I took this approach with FaceBook a few years back and I don't feel like I am missing out. Power to you brother!
Keep in mind that YouTube would be nothing without the user's content. So it wouldn't take much for someone else to start up a simpler video sharing website with less bloat that people could flock to. There are plenty of similar sites, but something about YouTube has held the popularity of the masses.
We've got to remember that even YouTube started out as a profitless venture. Before Google bought it, there was no massive push for advertising and there was no monetizing of content for the people uploading their work. It was designed to simply share sub-10min videos, not as an income stream for the budding video-entrepreneur (or Don't-forget-to-hit-subscribe cretin).
In 2006, I made a massive personal effort in launching my own video sharing website. This was (just) before YouTube was bought by Google and before YouTube truly took off. At the time, it was looking like Vimeo would (might?) reign supreme. On my site we were offering hundreds of non-commercial, community / Public-access TV producers a free platform to share their shows as well as a platform to sell individual episodes for a dollar or so each if they wanted to. We also encoded a huge amount of older British and American TV shows which we legally provided for free due to them being Public Domain (past-copyright, 50 years+).
The website become relatively popular in it's own right and we had a lot of local support, online buzz and word of mouth in free TV, radio and press. At one stage we were dealing with CNET (news.com, download.com, etc) who were pushing to get our platform onto the next generation of AppleTV alongside their own content. Apple Australia were quite supportive of our efforts, but ultimately locked the AppleTV down to iTunes-only content and dismissed any third-party networks. When this fell through my business partner left for the UK and all the wind left the sails so to speak. We kept the site running at a minimum for a few years (at a loss). Dedicated bandwidth costs were really high at the time and we only had minimal banner advertising supporting this. In the end it was a huge lesson in discerning between honesty and cretinous motivations
The point of my story is that given the right timing, conditions, etc it is truly possible for anyone to overthrow a giant like YouTube/Google for something new and upcoming without pushing to monetize the crap out of it.
So, who's going to step up?
Well so far, I've counted our only real choices as Vid.me (which died last year, and ********* (which I advertised last year as well). And so far, Minds is serving me pretty well (aside from the front page politics, which is a very popular topic there). If only I could bother to stop going to YouTube for game soundtracks, or PPC videos, or Linux content (which is actually decently popular on Minds), or the regular bull$#!* they so love to pump out on a daily basis. Not to mention the rich Millennials who struck it big streaming themselves playing video games, and now won't shut up about reminding you to subscribe to them.
I've kept telling myself, we as a population survived quite fine without a "YooTuub" in the mid-2000's...but it's just not the mid-2000's anymore...
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But is it a positive one web-wide?
THAT is the question.
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