Imagine a world without YouTube. Unimaginable for me at the moment. I like it to find lots of good cooking tutorials, DIY support for fixing things, including one of my old coffee makers. But you've all heard of the gluing algorithms. And because it's Google, and most of you use Google as your favorite search engine ...
$1.65 billion
Have you ever heard of Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim? They founded YouTube in 2005. Crazy story. In the end (sorry to remind you: one (!) year later) YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion. It's a perfect platform to build user profiles and combine them with search profiles. Transparent people. Good for advertising. Don't be evil.
Wait there is dailymotion, vimeo …
You are right. There are alternatives. Really? My last visit to any of the platforms - (a quick look at my browsing history: 4 months ago. YouTube: yesterday). This is platform economy. Winner takes all.
But I want to gain from the gazillions of users
OK. Now we're talking. This is marketing, and you're right. We want the reach. Millions of unknown potential customers. That's why we feed the beast. They don't know our brand or our product, but they are loyal users of YouTube and bound to the algorithm.
But as a YouTube channel, you are a kind of guest on their platform. If YouTube changes the rules, and you get kicked out, all your content, your interaction with other YouTube users, your comments, in short, everything is lost. That's the opposite of digital sovereignty. Besides, every time your users need to open YouTube, they feed their own profiles in the Google universe because of you.
Good news: There are other options..
Image a world where YouTube is only a marketing channel
It is possible. Install yourself a PeerTube instance. Upload all your content to your self-hosted PeerTube first. From there, add your content to YouTube, vimeo, dailymotion to attract more users. But define it yourself: My PeerTube instance is the first place. Include your PeerTube instance content in your blog post or social media activity. And since it runs on your own server, you can offer privacy to your users.
Start your journey into the Fediverse
Follow other PeerTube instances. Be open to being followed. That's the Fediverse way.
Btw: If you have some videos only on YouTube, PeerTube can also import YouTube videos :)
Our PeerTube hosted video of an a11y video
