It’s cheap, easy and fast to host your videos on YouTube! Why would you bother to do anything other than hosting your videos with a hosting provider? You can just paste the video URL into WordPress and it’ll Just Work, embedding your video! You don’t even have to think!
Here are a few reasons: major hosting platforms aren’t in the business of agnostically hosting my content nearly as much as they are in the business of soliciting uploads and driving engagement with their userbase so they can maximize ad revenue. They constantly push “views” and other metrics on you if you start uploading, which drives one to care more about the popularity of uploaded content rather than living ones life and taking the odd video or photo for friends and family. The press is always to be a good serf for the digital sharecroppers, although the term of choice these days is “content creator”. Me, I’m a bit old-school, don’t fancy producing content to line the pockets of Google’s shareholders. Moreover, I don’t trust them to not pull the rug at the slightest provocation; start charging for uploads, for hosting, to completely de-list my videos en masse for malicious copyright infringement claims (or who knows! merely including my childrens faces or voices!), the list of possible downsides is pretty much endless. I’m also extremely paranoid, and expect that every frame is scraped for faces and pumped directly into the NSA and probably mainlined over into Zuckerberg’s machine in some nightmarish data-sharing arrangement.
