With YouTube seemingly about to face its end in 2020, many of us have begun looking for ways to survive this upcoming COPPA storm. Some creators are already in the works of rebranding their entire channels to be in compliance of COPPA, some are looking for alternative platforms to continue on their work, while others are ready to call it quits altogether. Extremely confused and rightfully so, I myself am among those that are confused and fearful of what COPPA could mean for content creators so I wanted to share my plans, and hopefully this will help some of you that are a bit lost on what to do.
To start with, this advise comes from a small content creator who don’t necessary have much to lose in terms of revenue and followership.
Migrating to a whole new platform can be quite daunting, and convincing people to come to this new platform to check your content out has a 20% chance of success (don’t ask where I got those numbers from). However, if a large amount of creators on YouTube can decide on where to move next, the transition could be a lot less painful. People aren’t on YouTube for YouTube, they’re there to avoid TV and find normal people who they can relate with and are genuinely entertaining.
One platform that I have been eyeing on for some time now is a website called LBRY. LBRY is a free, open, and community-run digital marketplace. It’s a content sharing and publishing platform that is decentralized and owned by its users. You own your data and you control the network. What I like about LBRY is that is has this LBRY × YouTube Sync feature that lets you pull most of your recent videos (up to your recent 1000 videos) from YouTube to LBRY and it continues to update the page it creates for you until you’re ready to make the leap and post directly on LBRY. As in, if you upload on YouTube, it automatically uploads that same content to LBRY.
I’ve been using it for months now as a back up of sort, should YouTube ever collapse on itself. Of course there’s Bitchute too, but I prefer LBRY as it offers more features and still has upcoming ones that seems to be more robust that Bitchute. All LBRY has to do is fix that homepage (it’s ugly in my opinion) into something more user friendly and it could position itself well for mass migration of users online. There’s also a way to monetise your videos on it too so that’s a plus.
The next thing I would suggest is start using Reddit more. Reddit has positioned itself to be the face of the internet, and with its recent update that lets you upload natively to its page, it might be the next best place to move to in order to avoid being hit with a massive fine from the government. Capitalizing on Reddit’s already active and loyal user base (although the savageness goes up by 1000% so be warned), it might be you next best bet! In regards to making money and a sustainable one at that, well that really depends on different factors. Most people will likely rely on Patreons and the likes to keep the a float as there’s no direct way to make money on Reddit.
The stuff I’m writing here are a last ditch effort if YouTube’s COPPA A.I. algorithm gets out of hand and murders millions of accounts. The ideal way would be for the COPPA policy to be rewritten to be more clear and concise, make all your videos ” not made for kids or made for kids” and use the other platforms such as Twitter, Reddit and etc to promote the videos, letting you stay on YouTube. But that’s already a tough deal when YouTube won’t even promote your videos if you label that video “made for kids”.
It really just comes down to the big creators on YouTube to come together and decide on where to move next. They have the leverage and if they all make that united move to a platform they deem to be worthy, all the small creators will follow suit. Of course everything I’m saying here is a super last ditch effort should all hell break loose. If you really want to make YouTube your full-time job, then you gotta grit those teeth and buckle up. Being a full time employer ain’t no easy task my friend. My best advise is to learn everything that you can about COPPA and adjust your game plan. Adapt to survive!
These are just my opinions to be honest. Let’s see what the future holds for us, hopefully it’s a bright one.
