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"Creators" went for direct monetisation because de-monetisation can happen on youtube for almost any arbitrary reason and there is almost no way to contact a human (as far as I am aware) to remedy such a situation.

Yeah, and I think this drives the point home even further. You really want a risk mitigation strategy for YouTube's hostile actions against creators. It's been a slow but steady creep. So, if your business is built off the back of something like Facebook, or YouTube, or Instagram, you probably want a backup plan.

I've seen a few YouTubers have a centralized site for signups and support where they host all their content. While the YT revenue is important, they at least have a way to engage their consumers should something terrible happen. This is BCP in a nutshell.

Can creators self-host videos on their personal website and push that video to Youtube for their subscribers? That way, they can direct users who don't want ads to their website. Then they are not completely dependent on YT, FB, etc.

If you even have a few thousand people regularly watching you (whcih is common these days). The bandwidth costs start to add up.

Not really. Good dedicated servers come with multiple TB free = 1000x 1 GB stream. And usually it's only pennies afterwards.

Where? Most place seem to get quite expensive once you add a Object Storage on top.

Hetzner $50+ servers have 1gbps uplink with unmetered BW.

Thanks I will take a look.

That means the link can support less than 100 viewers at once on a video with 10 Mbps bitrate. Often a large portion of views comes in the first few days of a video being posted. You could probably handle the spike of views from a video that receives a couple of thousand views total (maybe even 10k), but more than that seems difficult.

Also, is Hetzner actually unmetered or do they claim they are with an asterisk?

I think it's actually asterisked. Iirc you get flagged over a certain amount of traffic, but I can't remember if they cut you off or just force you to pay more. I think it was several TB last time I looked.

There was limits before, but last two+ years it's unmetered without asterisk.

replying to Aerroon but it was too deep so replying here.

Is there a way to do it with some p2p à la popcorntime?

Then if there was a surge, the peers could absorb some of it.

Does peertube do that?

Peertube do exactly this. Webtorrent support it's main feature so you dont actually need powerful server for spikes in popularity.

https://us.ovhcloud.com/

I've got experience for US hosting and they dont have great package prices like you're describing after the initial cap ime. 20 TB as some of the biggest caps then your bill is nearly doubled for 20 more. After that your bill would skyrocket to >$1000 in the increased networking fees and you dont even want to know how much unmetered 1+Gbps will get you. This will vary of course because short of being a hosting or tech company of size its not worth the cost, paperwork, biometrics, and time it takes.

So you go for a reseller which there are many stellar ones but they'll either utilize a program with the datacenter akin to an reseller affiliate program with them being the 3rd party support or do it all themselves. If they do the reseller affiliate program they cant really offer anything outside of theie markups on the existing offerings by the datacenter. If they do it all themselves then it becomes much more expensive for the upfront costs.

What you want is a VPS and a CDN which provides a better experience and what every streaming platform uses. Not that expensive either!

Without a CDN, the streaming experience is going to suck for anyone outside of the geographic proximity of your dedicated server

Bandwidth is the easy part for most cases. The software/operations requirements and the network effects are huge and crushing.

Self-hosting video content is either not very simple, or not very featureful.

You can put an html video tag and call it a day, but you'll be missing out on using the best codec for each viewer and bandwidth adaptation and (last I looked, hopefully I'm wrong) usable UI.

Bandwidth is an issue, although I've seen enough high bandwidth, unmetered server offers that I think it might work. Depending on where your viewers are and where you find cheap bandwidth, you might get poor performance just from distance, whereas YouTube and Facebook have CDNs with nodes everywhere.

Meanwhile there is nothing that matches the efficiency of torrents. I got some nice feedback from putting a magnet under the embed. People said: 1) I wanted to keep the video. 2) I seed it to support it as an upvote. 3) My computer is to shit to play embedded videos. 4) I bookmark your videos (and website) in my torrent client.

A seriously crappy PC, poor bandwidth an some noisy old disks is enough to host 5 TB+

excellent compromise!

other replies mention the client compatibility, quality and bandwidth issues with self hosting but i think this can be reasonably adressed with just going for a common denominator on the self-hosting side (eg. 720p h264)

Linus of the Tech Tips variety has said that a major reason they kept paying for the forums, which are a pain to keep healthy & don't generate much revenue, is so that they could have a direct line of communication to their core fan base no matter what happens.

Similarly there's a reason LTT launched Floatplane. Risk management is important regardless of how big your business is. Even if you're large enough for youtube to assign you an actual person for support.

Couldn’t they just use Twitter or some other platform like everyone else?

On twitter communication only happens here in now. Nobody (almost) cares about tweets older than 3 days, and twitter UI "helps" with that.

> Linus of the Tech Tips variety has said that a major reason they kept paying for the forums ... is so that they could have a direct line of communication to their core fan base no matter what happens. Using it for announcements is precisely the primary reason they claimed to want to keep the forums. So in this case, having an archive of old posts really doesn't have much of a purpose.

If they used Twitter or some other platform then they are still reliant on an externally funded system they have no control over. It's not really a backup plan at that point.

Also I don't think you can build a community on Twitter anyway. It's just shouting into the void. They could use it for announcements (and do, LTT is on Twitter, too), but little else.

> Linus of the Tech Tips variety has said that a major reason they kept paying for the forums ... is so that they could have a direct line of communication to their core fan base no matter what happens.

Using it for announcements is precisely the primary reason they claimed to want to keep the forums. So in this case, Twitter would be appropriate.

Twitter and Google and Facebook often cut a person at the same time. So it's like backuping up your photos to another drive on the same computer. Better than nothing but not ideal.

So how does this work for content that they decide to demonetize? Does Google just run ads and take the money now?

I don't know. They have already had "not advertiser friendly" caveat which is a way of just disqualifying anyone they like.

There has been several moral panics incited by the conventional media (TV, newspapers etc) about adverts being displayed alongside edgy content a while back. Several rounds of this eventually brought about a TOS change where they could deem you "not advertiser friendly". This of course ignored that Google does targeted advertising.

Some claim it is "political" however I believe it is simpler than that. It gave youtube an excuse to stop paying people without outright removing them from the platform which saves them a fair bit of money and doesn't quite bring the same outrage from the respective fanbases as outright removing people. In addition to that the people that have been demonetised have ranged from progressives, anarcho-communists, people doing ben-shapiro compilation videos and edgy boys and girls that tend to shitpost. So I don't see anything political about it.

They've also made it harder to be monetised on the platform generally, IIRC you can't be monetised at all and cannot receive super chats if you have less than 1000 subscribers. You also can't put custom thumbnails on your videos which makes it harder for your content to get attention.

> Creators went for direct monetization outside of youtube instead of ads, and youtube responded by keeping their net income the same by just showing ads anyway.

It's more complicated than that. Small time creators or others ineligible for the Youtube "partner program" have no choice but to monetize outside of Youtube. With this change, the only way you as a creator can choose whether ads appear on your video is to make partner.

The scummy thing here is that Youtube has made it harder and harder for creators to become eligible to monetize their channels, and now they're swooping in to take 100% of the ad revenue on those small-time channels.

Being eligible to monetize doesn't look that intimidating? https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72851?hl=en

Not sure how many small creators both can't manage that but can manage external monetization?

1000 subscribers? You can sign up and make more money from 3 patreons than 1000 yt subscribers, what are you on about?

Even YouTube made $3 billion in non-advertising revenue last year which includes subscriptions. The ad business brought in $15 billion revenue.

That depends on the amount of content you post. 1000 people watching a reasonable length video might only be $1-2 per video, but 10-15 videos a month would be $10-30. That can be more than 3 patrons.

Most people I know using Patreon post weekly, with maybe 2-3 posts a week. That includes 2nd-tier content like WIP and polls. Patreon requires a substantially smaller commitment, but it's more difficult to find patrons than viewers.

Yeah - but you dont need to post weekly content with patreons, you can get by with monthly given the subscription, and tbqh you can probably do bi-monthly with many types of subscribers - supporting instead of expecting content.

Also with 1000 subscribers you dont guarantee 1000 views, just potential views.

I agree with most of what you're saying, but I worry that Youtube's effective monopoly means that there just aren't other hosting platforms with the same kind of user base and discoverability.

Perhaps their current pricing model is fair, I have no idea. But being the de facto video hosting site gives them tons of power. They have the ability to extract extra value out of their users---much more than a non-monopolized market would allow.

I'd agree if and only if this was some drastic shift in policy, but it really isn't. The headline here is basically ad-supported platform shows ads. Ads have been super common on YouTube for years and years, so this isn't really a big change in overall expectations & experience. It's not an ad-free platform goes ad-supported situation where it was subsidized to kill off others before showing ads. More a small loophole was closed, and only if you were large enough to even have the loophole available to you in the first place.

I think what we're saying is compatible. Youtube isn't really doing anything new, just putting out more ads. They're able get away with it because they have a monopoly.

In my opinion, they don't really have a monopoly. They have plenty of competitors. In fact, the largest user generated video servers are under facebook control.

They didn't do it because they had a monopoly, they don't have a monopoly. It was more base than that. They did it because they wanted more money. Which is their right. I'm not complaining, but everyone's putting forth a great deal of high tone reasoning fro something that really is base venality at its root. They want more money. They believe they can get it even though they are not a monopoly. Even though Facebook is bigger. And even though their users will get mad.

You're totally right, they want more money. I agree they don't have a perfect monopoly either. There are lots of other options.

The reality is, most of their customers aren't going anywhere. Consider all the times you use Youtube. Trying to find a music video, watching sports highlights, videos from your favourite creators. Can you switch to DailyMotion for all of that now? Are all of your creators posting their videos on Facebook? Even if they are, are the videos as easy to find and discover as they are on Youtube? For content creators, is there anywhere else they can share and expect to find the same kind of audience? Not really.

This is what I'm talking about when I say monopoly. It's true, there's other options. A creator can post their videos on Vimeo and host their own website to monetize, just like someone could have taken a horse and buggy instead of the new railroad. No one is forced to go by train, but doing it the old way is inefficient and expensive. n both cases they won't get the same bang for their buck.

You yourself admit that Youtube is a platform that provides you with great user base and discoverability. That's also the exact reason what every other platform uses to charge 30% (Steam, Apple Store, etc). So why is it expected here for Youtube to give away all that for free, and allow you to completely turn off all the ads making them zero dollar, while you are having your content hosted for free and making money externally?

You're right, they shouldn't give all of that away for free. They deserve to make money for their service. I don't really have an opinion on the business model, or whether it's right or wrong to force ads on all videos.

I just become worried when they use their monopoly to extract as much value as possible, far beyond what they need to sustain their profits. I think monopolies are bad in principle, and Youtube is another example, just like Microsoft was, cable companies are, telecom was, railroads were, etc.

> I just become worried when they use their monopoly to extract as much value as possible, far beyond what they need to sustain their profits

But I'm not sure that's clear. There's been a distinct increase in the number of in-video ads (Raycon, Skillshare, ExpressVPN, Squarespace, Curiosity Stream, and so on), which probably corresponds to a distinct decrease in Youtube enabled ads. So with that logic, Youtube is probably making less money from top creators, who have been skipping the middleman entirely. This seems more like a step to retaining existing profits instead of increasing them.

Creators not only moved their ads out, many have been using and advertising other platforms for a while now. Dropout.tv, floatplane, nebula, patreon, etc. have been getting ad-free, paid users for lower price than the current yt.