When I worked with an influencer who made free workout vids, his ad revenue was 80% of income. It was an extreme minority from free videos to buying something in his store.

Then some algorithm change in 2018 broke his entire income, he couldn't afford me, and last I checked, he was sponsored by diet pills or whatever fake garbage.

It's a damn shame because his dream was always to provide free workout vids.

People with enough of a viewership would still be offered sponsorship for videos. Like YouTubers who do their own ads in videos.

No one is going to sponsor a creator who has no way to garner an audience.

https://socialblade.com/youtube/handle/gamersnexus

He gets around 750 Million Youtube verified views per month , he's releasing about 5 hours of content per month.

He's not self-hosting that cheaply.

His sponsors are giving him the a nice pile of money based on his view count, he's not going to manage that on his own without the algo pumping users to him. Search engines kind of suck and video bloggers at that scale need organics to keep going.

You can't add monetization without discoverability and accessibility.

Looking at those numbers, I don't even know that peertube could handle it, he'd probably need to setup his own cluster to mirror them all.

There's a reason why we don't have a lot of competition to YouTube.

Theoretically, you could try to rely on patreon to have your audience pay you directly, but without discoverability, they will slowly dwindle and die. As to corporate sponsors, no one is going to pay for ads on torrented shows.

He's got 935 followers and about 20,000 views there

Rumble only takes half the cut YouTube does, But the amount of traffic on there is microscopic compared to YouTube. There's some room there to make money.

The vast majority of the content on there is a conservative echo chamber. I'd be a little worried about his ability to maintain journalistic integrity against big companies in that ecosystem. I'm also wondering what their ads look like ;)

There is no good answer to it.

It is ridiculous that a channel which uploads thousands of authentic original content can lose all algorithm momentum from a frivolous DMCA strike removing their video for 10 days.
It basically guarantees a video gets killed. Even if the video gets reinstated after an appeal.

This particular video will massively bounce back. People are angry at Nvidia, people are angry with YouTube and with YouTubes DMCA process, and now people are angry at Bloomberg.
And Gamers Nexus isn't gonna let this drop, and GN has earned its communities trust (and I think trust in general) that there will be flocks of people ensuring the video doesn't die.

But if this was a smaller channel releasing a massive expose like this, it would probably just drop out off the public's radar before it gets established

Messy. Youtube could just refuse to serve his videos because they decide they don't want to :/

They have more lawyers than God, I can't help but think the contract they all have with Google favors Google to the extreme.