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Comment by hayksaakian | Hacker News Reader

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hayksaakian

The More competition for YouTube the better.

The bigger question to answer: How do you appeal to viewers?

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The bigger question is how do you plan to foot the bill for serving videos at that scale.

Exactly, there's a reason why no one is competing with youtube.

Would ads that don't track users sell?

Even if you could sell ads as well as YouTube, you will neither have Google's scale or technological advantages, nor will you be able to survive on the same margin as YouTube. But off course, any YouTube competitor will most likely receive far less from ads than YouTube does (not counting things like facebook video here).

If we ever want to have a better YouTube alternative, I think the main question is would people be willing to pay a good amount of money for that service. Personally, I find the YouTube model better. Even though it tracks people, it atleast makes videos freely accessible to everyone. Would something like khan academy or OCW even exist without YouTube?.

However, I have observed that as one progress through the social ladder economically, the appetite for a paid but non tracking model grows.

Most individuals have gotten very accustomed to largely not paying (directly) for hosted content/email/etc.

This isn't universal. There are relatively niche sites that people pay to use, or at least have paid tiers. But free is what most people expect. (Look at all the outrage when SmugMug eliminated the 1TB free limit that Yahoo put on Flickr.)

My take is you go the freemium model. Free version of NodeTube gets you cool features, but if you want really epic features (livestreaming, increased file uploads, private/unlisted uploads) then you have to pay a bit. My bet is that people will get behind the project and pay a bit of extra money on a freemium model to access the extra features and support the NodeTube instance.

If everyone downloads once and serves twice, then you can reach every human in about 30 iterations.

If you want to prevent client storage because you want to create a repeated controllable attention resource, then you will have a scaling problem.

(It's too bad you can distribute everything as a torrent and give people an easy way to pay for the movie they just downloaded, even if it was just "on their honor".)

Getting 1 video to a billion people is dead simple, getting a million videos to 1,000 people is damn hard. YouTube serves both ends of the spectrum.

Really good points raised here guys. Here's my take on each point raised: 1) Appeal to viewers: it's slick, no clutter, really fun, and people hate YouTube. There's lots of appeal already just based on the reaction I've gotten posting it around a bit. 2) NodeTube has built in integration with Stripe where you can offer a 'plus' version of the site for $5/month. $5/month gets a LOT of hosting bang for your buck, so the bet is that your Plus subscriptions will outpace your hosting costs, I feel quite confident in that. 3) Regarding a video that may sit on the platform for a long time with zero views, my suggestion would be in that case since the file is serving the purposes more of being backed up rather than serving as content that you would prompt the user to pay a fee for using NodeTube as a 'backup service'. It seems harsh but if profitability is important to the project then you would remove those uploads that satisfy a condition that basically marks them as 'totally inactive, only using the platform as a content backup'. Interested to hear your guys thoughts on this concept.

Thanks guys!

> people hate YouTube.

Do they? In my bubble, that's certainly a very uncommon sentiment from the consumer side.

My honest opinion is yes. Look at how disliked the Rewind videos are, or how much flack YouTube gets on Twitter. Susan Wojicki is not looked on with much fan fare.

My honest opinion is that that's an opinion that might have arisen in a bubble, considering that multiple, actually mature alternatives to YouTube exist and yet its content and userbase continue to grow at a frankly alarming rate. It's like how a lot of people on here seem so certain that Facebook is a dead platform that nobody sane uses and everybody hates, when its number of _daily_ active users ranks in the billions.

I think part of that is people not recognizing the difference between "I hate this platform, as in I will actually put my money where my mouth is and leave or boycott it at the slightest provocation" and "I hate this platform, as in I grumble about it because pretty much every hugely successful venture has everyone grumbling about one thing or the other, but my net feelings towards it are actually rather positive and I have no intentions of leaving it".

That is the wrong question. Content draws viewers. So, the question is how do you draw quality content creators?

Honestly, I think a lot of creators are fed up with YouTube. Also creators like variety and the opportunity to leverage new platforms. I think new creators will really like the platform, also there is already automatic YT->NT backup functionality built into the app (as a Plus feature if I'm not mistaken)

Well, quite a few YouTube creators I know of seem to be willing to try new video hosting platforms, and have signed up for quite a few of the existing alternatives. So there's definitely interest there.

The real question is how you'll get a criticial mass of quality content creators, since while 10/100/1000/whatever could be persuaded to sign up to a new platform pretty easily, YouTube has tens or hundreds of thousands of great content creators on it. Also how to get them to prioritise the new platform over the old one, since many use these new platforma as a secondary one right now, not their first port of call for new content.

The biggest complaint I hear from popular YouTubers is that it is getting increasingly difficult to monetize their content. An easy way for content creators to monetize in whatever way they wish would be a huge draw. Most of the content creators I follow have turned to Patreon to reduce reliance on staying in Google's monetized good graces.

It's not an easy problem to solve. Viewers hate ads but also want "free" content. Making it possible for creators to monetize through ads, micropayments, or sponsorship is only part of the solution.

The ideal thing would be a way where you can load 'credits' onto your app and then reward them to creators, very similar to Sparks/Subs on Twitch. If you can get that into a media hosting platform you're golden.

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