Hacker News Reader

Comment by vfc1 | Hacker News Reader

It's too little too late. At this point many people have realized that as a content creator, you simply don't want to be in the hands of these platforms.

Not allowing creators to set the price of the subscription, taking 30% of it while still running adds those are huge constraints for creators.

Sill nothing beats creating your own website, and taking the recurring payments directly with Stripe. Plus having a mailing list and build a direct relationship with your supporters without the need for a middleman.

The same goes for Patreon, these massively centralized platforms are taking away revenue of creators by luring them into a ready to use service, while in fact building your own website is much more sustainable in the long term.

View on HN

More sustainable? Maybe for creators with huge user bases that have enough revenue to be able to afford the development and maintenance costs of running a website.

Not to mention, as a user, the absolute LAST thing I want is to manage my content on dozens of different sites. Being able to “subscribe” to my favourite 5-6 creators on YouTube means I can now manage those all in a single location and get a single bill, and get all my content from one place. I have no desire to check each site out individually for new content. I also don’t want to have to try to figure out what the heck that random charge on my Visa is, only to realize I’ve been paying someone $X/m for months on end without ever watching their content simply because I forgot about it (or maybe the creator stopped posting, out of sight, out of mind).

There are online video + ebook hosting platforms like Thinkific or Teachable that allow you to do that without the need for custom development, those are turnkey solutions.

Typically there are only a few subjects for each one given person is willing to pay for content, because we typically have only 2 to 3 major interests that we really want to dive deeper into at any given time.

It depends on the type of content, if its for example chess lessons then a membership site makes sense, its a never ending subject.

If its high-value educational content then it makes much more sense to build your own website, rather than be dependent of these platforms.

Historically, content creators have always been exploited by the middleman that gets the lion share of the profit, and because of that there is a lot of content that never got created not because it does not have a market, but because its unsustainable to creators due to the middleman and their control of the relationship with consumers.

The internet does allow us to remove the middleman for the case of lots of content creators, but instead, people are spending a lot of time and energy trying to make it in these platforms only for them to change the rules every two years.

You forgot the part where you pay Google AdWords for the discovery of your content.

> Sill nothing beats creating your own website, and taking the recurring payments directly with Stripe.

Sorry to go off-topic here, but I'd love to hear suggestions from the HN crown on this.

What are the best ways to handle video content on a self-hosted website? Browser-based player, streaming server, etc? Is there a reliable service that offers a solution to paywall video content on your own website?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com