[wongarsu]

There have been plenty of (mostly short-lived) competitors that paid out more per view than YouTube. But that's obviously meaningless if there are barely any viewers on the platform.

I agree that content ID is a necessary system in principle. Not legally necessary, but it's a system that solves real problems YouTube had before its existence. The problems with it are largely around YouTube heavily favoring recent content, while simultaneously having a support that takes weeks to even look at your case if you can't raise a twitter storm. They are trying to completely automate a problem that's full of subtlety and rife with abuse, and then don't give you any way to resolve it when it goes wrong. Other platforms don't have to choose the same path