And don't forget to write your own compiler, OS, DE, and IDE, lest someone pull the rug out from under you. /s
Specialization is at the heart of increasing productivity. Let's say a given person makes awesome travel videos. If that person can find a way to broadcast and monetize those videos with YouTube, Vimeo, or whatever, that almost certainly makes more sense than devoting their time to maintaining their own streaming platform. That's time the person could have spent continuing to refine their actual product: travel videos.
Video editing and production are extremely time intensive tasks that require a lot of skill; people work on these skills their whole lives. Likewise, dev ops and infrastructure management are incredibly deep rabbit holes to jump down. The idea that every hobbyist blogger, photographer, and indie band should learn about server administration seems crazy to me.
Does not owning your platform have risks? Of course. Everything has risks and business is always about tradeoffs. Platforms like YouTube solve a lot of problems for content creators. For most creators, those benefits are going to outweigh the costs.
Except that so few people make money broadcasting on Youtube, it's very likely they'd make more by learning how to maintain their own streaming platform and using that knowledge ('consulting') to less technical (but more creative) people who think they can make money broadcasting on Youtube.
You should probably invest some time learning how incredibly hard and costly it is to make a streaming platform. Youtube can only do this at low costs because they do it at scale.
Also, The only people who could do this are already making tons of money. We're talking about people with high technical skills, not the people posting ASMR videos.
You also need to attract viewers to your platform, which is no small feat.
Well, yea, not just youtubers but also farmers, janitors, receptionists, construction workers, and so on could probably make more if they were instead competent dev ops engineers.
Of course, this gets at another reason why owning your own platform doesn’t make sense, which is that web infrastructure is a specialty that most people have no interest in, and if they did, probably limited innate ability and training.
If it were that easy for people to suddenly pivot into a 6 figure salary field...more people would.
If they actually made more by learning how to maintain their own streaming platform and offering that knowledge to less technical folks, nobody is stopping them from doing so.
I suspect such an industry does exist, but it's quite a bit smaller than both the number of people profitably creating content on YouTube and the number of employees of YouTube itself, which tells me that maybe the risk-adjusted returns of it aren't as great as you think.
Specialization is at the heart of increasing productivity. Let's say a given person makes awesome travel videos. If that person can find a way to broadcast and monetize those videos with YouTube, Vimeo, or whatever, that almost certainly makes more sense than devoting their time to maintaining their own streaming platform. That's time the person could have spent continuing to refine their actual product: travel videos.
Video editing and production are extremely time intensive tasks that require a lot of skill; people work on these skills their whole lives. Likewise, dev ops and infrastructure management are incredibly deep rabbit holes to jump down. The idea that every hobbyist blogger, photographer, and indie band should learn about server administration seems crazy to me.
Does not owning your platform have risks? Of course. Everything has risks and business is always about tradeoffs. Platforms like YouTube solve a lot of problems for content creators. For most creators, those benefits are going to outweigh the costs.