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I have been here before

A follow-up to yesterday's column...

Every time I have a run-in with YouTube, I spend a little more time working on my self-hosting option.

Originally I was going to use a Raspberry Pi 5 with a few TB of cheap hard-disk storage to host and serve up my videos (of which there are now over 2,000) via a separate gigabit fibre connection to my home.

On each previous occasion, my enthusiasm for this option has waned before the task was completed so I continued uploading to YouTube.

This time however...

I'm now so close to finishing this self-hosting project that I've decided to go ahead and complete the task.

My YouTube audience has grown significantly in recent months so I've decided not to rely on a Raspberry Pi 5 and instead go with a more powerful computer.

There is a third-gen i5 box sitting in the corner (my former daily drive) and I'm wondering if it'll be fast enough. Perhaps I might be better to use the computer that's doing my video editing (an i7 8700 with 32GB of RAM) and replace that with something a little more powerful.

Whatever I decide to do, I'll be running a node of PeerTube, an open-source VOD server that is very similar in look and feel to YouTube. This has the advantage that there is also an app for smartphones that is available to those who want to watch vids that way.

The actual task of moving my huge library of video content onto this platform is something I fear I shall be underestimating in terms of the time and effort involved but it has to be done.

I posted this video to YouTube last night and it has already gathered around 30K views and 1,000 comments, mostly from people who are as outraged as myself.

It's well worth reading the comments on that video for some insight into the way YT's reputation has fallen of late.

Clearly there is very strong support for my self-hosting option and that has encouraged me to move forward with this. I plan not only to host my own videos but those of anyone else who feels similarly pee'd off with YT's policies and attitudes to serving up scammy ads from fraudsters.

From a revenue perspective, the platform will be free of advertising. I'll simply be relying on my Patreon supporters to pay the bills and I believe this will be a sustainable option. I'm pleased to say that most people are pretty good when it comes to donating to people like myself who go out of their way to try and deliver good content without sponsorships, ads and pitches for affiliate sales.

However, only time will tell.

So my review channel, my Xjet channel and my fitness vids (good grief, I just checked and those fitness vids have clocked up over a million views in total and I've gained 70K subscribers in a month) will all be self-hosted. Given the view counts and support, I am confident that I can effectively kick YouTube to the curb and use it solely as a way of introducing new viewers to my content rather than rely on it for the delivery of those videos.

If I can rope in other creators creating similar content then I'm hoping that I can create a small island of sanity in a sea of stupidity when it comes to the user-generated video content scene.

No, I'm not going to be rivalling YouTube in the big picture but I believe that the real secret is in carving out niches where success or even dominance becomes possible through a laser-like focus on a specific subject or subjects.

YT have pissed me off once too often and now I'm in war-mode. They won't even notice me and my efforts -- but if I can wake others up to the viability of laser-focused VOD hosting then perhaps, over time, some of their dominance can be eroded to the point where they *will* be aware of what's going on.

I love a challenge... this is a *big* one and with big challenges comes the lure of big satisfaction.

Stay tuned :-)

Carpe Diem folks!

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