Six More Places to Post a 30-Minute Video Outside YouTube — and the Ones That Pay Mostly Pay You for an Audience You Brought Yourself

After YouTube erased my travel channel over association with a separate, already-banned channel, and after I tested Rumble and Odysee as backups, I went looking for the other places a small creator can post a 15-plus-minute video and actually get paid for it. This is the fourth post in the series, and the pattern it turned up is almost tidy: the platforms with the biggest audiences pay the least attention to long videos, the platforms built for long video are the hardest to get into, and the platforms that pay most reliably only pay if you bring your own crowd. Here’s each one, with what it is, how heavy the moderation is, and whether a small travel, history, or news-recap channel can realistically make money there. Everything below is as of November 4, 2026.

Facebook: a huge room, built for short clips

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• What it is: a very large video audience outside YouTube.
• Long video: Meta has said Page videos can run up to 240 minutes and 10 GB, though that help page is an old one. Source: Meta Business Help.
• Moderation: medium. Community Standards enforced by strikes, closer to YouTube’s style than to Rumble’s or Odysee’s.
• Money: Facebook’s content monetization program has follower and watch-time minimums, but the exact numbers aren’t clearly published and the sources I found disagree with each other, so I’m not quoting any. The bigger problem is that the feed itself favors short clips. A 30-minute travel video is fighting the algorithm on the platform where there would otherwise be the most people to watch it.
• Who’s doing well: I could not find a public ranking of long-form Facebook video, or a single named long-form creator with published numbers, so I’m not going to make one up. What the evidence does say all points the same direction. Tubefilter reported in June 2025 that Meta was folding all Facebook video into Reels with “no length or format restrictions,” with Meta saying Facebook “remains a home for all types of video - short, long, and Live”; Meta is reported to have paid creators about $3 billion in 2025, with roughly 60 percent of it going to Reels. The only retention figure I found is old: a 2018 industry piece put average Facebook video retention at about 11 seconds and advised keeping Facebook videos under roughly two minutes and putting long-form on YouTube. That’s 2018, so hold it loosely, but nothing newer contradicts it. Big room, short attention, no evidence of who’s winning with 30 minutes.

Spotify video podcasts: real money, if a host is doing the talking

• What it is: Spotify hosts video podcasts and pays through the Spotify Partner Program.
• Thresholds, as reported in a January 2026 update: roughly 3 published episodes, about 2,000 hours and 1,000 audience in the previous 30 days to qualify; at least about $10 earned per six months to stay in; and video episodes need at least one ad break. Sources: Spotify newsroom and Spotify for Creators support.
• Moderation: medium.
• Money: 2,000 hours a month is a real bar for a small creator, but it’s a published bar, which is more than most of this list offers. Fit matters, but not the way I first assumed. This is a podcast platform, and the shows doing well on video are the ones where a host is talking to you, or to a guest, for a long time. My videos have me on camera talking, so a news recap, a history piece, or a travel episode I narrate all fit the format. What the hits have in common is less the subject than the shape: a host-led conversation or commentary show, usually long, with an audience that already knew the host before the video version existed.

Who’s doing well: Spotify’s Wrapped 2025 list of the ten most-listened-to podcasts worldwide is public, with the caveat that it ranks listening, not video performance (Podnews reads it as total minutes listened, which is an inference). Source: Spotify newsroom, December 3, 2025. Variety published a separate US top ten and marked which shows have a video version, so the right-hand column below comes from that list and only covers the shows it mentions.

Variety’s US list also flags The Shawn Ryan Show and Good Hang with Amy Poehler as video shows. Spotify told Variety that:

• 24 of its top 50 podcasts now have video;
• time spent with video on Spotify more than doubled in 2025;
• more than 390 million users have streamed a video podcast.

Its Jordan Newman put the pitch as “You can build a deeper relationship with the host on video.” Look at what the video-forward names share: every one is a host-led talk or interview show, long, and built on a host people already followed. That’s the pattern, and it’s also the gap. I can’t see the other 26 of the top 50, and none of these shows is remotely comparable to a small channel. The format fits me. The audience is the part I’d have to bring.

Nebula: built for exactly this, and you can’t just sign up

• What it is: creator-owned, subscription-only streaming, home to essay-style video.
• Moderation: medium, in the sense that it’s curated. The gate is the invitation, not the rulebook.
• Money: older coverage from 2021 to 2024 describes creators sharing roughly half of subscription revenue, split by watch time. I couldn’t find published 2026 terms, so treat that as the historical model, not a current quote. About 680,000 users as of December 2023, per Wikipedia. It’s the best structural fit on this list for a long history or travel essay, and the one a small creator is least likely to get into.

Who’s doing well: Nebula publishes no creator ranking, but its flagship creators are well documented, and every one of them is a big YouTube channel first.

• Brian McManus of Real Engineering, a Nebula co-founder: 5.02 million YouTube subscribers as of January 20, 2026.
• Sam Denby of Wendover Productions, Nebula’s chief content officer since August 2023: 4.92 million as of June 19, 2026, and over 8.8 million across his channels as of February 12, 2026.
• Half as Interesting: 2.95 million (May 13, 2026). Real Science: 2.05 million (January 20, 2026).
• Film and video-essay creators Maggie Mae Fish, Broey Deschanel, Abigail Thorn and Patrick H. Willems are also there. Source: Wikipedia.
• Jet Lag: The Game, the one that matters most to a travel creator: a travel game show that releases each episode on Nebula first and on YouTube a week later. Nebula is its main home and supports its production costs, and it passed 1 million hours streamed on Nebula in September 2023. Its YouTube channel had over 1 million subscribers as of October 2026 and over 133 million views as of February 2026.
• Nebula itself: launched in 2019 with 75 creators and had 175 by late 2023, with over 650,000 subscribers that autumn and 680,000 by December 2023. I found no 2026 figure.

McManus co-founded it after monetization problems and age restrictions on YouTube, which I appreciate, but the pattern is clear: Nebula is largely a bonus tier for educational, explainer and travel channels that already had millions of YouTube subscribers. The format is exactly mine. The on-ramp isn’t.

Dailymotion: big claimed numbers, fuzzy terms

• What it is: a Canal+-owned video site that claims “more than 300 million monthly users”, an undated figure, via Wikipedia.
• Moderation: medium.
• Money: there is a partner program, but the qualifying thresholds differ from blog to blog and aren’t clearly published, and I couldn’t verify its upload length limits, so I’m not stating any. Realistic expectation: a legitimate company that will host your video, with no way to know up front what you’d earn.
• Who’s doing well: I don’t know, and I tried. Dailymotion publishes no ranking, its partner page gave me nothing but a title, and the one third-party ranking article I found wouldn’t load; what little I saw reportedly listed non-English channels and large publishers at the top. The platform is also reported to have shifted toward professional publishers such as BBC News, Vice and Cheddar rather than independent creators. I could not verify a single independent creator success story. Three hundred million claimed users and not one name I can point to.

Substack and Patreon: no ads, no strangers, you bring the crowd

• Substack video: Substack takes 10% of paid subscriptions, plus Stripe card fees of 2.9% + 30 cents. No ad income at all. You need your own mailing list. Moderation medium. Source: Substack support.
• Who’s doing well on Substack: the names are real, and none of them is a video channel. Press Gazette’s January 23, 2025 roundup of the biggest Substacks put The Free Press (Bari Weiss) at 136,000 paid subscribers, per Weiss, and at least $10.9 million a year; Letters from an American (Heather Cox Richardson) at “hundreds of thousands” of paid subscribers, per Substack, and at least $5 million; Slow Boring (Matt Yglesias) at about 18,000 paid, per Business Insider, and at least $1.4 million; and The Pragmatic Engineer at at least $1.2 million. Those dollar figures are Press Gazette’s minimum gross estimates, before Substack’s 10 percent cut. Substack as a whole passed 5 million paying subscribers per Tubefilter, March 12, 2025, which also named Jim Acosta and Taylor Lorenz as recent arrivals, without subscriber counts. Every one of those is a writing-led publication. Substack has reportedly claimed that 82 percent of its top 250 earners use audio or video; I couldn’t verify that, and even taken at face value it says the top writers add video, not that video is what people pay for. No source I found says what video content works on Substack.
• Patreon video: videos up to 12 hours each, a 10% platform fee on the standard plan for new creators, and fans must pay to watch. Good for paid extras: the uncut version, the bonus episode. Source: Patreon support.
• Both pay the same way: nothing from passersby, something from every fan who has already decided you’re worth a few dollars a month. For a small creator that’s either the most honest deal on this page or the least useful one, depending on whether that list of fans exists yet.

Who’s doing well on Patreon: this is the one place on this page with a real public ranking. Graphtreon ranks creators by paid members (it says “updated daily”; I pulled it November 4, 2026) and shows estimated earnings only for creators who make them public. Its Video category top ten:

And the overall top ten across all categories, same source and date:

Two things jump out.

• Members is not money: the yard, at number nine, makes a reported $275,195 a month, more than four times Peter Boese at number two, and Graphtreon leaves out anyone who hides earnings, so the whole list is an estimate with holes in it.
• Look at who’s there: the video list is mostly creators with big YouTube followings (Jenny Nicholson, Dead Meat, YaBoyRoshi, Meatcanyon, Fin vs History), and a large share of the entries in both lists are comedy or political podcasts selling bonus episodes and ad-free feeds to people who already listen.

Vigilance Elite is the production company behind The Shawn Ryan Show, one of the video podcasts on Variety’s Spotify list above, which is about as neat an illustration of “the money follows the audience you already have” as I could ask for.

The ones that don’t fit, one line each

• Instagram is testing 90-minute videos (TechCrunch, October 26, 2026), with no monetization model announced yet.
• Vimeo is shutting down its On Demand sales product on November 20, 2026 (Vimeo blog, October 28, 2026).
• X needs Premium to upload long video, Twitch deletes VODs after 7 to 60 days, and TikTok isn’t built for 15-plus minutes. Poor fits, all three.

Where that leaves a small creator

Add it up and the honest answer is uncomfortable but useful. What each platform wants before it pays you:

• Rumble’s Creator Program needs 100 followers plus a Premium subscription (source: Rumble support).
• Spotify wants 2,000 hours a month.
• Facebook won’t say what it wants.
• Nebula has to invite you.
• Substack and Patreon pay exactly in proportion to the audience you walked in with.

Nobody on this list is handing a small channel money for being new. Every “who’s doing well” list above says the same thing in a different accent: the Spotify video hits, the Nebula flagships and the Patreon video top ten are all people who were already big somewhere else. The money is where you already have an audience, and the only income that moves with you when a platform drops you is a mailing list and paying subscribers you own the relationship with. So: keep posting to YouTube, build the list, put the paid extras on Patreon or Substack, and treat Rumble, Odysee and the free-speech sites in the previous post as insurance against the day the big platform decides you don’t exist.