Videos take up a lot of storage space and require some serious hardware specs to properly serve to users, no matter how much computer science wizardry you use to compress them and reduce their load.

It also becomes far more difficult to moderate and monetize such content. I bring up monetization because it is a damn necessity to keep a platform like this running. No amount of donations, voluntary moderator hours, FOSS packages or copyleft pipe dreams are going to pay for the financial and personnel costs of a large video site.

Many competitors to YouTube have popped up and failed like VidMe, Dailymotion, Break, Blip, Vimeo, Bitchute, Storyfire and oh so many others. The only one that has even managed to compete with YouTube came from a massive Chinese state sponsored tech firm (TikTok.)

And before you mention Rumble, they're pandering to a very specific niche of controversial right-wingers who have been largely deplatformed from mainstream social media. If it weren't for Donald Trump and Andrew Tate, they would've shut down years ago. Kick meanwhile is basically being bankrolled by a crypto slot machine website and is only attracting streamers because of how badly Twitch have enshittified their platform.