You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider. Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube. Otherwise, you will always be subject to platform risk via YouTube's whims which has destroyed many content creators. That's the long term winning play IMO and it doesn't preclude tools like FreeTube.

It doesn't have to be for your use-case. e.g. KDE has their own instance. It would perhaps be a good fit for MIT to host their OCW videos, or for Khan Academy to host their material, or people sharing conference talks, or governments, or quick home DIY videos, or vlogs and idle musings, or hobbyists showing/discussing their thing they like, etc. Videos that are meant to help people to better themselves or collaborate fit better on a platform that doesn't try to be a constant sales funnel.

I heard that main source of income for some professional YouTubers are Patreon and sponsorships. Ad revenue is dead last and very unstable. Also, if you are building your business on single platform, which one day might decide that your content does not adhere to their rules - that's a high risk to take.

Big corporations that pay big creators millions per production are just normal studios like Disney and Paramount and nowadays Netflix and Prime. YouTube is the competitor to that. No matter how professional you think of your operation, you're not Christopher Nolan or even BBC Earth and neither is anyone else whose primary distribution channel is YouTube.

Good examples of more or less "free" content that fits PeerTube are cited in other comments, though. Conference footage, MIT OCW, archival footage of any kind of live event. Productions where the work is in putting on the event in the first place. Holding the conference, creating a course, putting on some kind of skateboarding competition, whatever it might be. Incidentally filming it and uploading the footage costs next to nothing in comparison, isn't expected to drive revenue compared to the live attendance, and it doesn't make much difference to the viewers if the footage is terrible. Shitty quality Feynman lectures is still watching Feynman lecture. It was really cool, for a recent example, that somebody found and uploaded phone footage of Caitlin Clark's fabled scrimmage against the Iowa men's team from however many years ago. Nobody cares about the quality of the video or who filmed it. Likely nobody subscribed to whatever channel it first ended up on, but how cares? People who wanted to see a rare real world event would still have been able to find it and it cost nothing to the person who pulled out a phone and turned it on while that event was happening.

There are 100M+ channels uploading on YouTube regularly and only 2-3M of them are monetized. Not everyone wants to upload videos on the internet with the explicit goal of making money. Professional creators are a very tiny minority, and a platform like YouTube will always be better suited for them (your "small" channel with 100K subscribers is actually in the top 0.5-0.1% of YouTube). There is no reason for Peertube to go after this specific demographic.

> most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.

I get your point, but many of them fail to hit some hundreds of views due in large part to all of the large, professional channels that are spending hundreds of man hours as week producing content.

If the production was less professional do you think total viewership hours would drop significantly, or would it be distributed across more channels?

You say your target is $500-$1000 per video and let's assume you do videos weekly. That would mean your optimistic goal is $4500 a month. Let's say you create a voluntary donation subscription at $5 per month for people willing to support your work. That means you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them to hit your $4500 goal. That's a 0.9% conversion rate from subscribers to donators. Doesn't seem that impractical when looked at in those terms. This is often the default monetization model for small podcasts because RSS feeds don't have built in ad revenue the way YouTube does.

This is exactly why TikTok won. It is so much cheaper to iterate ideas on 10” videos.

You make non interesting 20’ YT video? Well too bad your 80 labor hours & equipment time are lost.

> As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.

As a video watcher, the main issue I have with YouTube is the presence of monetization.

its fine for the genre of video thats just someone narrating while filming with there phone and almost no editing. if someone is doing something interesting, i prefer this to something well produced, its more candid and relatable, and lacks the artifice most projects designed for youtube have

YouTubers are now blurring out women's cleavage.

Not bare breasts. Cleavage. Nearly all of Pamela Anderson's notable body of work would need to be censored to avoid risking loss of that precious, precious monetization. It's like fucking Iran.

And of course you can't say "die", "kill", "suicide", etc. You have to talk like a parody of 80s cartoon censorship—literally. (The neologism "unalive" came from Deadpool in an animated series called Ultimate Spider-Man, who realized he was in an animated show but thought it was 80s Saturday morning fare and constantly minced his intent to kill by saying he was going to "unalive" his target.)

Monetization has had a chilling effect on the kind of content people put on YouTube. I do not mourn its lack, at least on alternative video platforms.

Having your own distribution has it's benefits as a fall back or alternatives, in addition to publishing elsewhere like youtube.

The cost of creating and editing videos going to come way down, there's already ways to do it in the past few years.

Your issue is assuming that this is trying to replace YouTube for those who wish to try and make money from this. I suspect this is much more closer to a Google videos or YouTube back in the day which was pretty much just random videos, plus lots of conferences on there (which don't get enough views to monetize). This can easily replace that and is something I would support. YouTube hasn't always been monetising and it is good if we have a competitor against it.

Maybe the purpose of Youtube going forward is to be a quarantine for content whose purpose is to be monetized.

Honestly I found that the videos I come to Youtube to watch are either personal, non-monetized hobby video, or just a head talking to camera.

Virtually all of the content I watch on youtube does not fall into this category. The content I watch is a mixture of raw footage, a guy speaking to a camera with minimal editing for 10 minutes (think Rick Beato, for those who know him), edited down footage of people working (pool cleaning guys, chefs, etc) or people playing music.

Frankly I wouldn't care at all if all of your over-produced thumbnail-bait disappeared overnight.

> As a professional YouTuber

Well, there's your problem.

You want the numbers that come from mass consumption, which means catering to the lowest common denominator thus producing shit with gold plating while then complain the gold plating is bloody expensive.

Some people just are knowledgeable and want to share with the rest of us mortals like say someone like Terrence Tao. Putting someone like him on "YouTube" is a goddamn travesty. We need an alternative and yes, you won't make money and no, it's not for you then.