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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Every single content creator needs to host all their videos on something that is more under their control. People need to learn how to setup PeerTube instances. I realize people are afraid they close loose subscribers/revenue, but trust me, the people who prefer PeerTube are most likely running adblockers anyway.

Always host your video on an alternative network you pay someone for and have regular backups of. The time is coming when YouTube will not be a viable place for creators.

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I can't see how PeerTube isn't a non-starter. Aside from being much worse of a cesspit of porn, white supremacists, and other things you don't want your kids finding without having you there to explain what's going on (and yeah, you're gonna say "but you can filter it!"--you can, I can, people can't), it has no reasonable-person-testable model for creatives to actually pay their bills, both through lack of reach and lack of accessibility. (Which is to say--the adpocalypse is real, but most creatives aren't finding Patreon supporters on ye olde PeerTube.)

(Aside: if your proposed model includes the word "cryptocurrency," you fail, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Rent and taxes are denominated in real money, thou must do likewise.)

For all the huge, gaping problems that YouTube has, and right now in another thread I'm going to the mat on exactly that, centralization won and will continue to win and so we need to use the big lever (y'know, the "being in a society" one) to fix what's centralized, not expect people to scatter to the four winds of irrelevance.

>> centralization won and will continue to win and so we need to use the big lever

It may have won the current battle, but who really knows if centralization will be the norm in say 10, 20 or 50 years. There have been lots of instances where a technology or company seemed to have won only to loose to an upstart that they never saw coming. And when they loose they tend to loose big. Getting completely obliterated within a few short years. Nokia and BlackBerry phones are relevant examples.

If you die in the short term you can't come back 10, 20 or 50 years later.

YouTube is as bad as any other tube when it comes to content you don't want you cold to be exposed to. Algorithms suggesting videos make this even worse.

> I realize people are afraid they close loose subscribers/revenue, but trust me, the people who prefer PeerTube are most likely running adblockers anyway.

Doesn’t this just validate their fears?

It depends whether your fear is about money or about censorship/visibility.

Agreed. In fact, this is why I always host my own work wherever possible, then syndicate it to third party platforms afterwards. That way, everything stops with me. Not Google, not YouTube, not Medium or Twitter, me.

Are there risks? Sure, self hosting your work can always be risky, and there's always the possibility someone genuinely will want to take legal action.

But many, many more won't. Many more know full well that they don't have a legal leg to stand on when it comes to takedowns of YouTube videos or what not. YouTube and other platforms not giving a damn about fair use is a gold mine for large companies and unscrupulous actors.

Self hosting avoids that, and makes those with questionable ethics (like say, Vice Media in this example) actually think 'do we really believe we've got enough of a case here' before trying to strike down criticism or what not.

Oh, and the time is coming? No, YouTube already isn't a viable place for many creators.

>The time is coming when YouTube will not be a viable place for creators.

Looks to me like it already is.

Tell that to the thousands of creators who pay their bills with YouTube money...

"The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet."

Before the first adpocalypse, more people could live off Youtube revenue than do now. Youtube is going through the third or fourth adpocalypse. Those who can still live off Youtube are lucky, and should be looking to diversify their income. For everyone else, there's places like Patreon.

I love this phrase

There are stages of adpocalypse?

Surely ad blocking would mimic the slow growth rates of browser adoption.

The YouTube adpocalypse wasn't just about ad blocking. YouTube has gone through multiple rounds of "you can't monetize", or "you can't be a partner anymore", or similar ways of cutting people off.

I don't know of any other video platform that pays Youtube money

I don't either and I assume there aren't any. The thing I would recommend to anyone living off of Youtube revenue is to diversify so you're not left with nothing if your channel gets taken down or demonitized.

Diversify to what, though? A portfolio of Treasury bonds and Monopoly money is not meaningfully diversified. If there is no other way to monetize video content than YouTube, there's no meaningful diversification you can do. You either have to eat the risk or leave the market.

I think he meant diversify "markets"... A.k.a work a part time job or something so in the event that your youtube revenue is nuked (as is happening more and more frequently), you'll still have a meaningful source of income (Many part time jobs have the ability to increase your hours as well if necessary).

That sort of "diversifying" is potentially not very practical - video production takes a lot of time and effort, so either you cut your output there to have time for a part-time job (is the part-time job giving you as much money per hour as the extra work you could have put into making more videos?) or you're now working a job and a half.

If you can make more from YouTube ads and per-video Patreon subscribers than you could by cutting your video production by half to fit in a part-time job, it might make more sense to stick to just videos but keep tabs on local part-timer opportunities. Less stable, but a higher net income until your channel goes down -> more able to last until you can get a part-time job? Not sure; I've been lucky enough not to have to worry about that sort of thing, so this is mostly speculation.

For video game streamers a lot of people diversify into a mix of twitch streaming, youtube videos, and patreon subscriptions, but it's not obvious that this is a viable path for the majority of youtube content creators.

Creators go where the market is. If that wasn't the case, they'd be hosting on Dailymotion or Metacafe.

The question is whether it is viable for creators to earn a living through YouTube, or even to just host their content. With YouTube randomly shutting down channels and demonetizing at the drop of a hat, it's clear that it is no longer suitable for either of these cases.

As things are now, there is no other "market creators will go to" since I don't believe Dailymotion or Metacafe are viable either.

Vimeo?

Youtube already screwed their creators before the whole mess with the ads and made it less and less viable to make a living from revenues on their platform. Most creators who do this for a living have switched to something like a direct contribution-based system. Youtube’s seen and inderstood this, seeing as how they slowly started implementing these payment features themselves.

As a platform for making a living the company is completely untrustworthy: they are impossible to contact, quick to act and deceitful. I wouldn’t trust them with my livelihood myself. I mean, they were caught sending robotic replies in response to support complaints disguised as legitimate messages, what else do they have to do to prove to creators that they’re only good for hosting but the revenue has to come from somewhere else and a direct line of contact needs to exist towards fans in case they decide to randomly disappear your channel?

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