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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Sharing video content is not an issue per se anymore. The cost of bandwith is when you become even remotely popular.

That is a good problem to have. I admit this is a chasm where cash goes to die.

The interesting part is where content creators, personalities, etc own their own rails. They don't need a massive audience to run their own show. Even if I only push 10-20 TB / month that is enough to make a lifestyle "+" business.

That is my hypothesis, and 2021 looks like a good time to test it.

(Edit - I can't grammar, apparently)

How can creators monetize their shows without Google’s ad ecosystem?

Check how twitch works.

Merch, membership and membership only events/videos, tipping, etc.

I was inclined to say that you need the right niche with the right culture. See game streaming with it small but frequent donations. But with enough momentum your apparently can create such a culture in quite some topic areas, like classical trained violin playing: https://www.youtube.com/user/twosetviolin. Interesting!

A seminal essay on this topic https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

Looking at https://influencermarketinghub.com/youtube-money-calculator/ suggests you get peanuts for google adverts - suggests 1 cent per view at most.

that seems to be inline with what I expected.

Lots of ways:

direct ad sales and "reads" (old school way of doing it)

run pre and mid-roll in the content (again, already done)

paid live-streams with ticket sales. Paul Richards from Stream Geeks wrote a book on this.

Merch

Paid newsletters / content which is marketed in the show.

Everything exists -- lots of value in helping creators stitch it all together.

I see a similar opportunity how web devs helped grow the e-commerce for small companies, we will see the same growth helping creators stand on their own.

That's true. If you don't have a solid monetization plan things become harder very quickly.

A peer-to-peer-relay approach helps with this!

Peertube is apparently getting support for live streaming, or already has it. I can't tell.

https://joinpeertube.org/en/roadmap

How bad's the delay on live p2p? I'd be surprised to hear it getting below 10s and picture it more at 30

This is not a dig at Peertube, they're doing truly great work. My use case is probably different

Apparently Peertube claims between 10 and 30 seconds but I have not tested it.

You can run the 3.0 release candidate now, which has live streaming [1]. There are official Docker images available as well [2].

[1]: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/releases/tag/v3.0.0-r...

[2]: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/support/...

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