TL;DR - The internet is fully centralized and no one can compete with a billion dollar user experience.
I have tweeted about this at length, and no one ever cares. I worked at a tech startup that attempted to compete with YouTube for about six years. It was almost entirely a waste of my time outside of the work experience I gained, and the things I learned about people in my current industry.
The fundamental problem is that the people are on YouTube. They have been on YouTube since 2007. There is a multi-billion dollar user experience on YouTube, and no one is leaving in any real serious numbers to go on a competitor's platform with a sub-million dollar user experience.
For a while, we paid creators a $25 CPM to get them to try and convert users.
It didn't work, mostly because we couldn't build a billion dollar user experience on a high six six figure annual development budget. It was just not sustainable for the development team who could be making far more cash simply contracting for larger and more profitable companies.
I firmly believe that anyone still doing this today without access to tens of millions of monthly users is simply wasting their time. The same people saying "Use Rumble/Odysee/BitChute" or whatever other AltTech platform are promptly opening the YouTube app right after their comment. The traffic numbers on alt tech platforms prove this.
Deeper down the rabbit hole, there's the problem of the internet being fully centralized now. All internet traffic is controlled by Google, Meta, X, Reddit, and PornHub at this stage. We no longer have the Internet of the early 2000s where individual webpages can thrive on their own merit. Websites need to be fed traffic from one of these major players or else discovery simply doesn't happen.
How they got us was branded social media pages and paid search. All of these platforms sold us on building permanent presences on their "social media" sites. They fed enough traffic for content websites like VICE and Buzzfeed to receive billion dollar valuations through 2016. Then they turned off the traffic faucet, effectively killing all external references.
Following that, once they gained almost complete control of the traffic, they inserted infinite scrolling short form content to maximize their own ad inventory and keep users on platform, and then essentially killed the rest of the internet and made themselves permanent universal content editors exempt from government control because of Section 230.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk, for the five of you that will read this.
This has been said for over a decade at this point, but YT seriously needs a real competitor that isn't controlled by special interests and is a true neutral platform for free expression.