Video hosting isn't as expensive as we are often lead to believe,
Then do it yourself. Video hosting is the most expensive form of hosting you can do on internet, and no other form of media even comes in the ballpark (games, photos, audio, text, databases). YouTube is running on CIA money. None of us can pull off what they do, because the fucking US government is running YouTube in an indirect way. Wanna know who owns Utah data centers? That's right, US government agencies and its little puppet corpos.
Tiktok, as colossal as it is, does not even compare because it hosts merely 30-60 second video clips. YouTube hosts an average of 10 minute videos and countless hour long documentaries and video essays. Even the likes of MindGeek owned porn sites are tiny compared to what YouTube hosts. Vimeo, Dailymotion, Facebook, VKontakte, Bilibili, none of those ever became as big for video hosting.
The reality is we have lived as freeloaders since the 90s, and many of these Big Tech services should not have been free in the first place. Now we are used to the convenience of these digital drugs. I forgot who talked about this once in a blog, but I will echo that message, and am unapologetic for this blackpill.