alt Hacker NewsIf you are a "YouTube creator", you have already firmly planted your castle on Google's land. The positioning of onself as bound to a particular website run by someone else is needless loss of independence.
Position yourself as a video creator and post your videos also to Instagram (when possible) and to Vimeo. Seed free / back catalog episodes via a torrent. Run a mailing list announcing and discussing your videos, with some premium content for paying subscribers only. Maybe have an X / SkyBlue / mastodon feed with more compact announces, comments, and high-virality short clips from your longer videos.
Cross-link and cross-reference all the channels of your presence. Make your brand recognizable across the publishing methods. Gently prod people to touch more than one channel of your video distribution, just to get the most avid viewers acquainted with several.
Yes, this is significantly more work. It also may bring significantly more results if your videos are good. This gives you a much stronger assurance that your brand and your following will not be lost, should you lose access to YouTube / Instagram / Vimeo / X / whatever other platform. Commoditize your complement, as they say.
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Dave Jones from the EEVBlog does this - he cross posts to his own site and to many smaller video hosting sites. But if I remember correctly he has said in the past that almost all his viewership comes from YouTube. Unfortunately for long-form videos in English YouTube seems to be the only game in town in terms of discoverability.
Can you suggest a few video creators who are having success with this model? I watch quite a few video creators, and don’t know any trying to use this model.
Nice summary. There are tools out there that can help with chunks of this, but understanding the pieces as you’re laid out is critical.
Since a lot of creators today were consumers first of content, they miss the side when there was little social or video to consume online, and in turn creating was the default.
This is all good advice but realistically you can probably skip the random social media sites and just do email and YouTube. Email is much, much better than pretty much any social network.
Vimeo only gives you 2 TB bandwidth/month without negotiating an Enterprise plan. If your video goes viral, you're going to be out thousands to host it for everyone. How are you going to pay for that? You could put it on credit and then show these numbers when manually negotiating the payout from your next sponsor and pay it back with the proceeds from the next video, but there's no guarantee your next video will be also a hit.