If your videos are acceptable to Vimeo (they have anal TOS but great technical platform) then I recommend at all times upload duplicates to Vimeo (and someone else). Then register your own URL shortener domain (such alex.je or whatever) and send links to your video through your own shortlinks, such as: alex.je/2013
Trusting your business to single platform provider - no matter how big - is disastrous.
With planning like above you'd be back in business in no time by flipping redirect URLs to your videos at secondary provider.
Thanks. In terms of marketing the show, I've been pointing everyone to CWATF.com/xxxxxx, so to get back up-and-running, I would just need to upload the video files to a different video platform and re-embed per URL.
I do regret not backing up each video to another platform while I went. The reason was because I wanted to aggregate all traffic to a single platform, in the case that I started to run ads. I guess I could have uploaded them privately on another platform, only to open up publicly should something like this happen.
Great, so just reupload your greatest hits and most recent ones to Vimeo (or whoever) and update redirects from CWATF.com.
I think your competitors complained to Google using the right terminology. I had similar experience with Google.
The conclusion I saw for myself is to "use platform, but do not rely your business to platform".
But what about the loss of ad revenue? I imagine folks are posting to Google because of what can be substantial monthly ad revenues -- which then a content producer becomes dependent on to finance the series and which makes an arbitrary termination like this even more disastrous.
It good while it works and last. Have backup plan when provider suddenly decides to boot you up or creative competitor complained to terminate your series.