I will always remember about Blip.tv. It was a platform where many "content creators" started their careers. It was better than YouTube because it wasn't so strict about copyright issues, which is neat when you're doing media analysis and you need to show movie clips to prove your point (imagine doing a thesis and your supervisor tells you that you can't quote other pre-existing books, otherwise people might not want to buy those books, being satisfied just by reading your quotes... After all, you don't have the rights on those so you can't complain... mental, eh?) and was built more for serialisation, around the idea of your "show" or "programme".
One day, a subsidiary of Disney bought everything and so for a while, those people were Disney employees. The situation was stable for... maybe a year? A couple of years? I can't remember frankly... Then, they liquidated the company and closed the site. So all of a sudden, those people who made their living just from that were out of a job.
Many continued on YouTube which... is not great, because they're paid less and less and everyone by now needs to have a Patreon to keep going and there's nothing else they can do, because yay monopolies, right?
But I think that without those who were on Blip and their sometimes weird and wonky series which created an audience for this type of content (aka a humourous takedown of movies/discussion of tropes in an unpretentious manner), we wouldn't have the video essayists of today (some of whom are the same people — I think, for example, of Lindsay Ellis, who's been nominated for a Hugo Award for a series of videos about The Hobbit trilogy).