Love it or hate it, YouTube is by far the biggest player in the game when it comes to online video publishing. The reason for its near monopoly on the market in the market is almost entirely because hosting videos is expensive. Last year, Alphabet/Google lost 70 billion in market cap that they directly attribute to subsidizing Youtube.
However, even with the difficulties of maintain a presents in this space, a few other companies have managed to stay open and viable.
Bitchute
According to Bitchutes’ website “BitChute aims to put creators first and provide them with a service that they can use to flourish and express their ideas freely. ” With online censorship on the rise they fit in to the market by billing themselves as a free speech video platform.
The service works similar to Youtube. You create a channel, upload videos, ad tags, etc. all for free. This is the the primary location for creators who have either been kicked off of Youtube or fear that they me be up on the chopping block on the video sharing Goliath.
Vimeo
Vimeos’ mission statement: “…most supportive community of creators and get high-quality tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos in gorgeous HD and 4K with no ads. ” However, Vimeo costs money for most features and can be expensive depending on which tier you choose. Primarily, Vimeo is for filmmakers and creators that want to sell their videos instead of giving the content away for free like on Youtube and Bitchute.
Dailymotion
Dailymotion is a direct competitor to Youtube with many of the same features. Unfortunately, for this fairly old video publishing website , they’ve never gain much of a foothold in the market. Although, if you just want to host your videos for archival purposes or spread your presence as far as you can, check them out.
Twitch.tv / Dlive.tv
I’ve combined these two because they fit the same niche. Twitch.tv is well known in the video game streaming market, but Dlive is making waves by signing an exclusivity deal with PewDiePie. Twitch.tv has a much bigger market share but they are well known for their strict TOS that they don’t enforce evenly among their users. Dlive on the other hand is a bit more relaxed and simply assigns an X-rated tag to their more controversial streamers.
