I am sure other platforms / personal hosting will continue to exist in the future. They simply won't be relevant in terms of video streaming market share.

The network effect of youtube is massive. They have a huge amount of content creators and audience. That means the audience will stick around for the creators and the creators go for the biggest audience and hence the most views.

Being google, they have data centers all over the globe, provide a fast app / browser access for any OS, can cast to a TV with one click - all these equal convenience which cannot easily be beat by any individual website.

Some huge youtube brands like linus media group are trying with floatplane as their own paid video hosting service, but I'm sure their view numbers are insignificant compared to youtube even though they are the biggest players.

There's a significant aspect of scale being ignored when you talk about video sites before Youtube took off.

Not a single one of those self hosted sites had anywhere near the storage that youtube allows. Want a video from over a year or two ago? Hope you downloaded it or the creator loved it enough to leave it up. Frame rates? Resolution? What are those? I understand that tech has advanced as well, and those issues would not be as severe now, but I really doubt that a lot of channels even now would be able to keep the same lengthy back catalog of old content if they were self hosting.

I also think that there are countless channels that would never have existed if the creators had to figure out hosting their own site, setting up streaming of the video files on it, potentially managing their own comments plugins, potentially managing their own methods to keep viewers aware when new content was posted, and having to somehow spread the word of their existence without the aid of an existing platform trying to keep people viewing things for more ad impressions.

The monopoly of Youtube is a problem, the lack of easy to use and configure open alternatives is a problem... but we can't ignore the massive impact Youtube had in lowering the barrier to entry and upkeep costs of being a content maker.

There are a lot of hurdles to content creation and hosting that Youtube enables creators to completely ignore.

I've seen the same. I wonder if the older you get, the more you value your time.

I remember seeing lots of ad breaks on TV when I was a kid and it didn't stop me from watching a show. Now if an ad break happens, I am reminded why I don't own a TV and turn it off.

Same here except I've always used adblocker. The contrast between YouTube with adblock + sponsorblock compared to stock, cannot be overstated. The site literally becomes unuseable. It's awful.

Controversial take around these parts but... I don't mind paying for services I use. A model where content is hosted and edited and provided for free by ads is already a bad and unsustainable model, and when most users use adblock too it just pushes companies towards ever more intrusive and unethical methods.

I have been paying for YouTube without ads since it was part of Google Play Music. I'll pay for services as long as they meet some criteria I consider fair:

• If I'm paying, you don't get to also show me ads. I won't even pay for HBO for this reason. They're showing ads for their own shows, not from random advertisers, but it's still obnoxious to me

• The price has to be reasonable and affordable. Netflix has passed this line now, for me, but for example Crunchyroll and YouTube Premium remain worth it for now.

• It has to be convenient. News sites are inconvenient because there's a million of them and I don't plan to use one as a central portal for news. I'd rather click on a link I see from somewhere else or that a friend sends me and be able to view. I'd kill for a service where I pay a monthly fee for news sites and it just analyzes which ones I actually used and splits the money up to them accordingly.

I find the number of people saying "well I'm not going to use YouTube anymore!" hilarious. Yeah dude, that's the point, you were just a cost to them, not a profit source. I'll happily argue that capitalism is broken, that a lot of our most important services should be freely accessible, that corporations are seeking profit in increasingly unethical ways. I just don't think being a complete leech is a reasonable answer.