Hi AWN!
I am CryoLogic, one of the staff at https://www.anim8.io
We are a group of animators and animation fans who came together to build a better alternative to YouTube approximately 2 years ago. We work on this project on the side, and take no money from our members (it all goes to servers and to animators on the platform).
Anim8 is a video hosting platform that offers the following awesome features (plus many more not mentioned here!):
Features for Animators
- Upload and distribute your animations to a wide range of animation fans (versus general purpose audience)
- Gate series of animations behind a paywall and make money from "supporters"!
- Take donations from your biggest fans
- Get featured on a number of sites, drawing more traffic to your animation (all done in an automated fashion)
- Categorize animations as WIP or FIN
Features for Animation Fans
- Support your favorite animators financially
- Aid in categorizing and tagging animations for better search relevancy, earn XP that leads to rewards for helping!
- Follow, favorite and communicate with your favorite animators!
- Find animations based on a number of metrics like style (3d, 2d, etc.) genre and more!
- Animations can be sorted based on cool metrics like writing, animation quality, sfx quality etc.
Please check us out if you are looking for a community to meet animators, animation fans and share your content outside of YouTube.
We are also hosting a $500 animation competition for those interested: https://blog.anim8.io/wickanim8jam2020/
Sounds really good!