Four More Places to Park a 30-Minute Video After YouTube, Rumble, and Odysee — One Cut Off UK Viewers, One Isn’t a Single Website at All, and One Lets Creators Keep 95% (If They Stream)

After looking at Rumble and Odysee, I wanted to know whether four other names that come up in this corner of the internet (BitChute, PeerTube, Brighteon, and Kick) are a real fourth home for long videos or just a place to keep a spare copy. This post exists for the same reason the first two did: our earlier story on YouTube as a “bully monopoly”, where my travel channel was erased over association with a separate, already-banned channel. I make long videos (travel, news recaps, history), I already post to YouTube, Rumble, and Odysee, and the short version is this: they’ll all host the file. Getting paid is another matter.

BitChute: a free-speech alternative, smaller than Rumble

Logos are trademarks of their respective owners and are shown to identify the services; no endorsement is implied.

• What it is: an alternative video site in the same free-speech-platform lane as Rumble, but much smaller.
• Moderation: low to medium. It added “incitement to hatred” to its prohibited-content list in January 2021, so it does have a line, just a looser one than YouTube’s. In April 2025 it suspended its video service for users in the UK, which is the most concrete thing on this list a small creator should know before building there. Source: Wikipedia’s BitChute entry.
• Money: ads, memberships, and donations all exist. I could not find any published thresholds for who qualifies or what it pays. Treat that as “not clearly published,” not as “no.”
• Size: BitChute has claimed around 218 million unique visitors over a year as of 2023. That’s a secondhand figure, so hold it loosely.
• Length limits: not clearly published.
• Who’s doing well: I can’t tell you, and that is the finding. BitChute publishes no ranking. As far as I can tell, its own help pages say “popular channels” are picked by a mix of views and subscriber counts, but name no channels and give no numbers, and I could not find a BitChute-native figure for any named channel. Academic research I’ve only seen summarized reports that roughly 12 percent of channels get more than 85 percent of the engagement, which, if accurate, means a very small group of channels has the audience and everyone else is talking to the hallway. The one named example I found is a YouTuber who had about 489,000 YouTube subscribers when YouTube banned his channel and who later said he would post to BitChute a day before YouTube; those are YouTube numbers, not BitChute ones. Of the four platforms in this post, this is the one with the least evidence of who, if anyone, is winning.

PeerTube: not a site, a piece of software

PeerTube logo by Framasoft, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

• What it is: free, open-source video software that anyone can install on their own server. Each server (an “instance”) is its own little video site, and instances federate (they can show each other’s videos), so the whole thing works a bit like email: lots of independent hosts, loosely connected. There are no ads anywhere in it. Source: Wikipedia and the PeerTube documentation.
• Moderation: entirely up to whichever instance you join. Each instance sets its own rules, and an admin can block other servers outright. The same video might be fine on one instance, banned on another, and invisible to a third because its admin blocked yours. There is no central policy to read, which is both the point and the problem.
• Money: nothing built in. You can add donation links or plugins, and that’s it.
• Length limits: set per instance.
• Reach: small. This is the one where you’re most likely to be talking to yourself for a while.
• Who’s doing well: nobody can rank it, and this time it’s structural rather than secretive. PeerTube isn’t one site, so views are split across more than a thousand independent instances and no single leaderboard exists; the network’s own search engine gave me a blank page rather than a list. What I can give you is the size of the network: when I checked FediDB in early November 2026, it counted 1,557 instances and 630,091 users across all of them, and the software’s latest release, v8.3.2, shipped on October 26, 2026, so it is actively maintained. A 2025 academic paper reportedly found the network is centralizing, with about 70 percent of instances hosted in Germany, the United States and France. I could not verify a single named creator making a living there. Six hundred thousand users spread over 1,557 servers is a lot of very small rooms.

Brighteon: free speech “with reasonable limits”

• What it is: a video site run by Mike Adams that describes its own policy as “free speech with reasonable limits.”
• Moderation: low to medium, by that self-description.
• Money: a NewsGuard report says Brighteon does not pay creators for uploads, and that paid content is limited to affiliate and premium videos. I couldn’t confirm that from the platform itself, so I’m attributing it rather than stating it as fact.
• Length limits: not clearly published.
• Who’s doing well: Brighteon publishes no follower ranking. Its homepage has a “Trending Channels” list, but when I looked on November 4, 2026 it was ordered by how many videos a channel had uploaded, not how many people watched: NewsClips with 57,413 videos, The Prisoner with 33,166, Ron Gibson Channel with 28,738, and Health Ranger Report, Mike Adams’ own channel, with 8,114. Upload count is not popularity; a channel that posts clips all day will top that list regardless of whether anyone watches. The most-viewed videos shown on the page that day had 4,256, 4,049 and 3,177 views, and the ones I could identify were Health Ranger Report commentary, and the site’s footer describes its content as “commentary or opinion.” Third-party estimates reportedly put traffic under a million visits a month in late 2025. Read together: a small site, where the most-watched videos I saw were in the low thousands of views.

Kick: the one with real money, for the wrong format

• What it is: a live-streaming platform first and foremost, closer to a Twitch competitor than a YouTube competitor.
• Money: this is where Kick stands apart. Creators keep 95 percent of subscription revenue; Kick takes 5.
• Moderation: looser than Twitch’s, which is Kick’s selling point and its risk. In August 2025 a streamer known as Jean Pormanove died during a livestream on the platform; Kick banned the people involved, and Paris prosecutors opened an inquiry. Source: Wikipedia’s Kick entry.
• The catch for long videos: Kick is built around going live. If your work is an edited 30-minute history piece you upload when it’s done, it’s better for streams than for the kind of videos this series is about.

Who’s doing well: Kick is the one platform in this post with a real public ranking. Dexerto’s list of the most-followed Kick streamers, updated October 30, 2026 with figures attributed to StreamsCharts, looks like this:

Look down the right-hand column: every single one is live streaming. IRL, casino, football commentary, GTA, Minecraft, Rust, chat. Not one is an edited 15-to-30-minute video channel. That matches the scale of the thing: Streams Charts reported on April 13, 2026 that Kick had reached 100 million users, ranked third by peak viewership, and that more than 500 million hours watched a month had become routine by March 2026, with the platform pushing Just Chatting and IRL alongside gaming. The 95/5 split is real and the audience is real. It’s just an audience for people who are on right now.

The trade-off, stated plainly

Lighter moderation is why all four of these exist. It’s also why some of them host more extremist content than mainstream platforms allow, and why advertisers avoid some of them. That isn’t a political observation. It’s the business model: fewer rules means fewer ad dollars, which means the money has to come from subscriptions, tips, or nowhere.

For comparison, Rumble reported about 47 million monthly active users in its Q3 2025 SEC filing, and its Creator Program requires 100 followers plus a Rumble Premium account. Source: Rumble’s Creator Program help page. That is a low bar, and it’s still a bar none of the platforms above clearly publishes.

Where that leaves a small creator

Upload to BitChute and a PeerTube instance anyway. They cost nothing, and a video that exists in several places is a video that survives any one of them. Just don’t confuse a mirror with an income. Of the four, only Kick has a monetization story a small creator can plan around, and it rewards a format most long-video makers don’t produce. BitChute’s and Brighteon’s payouts are not clearly published, and PeerTube’s is a tip jar you bring yourself. These are good backups. None of them replaces a real income.