No one wants to scale enough to compete.

I don’t consider scale important from the perspective of making and watching good videos. People get hung up on it when citing barriers to competition with Youtube, and while it’s certainly there, it only matters to Google itself (so it can continue to plausibly lie to its customers about ad impression numbers). In fact YT’s offering was at its creative peak when scale was lacking.

It makes no difference to me whether a knowledgeable hobbyist has 20,000 subs or 250,000. I don’t care about their “content” suitability for advertisers (that creepy term can get nuked). I certainly couldn’t care less whether the algorithm promotes their work, deserving as it may be. This sort of creator operates on the assumption their viewers are intelligent, and is typically savvy enough to route around YT with alternate donation/support mechanisms. These people will continue on any platform. For them, quality is an end in itself rather than a feed-in to a metric. I would rather watch a badly filmed insightful critical appraisal of a new piece of hardware than Canadian/Black Technology Man’s 8K press release rehash full of slick cuts and pointless b-roll.

Scale is the concern of middlemen.

Assume for a moment the platform providers are in a game of chicken, continually eating costs in the hope of soaking up subscribers from their (at some point) defunct competitors. Every year this competition continues, the victor needs to make increasingly outrageous changes to the service offering in order to bridge the profitability gap. Or perhaps they are betting that a chunk of savings will come from reduced spend on rights, in a market with fewer bidders for programming?

Are investors in the conglomerates even agitated yet?