There is a reason why these Youtube channels don't just roll their own platform: their content is not worth money. Same reason why no one pays for your blog. It is just not worth any amount of money.
There are many Youtubers whose content I like, but if I had to pay monthly fee (or pay per view) for their videos I wouldn't watch them. I think this was pretty much confirmed with the Youtube Red experiment. Many of the channels I follow got picked up for the program, but I have no desire to pay for the shows they produced for Youtube.
And how the ads work on Youtube makes it completely unwatchable without AdBlocking and I am not paying for the Youtube Premium to remove ads because A) it won't remove the ads and sponsorships that are embedded in the videos and B) I don't want to give Youtube as a platform any cut.
I feel like you completely validate my point that people aren't willing to pay for content, the original sin making alternative monetization a requirement.
You're willing to watch the content, just not pay for it.
This is why concepts like PeerTube will never attract the majority of content, because it isn't free to make it, it isn't free to show it, it's only free to consume it.
It isn't poor quality stuff. Just because you don't like the content that Youtube creators make doesn't make it poor quality
Ironically, when I go to Peertube, all the content there is objectively low quality with extremely poor production value, little to no editing, and clearly done with the lowest of budgets.
The content airing on Youtube from the top ~1000+ creators is easily as good or better than the majority of cable TV.
It's often extremely high quality content, frankly.
Production quality with fancy cameras and editing doesn't make the content good. It makes it fancy.
And yes there are some Youtubers whose I have subscribed to and their content is often great. However it is not consistently great enough to pay for it just like cable TV. And that is just the top 1% of the top 1%. Rest is at best mediocre and often just grabage.
Again, that's your personal opinion which clearly deviates from the public opinion. It's okay to not like it, but to call it bad because you dislike it is ridiculous.
We're talking about business models here, we're talking about a whole industry, and you should realize that your opinion is worse than useless, it's actively harming your ability to understand and predict
If PeerTube wants to be a 0.00001% write off for radical CopyLeftists and "Hackers" to put up some low effort, low value, "good" content then so be it but to even bring up Youtube in a conversation of yet-another-tiny-site is silly, because that concept is not competing with Youtube and could never compete with Youtube.
So my opinion doens't matter and is worse than useless, but your opinion on PeerTube's content is worth while? If my opinion deviates so much from the public's opinion why isn't Youtube pay per view? Or at least monthly subscription? Sadly most people are not tech savy enough to use ad blockers or are consuming Youtube with their mobile devices where they can't block ads.
As for PeerTube I don't care. Sadly video is currently expensive to host and only Google has the pockets to operate a site like Youtube. I won't pay for it and the day my adblocker stops working is the day I stop watching it.
I mean, radio and TV were free OTA for decades. I don't know what you want to call the "start" of content, but ad-supported free models have been around for a very long time.
