Unintended consequences

Posted Jun 3, 2025 9:24 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Unintended consequences by Cyberax
Parent article: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet

From my perspective, that's just the normal shifts in the marketplace, and if YouTube becomes unviable as a place for content creators to put up content (e.g. demands $1,000/month just to keep your content available, plus subscriptions from viewers, too), the content will move elsewhere. It happens to be focusing in on YouTube right now because that's a platform that will pay you to provide content, whereas you'd have to pay to host it ad-free on Vimeo or similar.

I don't however, see that this means that the content will remain on YouTube forever; for now, YouTube offers a great deal for hosting content (it pays you a considerable amount), so that's where the creators of interesting content are congregating, but as YouTube puts limits on creators, they'll sort out things like Nebula, or even just paying for private video hosting from platforms like Vimeo. Thus, I'm not concerned about the risk of everything congregating on YouTube; people can, and do, move away from platforms where the alternative is better value to them.