Quote from: evb149 on Today at 03:24:14I don't disagree with regard to monopolies but what you say about taking control is fine if you're just running a site with a few hundred or so members downloading or streaming the odd few videos per day. However, with the popularity of Dave's sites, just maintaining such a site would be a full time job for at least one someone, let alone the cost of other resources such as bandwidth etc etc. For all its faults, and I have little time for the way they react in circumstances like these, Youtube does at least allow a creator to just concentrate on content creation leaving the rest of the hassle of publishing to them.
I would think that technical side of running such a site is not that big a problem as delivering video content globally anyway needs to be outsourced to someone with local servers around the world. Try Akamai or someone like that. Selling ads is where the hassle is but given Dave's large and focused audience I would think it is possible to cover hosting costs.
For those who think Youtubers can just change to another site or host the video server yourself etc are missing the
entire point of Youtube.
It is the world's 2nd biggest search engine, and the world's biggest video search engine by many orders of magnitudes. When you want to find and watch a video on anything, the only place you turn to is Youtube.
Half of my daily views come from searches, and almost the entirety of my existing and continual new audience comes from being visible and searchable on Youtube.
There is a reason why there practically isn't anyone making a living making original Facebook video content, or Vimeo content etc.
Twitch might be the only exception, but it's still zero competition to Youtube.
Good luck trying to convince advertisers you have xx thousands of viewers on your own private server, or vimeo etc, no one cares, you become invisible and will almost certainly fade away as will any audience who switched with you.