that would cost so much money it would be near impossible for a start-up company...

you have any Idea how many youtube vids are uploaded daily? and many Petabytes worth of Video is hosted on their servers?
getting a system running that could handle all that would be nearly impossible for a start-up... unless you had some super wealthy benefactor...

the reason youtube is as "powerful" as it is is because at this point you couldn't get the finances needed to create a decent alternative...

I'm sure with all the "Partners" out there at least a few would love to pay into a system to have priority in the featured tab, kinda like they do now, and just market it as "Branching out". Of course accounts are free, but with ads (countered by you-guessed-it, adblock), but alot of the YT Partners now are making Quarter-million dollar productions as it is now, and not being able to get feedback from a wider range of their audience would really dampen their efforts.

EDIT: I guess if they really wanted to, they could build a Tumblr or something as well, and just use it's commenting system, only using the YT page as a way of letting people know there's a new vid up or something like that.

I kept closing out the windows when it asked me about connecting to google plus because it's complete garbage. I wanted to be able to comment on the videos of channels I'd subscribed to so the people who uploaded them knew somebody appreciated their content. I don't want to use my real name. I don't want to have a google plus account. I guess I'm done with commenting because I will not ever get a google plus account. It actually tricked me into setting one up once and I had to go through and delete it.

Social networking sites that are uploaded with the sole purpose of interacting with people you know in real life are the scum of the internet and I want no part of them. MySpace, Facebook, G+, whatever. I wish they would quit trying to tie them into every [censored] section of the internet. You can hardly comment on an online article anymore without signing into your [censored] Facebook account. It's atrocious.

Google forcing their fail attempt at social networking with Google+ on Youtube. Quite annoying.

And that's why you set up Ghost accounts. But I agree, having to use a Social media account is ridiculous.