Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites
bbc.com
bbc.com
The goal on HN is curious conversation. Curiosity likes diffs [1], not generics [2, 3]. Try to comment in a way that leads to a new place rather than an old place.
The easiest way to do this is to respond to the specific new information in an article. As a nudge in that direction, I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases).
You don't only have to react to the specific new information in an article. Whimsical tangents and reactions are also ok. Just ask yourself if it's expected or unexpected [4], and prefer the unexpected.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
There's nothing wrong with repetition per se. There is pleasure in it—it's just a different kind than the pleasure of curiosity. The problem is that we can't have both pleasures at the same time, and HN is a site for curiosity. This is one of those moderation calls that seems arbitrary and obscure until you take literally that we're trying to optimize for just one thing, and then it follows rather straightforwardly.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280
(It's really a sweet spot to have only one thing to optimize for—one gets to have fun being radical about following it to all its counterintuitive consequences.)
although I guess it is also a smart thing to still have something open if youtube suddenly decides to screw you over by algorithm.
Assumes there are no new readers on HN and that everyone reads almost everything and nothing needs repeating. Also it's very 'no noobies' as if anyone who is anyone should know the ropes already. And that is not the case.
And I've mentioned this before a few times so I will repeat. Why don't you have in your profile that you are a moderator? How would someone new to HN know why you are saying what you are saying and why you have the right to pin what you say at the top?
HN hasn’t been turning into Reddit for a long while because sometimes the moderators make comments like this and the community goes “Okay” because they value the community and can see the moderator’s point and those matter more than typing something easy to type because it is all over Twitter.
More seriously, if HN’s moderation conflicts with your deeply held principles, HN might not be for you. Like any social media that makes someone unhappy, a voluntary break, temporary or complete, may be warranted.
HN is not going to suddenly become a democracy or collective. Moderation is a big part of what makes HN HN.
We already have software support for a subset of trusted users to do things like add years to titles. (If anyone wants to be incorporated into that set, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.) That was an experiment and it's worked out really well. I want to extend it and this is on the list of possible extensions.
that feels super gross, I love mostly passively reading HN, but manipulation like that because basically it sounds like you don't want to see stuff you've seen before ...
poor decision.
'Manipulation' and 'moderation' and 'curation' and so on refer to the same thing, just with different emotional valences. We're not trying to be manipulative per se, but it takes human attention to prevent the system from falling into its failure modes.
It would be wonderful (especially for us!) if community action plus software were all that was neeeded for an optimal solution, but sadly they're just not. There needs to be a third component: humans who pay attention to the site as a whole and jiggle it so it doesn't degenerate. That's what we mean by moderation.
When that third, human component is working well, it fades into the background and creates an impression that the system is regulating itself. That's a sort of paradise mode. But then when moderation shows up intrusively (as in my comment above), some readers feel like we're interfering with the system that exists. Actually we're already part of the system that exists, and if we weren't doing what we do, the whole system would be very different.
How downvotes encourage that? I mean it can be abused and is abused for bullying opinions that some people do not want to hear.
There are some interesting opinions reflecting exactly this "Curiosity likes diffs" that get downvoted and how it encourages to write something interesting if it will be invisible and become deleted anyway just because it's not in the trend or too different.
Or if I get downvoted for stating the facts I observe. In theory it should sparkle curiosity! Not shutting up the facts using downvotes. Once I've experienced getting downvoted for stating the facts it's not really encouraging to say what I think is really there.
Can we remove downvotes and leave only upvotes? Or can we limit downvotes to some degree so at least somewhere in the end of the threat you can still read them. I mean at leat let me read those downvoted opinions, it's not too comfortable to read almost white on white and it's annoying.
May be we can put a red line in the end of the thread and put some comments beyond that line to let know those have been downvoted a lot. But let me read those, at least we can learn why they have been downvoted.
I appreciate your work. Indeed HN is a unique place and supports curiosity to some good degree. I just wish it to encourage it more and I think people need some more safety for this.
I observe that if people want to say what they really think they just create temporary account just to express that specific opinion because new accounts are protected from downvotes as I understand. This observation should be worrying I think if we wish to encourage "diffs" and "unexpected".
For now I've learned that saying something really different here would get downvotes and this is not what I wish to learn here.
I wish to explore concepts that I am not sure are correct and I wish get answers helping me to explore them. Not downvotes that tell me mostly nothing about the concept.
We already check for strict duplicates but that's so strict a test that basically no post passes it. What would be needed is software to group the repetitive posts into equivalence classes but exempt the posts that are on the same topics but add some original twist. That seems hard for software! even with modern AI. I'd love to be proven wrong though. If anyone wants to take a crack at it, the data is all public.
I don't think hners are elite? and yes, many people use both HN and Reddit - why shouldn't they?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
Honestly it's sad how people on this website are okay with this Maoist nonsense, considering how brutally they attack trends like censorship and political correctness.
* His Youtube channel is his main platform
* However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there
* He also earns income from a podcast, Cortex
* The Podcast has its own brand of sellable things, currently journals and Tshirts
* He had a second podcast, hello internet, currently on hiatus. If ever something went catastrophically wrong with youtube this could be reactivated via the feed
* He has a large email list which he uses to reach people directly and drive traffic to videos if people request these updates
* He is also prominent on twitter etc and maintains secondary youtube channels, useful if main one taken down
* He runs a large subreddit for his following
So it is layers and layers of redundancy, built on a mix of other platforms and also two he controls directly (email and rss)
Still faces a youtube risk but it would take a an earthquake across platforms to truly wreck his income streams.
As someone who runs an online business and follows him it’s been impressive to watch how diversified he has made his comms channels.
Also he has no basic decency to announce cancelation and left Tims hanging, for many of whom it was the podcast.
Compare that with Cortex where Gray can talk productivity systems and his unanswered love for Apple all day long. Endless content there, as you can never overthink it too much.
I know that Haran eventually posted a brief comment on Reddit acknowledging the hiatus, but it struck me as a strangely subdued way to announce the end of a regular series that had been very successful for several years.
I would say in particular lots of these people started doing "community slacks/discords" and then they realized that being able to produce podcast episodes doesn't make you a good community manager.
There's been specific drama with Relay and people around that extended universe as well, so lots of podcast hosts in that space are basically done with fan interaction.
I'm being a bit glib but I totally get it. If you have the choice to just walk away from dealing with CM stuff then it's a pretty nice proposition.
A show that I listen to skipped a week during the early stages of the pandemic. I was concerned that one of the hosts was ill / possibly dying. It was some planned thing, like a vacation or something. A little notice would have been nice.
Sure, these are strangers and my emotional investment is a bit like teen girls crying when they saw the Beatles play: “Really?”. But I love the show and would have missed it, so I was anxious about its (possible) demise.
I think you’ve nailed it with this.
I have a podcast app (Overcast) which I use for everything, and nothing that I can't subscribe to in that will ever get my ears.
Spotify is the first serious challenger, but so far the only ones to go Spotify exclusive as the really big ones that are paid handsomely to do it.
They stopped it right when the pandemic hit. That messed up podcast advertising for a while, and also the usual stuff they talked about.
Meanwhile they both have other projects and may have decided their time or energy was better spent elsewhere. Who knows?
A little unusual not to say anything but hey, they end episodes without goodbye so not a giant surprise. And Brady has said they’re on a break and on good terms so it isn’t totally secret either.
I enjoyed it while it was around and wish them well, but I don’t think they owe us anything. I subbed to Goodbye Internet to give a small incentive to them restarting, and that’s it.
But to my larger point, it is still an asset. If the community atrophies 40% while they’re gone...it’s still 60% of a great asset.
But he already burned a lot of good will by doing it so glib. For example, I don’t click “like” on his videos anymore, and I’m not subscribing to his paid director’s commentary. It only applies to Grey, we all know it’s not Brady’s fault.
It's hard for us to visualize since having such an audience sounds like a responsibility we'd take seriously. But to Grey it's just a small income stream on the side. He doesn't have an actual relationship with the members of the audience, even if the audience might believe otherwise.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that considering the change of perspective is an interesting exercise.
He was one of the driving forces behind Nebula, but I believe he is no longer involved in running it.
Did he break that down publicly or do you get your info from elsewhere? I've always been curious to know what a typical high profile youtuber income flow looks like, and how much they're really tied to Youtube.
Mark Brown, of Game Maker's Toolkit, puts out vids on Youtube that get a couple hundred thousand views (1 or 2 vids a month). So he could theoretically get a couple hundred from those. But his Patreon following nets him a couple thousand a month ($11k!)
When you have niche content you can end up getting way more per subscriber if people feel your content is worth it.
I think that genre allows for showing those scammy get rich quick motivational guru type ads, which pay well. Everyone else has to be sponsored by ExpressVPN and CuriosityStream.
I also get a lot of Farage's new presumably penny stock product adds ( just let those play out to maker sure he's paying out)
What strikes me as odd is those super low quality portrait videos with uncanny valley synthesised like I am going to buy that crap?
Not really.
There is some kind of "channel" redundancy but no "revenue streams" diversification outside ads and patreon.
Without actually paying for content, one can usually find:
- google ads, low effort low reward - brand sponsorships, high effort, fixed reward - patreon subscriptions, high effort high reward - tips and super chats and twitch - sometimes brave BAT rewards
- podcast ads - podcast subscriptions - merch - sponsorships - YouTube ads - nebula subscriptions
That’s pretty diversified and it includes paying for content three times.
Something to understand, for those who might have just seen some youtube videos of him being goofy, is that he's an actor. The guy on camera doing stupid stuff is a stage persona. It's an intentionally cultivated image and media persona to get as many video views as possible.
I sort of see him as one possible aspect of the low/medium budget TV production stuff which is common in his home city, Vancouver BC. People who've met and worked with him in person report that he's a much more normal, calm, rational individual off screen.
I won't judge him for being goofy on camera because it's hard to make a living as a working actor. For every person who gets a job in a vancouver-produced TV drama that might last 2 or 3 seasons, there's dozens more people who are working as restaurant servers while trying to get their big break.
If I can be honest nobody wants the high maintenance viewer with personal rules about this and that little thing anyway. It's exhausting and they definitely use adblock haha
But on the other hand, I've saved myself many hours of having clicked through a stupid face thumbnail to some bland algorithmic HeyGuysWhatsUpThisIs-type crap.
Which is crap, but that's the world we live in. They do excellent content nevertheless. LTT and MKBHD are the only two tech review style Youtubers I bother following. They get to the point, know their shit and speak calmly.
I mean the HC community and YC companies have no qualms about discussing and promoting the best practices for a good landing page, every time someone comes in to promote their product there will be unsolicited advice about that. It's the same thing, but instead of saying "you should put caps in your title and have an expressive face in the thumbnail" it'll be about the content on the landing page like "you need a screenshot".
I find enough of their videos to be informative enough that I continue to watch those that I think would interest me. I've become a regular for the their TechLinked channel as I find it entertaining as well as informative but their longer videos and unboxing videos I'll cherry pick: I'll watch reviews of products I'm interested in but I tend to skip the extravagant/outlandish builds they do as I find them pointless since I wont be doing anything like that myself.
He actually built this in spite of all the production resources that Vancouver has to offer, and is more a "growth hacker" than actor I'd say.
SOURCE: Linus is a friend...
In French we say "veille technologique" which seems to coincide with "technology intelligence" in English, but it's a lot less intense: I just like knowing what's out there, keep informed, and LTT's format is just that: highly digestible updates on storage technology, network infrastructure, hardware and everything tech.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging [2] S2E4, Unscripted: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6068870/
I think every successful youtuber has a cultivated stage persona because that's more entertaining than just watching an everyday person talk about a mechanical keyboard for 15 minutes.
I didn't mean so much that he's a person who tried and didn't get a part on a Vancouver-produced TV show, but that his video production efforts are part of the whole general Vancouver and Toronto "hollywood north" industry scene of people who act, do camera work, set decoration, costume, cinematography, sound, rigging, grips, etc.
Many shows now make sense.
People were screaming about where platforms and digital sharecropping was headed all along... and we're here now. Youtube, which is basically digital free-to-air is even more centralised than old free to air.
Youtube really is an extreme situation. They really dominate a whole medium single handedly and youtubers have shockingly little power in the whole thing. There either needs to be some neutrality, competition or youtubers need to organize somehow... unionize even. Trying to have a relationship with audiences that doesn't run through youtube won't work for most channels... even ones with millions of views.
I always expected a porn company to come in and compete with youtube at some point. They have the infrastructure. I've also been surprised at how restricted youtube manage to be, and still succeed... just the skin censorship if nothing else.
That makes people reasonably annoyed when Youtube decides to semi-arbitrarily pull the plug on a channel, but it also means that competition is very hard. If a competitor decides to start charging for hosting or streaming, they're doomed to be niche.
Google uses profits from search to napalm everything remotely looking like a threat.
No other enterprise, besides Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and all the streaming companies (Netflix, Disney, ...).
But from what I understand, they burned money for many years and only very few years ago became profitable. But in some sense YT doesn’t really have to be profitable - for Google it’s more important to prop search itself, then to make money on YT.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
THIS is the antitrust of google, and where authorities should strike them. They built a video platform and destroyed others using their 90% market power in another market.
Actually I find Google video search is still the best place to find non-YouTube videos. Of course YouTube dominates if the content is there, but when it's not, Google is still great at returning relevant results on tons of other sites.
Anyway that said, there's enough competition for youtube to ensure that these channels don't have to die; it's just discoverability that is the issue. Youtube does not have exclusive rights to any video uploaded (although I'm sure they have negotiated exclusivity contracts with some), so anyone is free to mirror their uploads elsewhere, just in case. I'm sure there's software out there that makes cross-posting videos easy.
Monetising. Youtube does it automatically, with a blog you need to manage the ads yourself and the audience is a lot smaller.
There is also a generational gap at some point. To me, it seems that 20-somethings turn to Youtube for every issue (phone setup, toilet clogged whatever) instead of looking for a text resource.
If I don't like one email provider, I can always move to a different provider without losing access to all the user's that remain there.
If I could make a Facebook post and have it's content propagate to other providers, websites would act more like UI filters rather than gatekeepers.
Now let's be serious, there are numerous barriers that stand in the way of "normal" users that want to escape the evil platforms. Why not direct our ire at the real problem: Why Johnny Still Can't Host a Website!
And if we fix that, perhaps we can move on to Why Johnny Can't Get Any Visitors (Because Google Won't Index It) and Why Johnny's Visitors Don't Receive His Updates (Because Google and Mozilla Killed RSS).
...otherwise the most googled term would not be facebook, just to click on the facebook.com link.
If there would be something like decentralized trackers (similar to the torrent architecture) you could have lots and lots of specialized communities that provide meta information about those websites and urls.
This would also allow different sources of traffic and updates if the discovery aspect of similar semantic content would be provided by something like a tagging system or a search field.
Humans don't have to remember domain names (and email addresses and URLs) because we have address books, contact lists, and bookmarks. We do have to recognize domains (and email addresses etc) when we see them, but that doesn't seem to present any issues in the real world.
Domains are absolutely everywhere in modern life: business cards, restaurant menus, outdoor advertising signage, and even in people's conversations with each other. People do, in general, understand how to use domain names.
Of course I do agree with your overall point that we need better protocols for content discovery, but I just don't think that domain names themselves are a stumbling block here.
i was billed -very little- for a while then i opened a support ticket to have my account restored, since i had been billed for a while i at least wanted to watch some content.
but apparently something in the backend had changed and they plainly refunded me from the time i had my last login (iirc) and then they allowed me to re-signup.
it's been nice because i had then been able to re-signup and also recover some money that were pretty much lost, and i wasn't expecting that nor asking for it.
i really hope to see floatplane grow!
Which makes sense given that show reels / corporate marketing videos appears to be what Vimeo is focusing on.
This is why those services as so necessary.
Hopefully these creators will manage to carve enough of a niche to create healthy competition, especially with a business model that doesn't rely entirely on ad revenue. It's going to be very hard though, making money from video hosting is a very difficult thing to do.
You host the content, and you can pick from UIs/algorithms for the discovery.
It’s the same as the old Apple saying: if you’re serious about software, you have to make hardware.
The actual quote, "people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware," is from Alan Kay, when he was speaking at a seminar in 1982 called Creative Think. Andy Hertzfeld was in attendance and took notes. When Hertzfeld got back to his office at Apple, he summarized the notes on one page and handed out to his team members. Kay was later hired as an Apple Fellow in 1984.
I'm woefully uninformed to speculate about how feasible this might be though, so it remains just a hope for me.
I think PeerTube or systems like it have a lot promise — particularly if more estblished channels on YouTube, and other media producers, were to start to promote them as alternative methods for accessing their output.
What is sad is that you see youtubers talking in code on videos, not saying words, self censoring because youtube's detection is so good, videos get demonetised instantly. This is also why most people have seen an Ad in a video for PIA or surfshark or worse, raid shadow legends.
On YouTube I have to call it 'wordlength shift gain' because YouTube thinks I'm saying 'bitch'. And I don't know, maybe that would increase my YouTube discovery at some times when they're leaning more in the direction of provocation-for-engagement, but that's not the kind of channel I do, so I self-edit.
I don't find it sad so much as it's simply a step into the future: awareness means understanding what the algorithms will make of you. Fail to grasp that and you get caught in the gears. I also openly talk about how I allow YouTube to run ads even though I'm a uBlock Origin guy myself and encourage people to adblock likewise: I assume that if I balk YouTube on this, or fail to pretend that I'm after what meager revenue YouTube promises, that I'll be eventually punished for it. So, I keep up appearances, 'cos it's a key platform for me.
I'm currently watching the Linus Media Group playlist on how they make money and why they make clickbaity thumbnails, with interest. I could probably put some words into my thumbnails and construct them better. I earnestly believe Google is good enough to automate discovery of whether people are doing these things, and reward/punish them algorithmically based on whether they're in compliance, so I am probably blocking myself from discoverability by failing to include text on thumbnails even without a single Googler making a human decision on the matter. I don't know whether I need to make faces too: it's an experiment I could try if I felt like it. Gurning for dollars :)
You support creators by giving them money. In return for supporting a creator you get video content in return. Floatplane as a platform for the most part doesn't dictate what that content is other than it being in the format of a video.
LTT themselves have actually been moving away from pushing videos early to Floatplane and more towards giving unique video content on Floatplane such as behind the scenes videos.
You run into issues with promising videos early to only part of your community. For example when you have review embargos and want to make drop a video at the same time as every other YouTuber,
> The cost of building and maintaining a platform like that must be large
It isn't that crazy really. Unlike YouTube which streams most of it's video for free and has to recover that cost via ads, every person streaming on Floatplane has paid money to stream that content.
Floatplane has been scaling slowly which has allowed them to stay on baremetal instead of going to the cloud. They don't need a lot of the advantages the cloud has, such as the ability to scale on demand. This isn't your normal unicorn startup from silicon valley that needs hyper growth to attract more investors for an eventual IPO or buyout.
Linus and Luke are putting their own money into it because they want to have a fallback incase YouTube pulls the plug on them. They are not taking lots of investment to try and build a YouTube competitor.
Their costs are actually really reasonable. They have a much better profit sharing model with other creators than YouTube does. They recognize that they have a base line cost for a given creator, that is the cost of storing the video and processing it for example. Then they have a cost per user of that content. This may have changed but their model was recover that base line cost from the subscriptions and then take a much lower cut afterwards. So from a creators point of view you get more value as your scale the number of users from your community on the site.
> seems unnecessary for what is essentially video Patreon.
Eh, maybe. It does however let them focus very much on that video aspect and provide users with a solid experience dedicated to videos. I imagine over time they will add more features to Floatplane that help differentiate it.
One example of that is live streams. If you want to live stream to your Patreon members they suggest you use Crowdcast, something you have to pay for separately (https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002973506-M...).
Floatplane supports live streaming.
Do they allow, say, porn, or white nationalist videos? I'm always curious exactly where platforms set the bounds.
> Do not post false or misleading information
Depending on how this is interpreted/enforced, it could make the platform much more or much less attractive to politically-oriented creators.
The gray area for false/misleading information isn't as large as people would think.
I guess for youtube content, this is sometimes needed, but again feels like a lot of effort for limited return. The cloud is one thing, but engineering costs, support etc must eat into profits.
I think from a support point of view, this is where merch sales are actually great, everyone gets something, even if it means that people charge $70 + shipping for a hoodie with a print.
Peertube seems perhaps a more credible competitor in that sense, by making hosting cheaper. As long as the creators can fund themselves with Patreon, merchandise or whatever else.
Also what guarantees are there when you come along and upload 10+ TB of archive footage to Peertube the network decides that's far too much? Their creator sign up page has an instance filter for "At Least 50GB" (which is quaint). And sure when you get the results back many instances say "Unlimited" storage, but there's "unlimited" and "get lost".
This isn't even remotely related to Vimeo or YouTube. If you're talking about movies legitimately published by the rights owners not being DRM'd on Vimeo, then there's nothing stopping the studio from uploading a DRM-free version to YouTube as well. IF you're talking about piracy simply because Vimeo doesn't have Content ID, then that's also just a failure of Vimeo and/or the studios not really caring about 480p streams with relatively few views.
This is of course something that is unrelated to the greater discussion in this post, but it have been something I have found different on vimeo compared to elsewherein the past.
You'll find other types of content, but Vimeo is not try to compete with YouTube's content scope. You won't find 'How to unblock your kitchen sink with baking soda' on Vimeo, or 'Learn Javascript in 60 mins', but you'll find these (and dozens more) on YouTube.
But I would rather talk about the similarity between Vimeo and YouTube - they both are walled gardens. I would rather have many Vimeos that federate.
Youtube feeds me a diet of videos that are hard to turn off, spanning literal decades and with some really weird stuff thrown in (and based on the comments, others have same experience - I'll be on a 10 year old video with positive comments from a day ago).
A common youtube quote:
No one: I want to see five year old archery videos Youtube: Here, try this
He had something along the lines of a “best laptops for typing” video without mentioning the Thinkpad.
He continuously promoted Razer laptops without mentioning that they had an internal 50% failure rate of their own Razer laptops. (Thanks for keeping it real during a WAN Show, Luke.)
I still watch LTT as entertainment for some reason, but come on Linus. I have major respect for your biz acumen, but you can do better for your audience.
Partially due to his recommendations, I once recommended a Razer to an exec above me, he eventually had to do a credit card charge back after it started to bend all on its own. Not a good look. Lesson learned.
- Every major website where RSS would be useful (except Facebook. Twitter needs RSS like we need the plague), _has it!_ RSS support is ubiquitous
- There are carbon-copy clones of google reader. I use one every day (well, twice a week cuz I don't depend on reading RSS). You can just subscribe
- For really tricky stuff, you can wire together some stuff with, like, Zapier. It's annoying but way easier than it would be 10 years ago (cuz even then loads of random stuff didn't have feeds)
This is the most annoying kind of nostalgia. Not because it's wishing for an old world that never existed, but because it's implying that the current world doesn't _still have all of this stuff_. At least whining about XMPP has some merit.
And many new sites never test RSS functionality, so if there is a feed, it just shows posts tagged 'feed' or something like that.
If you had told me in 2005 that'd I'd become nostalgic for Flash-ridden, PHP backed, IE6-compatibilized internet I wouldn't have believed you, and yet here we are.
Merch is huge for YouTubers in a lot of ways. He's been doing solid merch for a long time.
He also has been doing his Cleetus & Cars events for a few years now and those bring in big numbers.
Last year he announced purchasing an abandoned race track. Which he opened officially this year. This past weekend he had an event and the place was packed (COVID not withstanding... it feels like in Florida, where this is all located, COVID isn't a thing). He seems to have successfully saved an abandoned race track.
In an extremely creative maneuver they had to tear up part of the race track for repairs. To help fund the repairs he sold chunks of the track in a bottle with a t-shirt and a few other merch goodies. He literally sold chunks of the track.
He's now doing Pay-per-view events, which he started last year.
I'm sure a good chunk of his income still comes from YouTube, but in a lot of ways he's seemingly finding creative ways to make his business bigger. Eventually, I anticipate that YouTube and him part ways and he starts his own platform where he can make it more of what he wants it to be.
When you use someone else's platform you are completely dependent on the owner of the platform, and being dependent on something you don't control is a huge business risk.
Being off of YouTube doesn’t make you immune to this. You can still be deplatformed by your host, domain registrar, payment processor, etc.
Registrars won't take away your domain just because they don't like your site. Companies will delete your personal account on their platforms without even talking to you. I can't think of any case where a domain was seized without a court order.
Circumventing payment processor censorship is one of the many purposes of cryptocurrency technology. All you have to do is accept Monero as payment. The more people that do this, the more legitimate and popular and well supported it will be.
Yea? Or must mean those “alt right hosts”. Because the second someone ACTUALLY practices this, they’re themselves labeled as AltRight. See the problem?
> Registrars won't take away your domain just because they don't like your site. Has a domain ever been seized without a court order?
Ar15.com went down without warning, provocation, or cause because one day around the election GoDaddy made a decision to cancel them.
> Circumventing payment processor censorship is one of the many purposes of cryptocurrency technology.
That’s one option... OR... we give equal protections to anyone not breaking the law?
No, I mean hosts like Nearly Free Speech which has been operating since 2002. I've seen this one posted many times on HN and it seems great.
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
I understand what you mean though. Since they are usually smaller hosts, they aren't used by big name companies and eventually acquire a reputation for hosting only offensive content.
> one day around the election GoDaddy made a decision to cancel them
Huh. How could they just do that? It eventually went back up right?
Do you have more examples?
> we give equal protections to anyone not breaking the law?
What do you mean?
It also helps that many other companies offer the benefit of being able to reach an actual human in case something goes wrong, which is something that is basically impossible with anything Google.
From Amazon sellers to YouTubers to high ranking apps to prominent social media profiles, I’m in awe of how much value sits at the whim of some platform which usually won’t even have a person to talk with on the other end.
Generally speaking, any industry where your revenue relies on marketing, promotion, or access to exclusive collaboration and distribution networks is going to have this property.
If you've made it really big, you can try to mitigate risk by doing your own marketing, or owning your own share of the distribution channel. For all the B-list actors, though, the economics of that aren't very favourable.
The alternatives are either a return to syndication, or a transition to some kind of non-market public cultural utility for distributing and promoting my cat videos. Or, we remain in what currently seems to be a local maximum, where distribution and marketing is cheap, but not so cheap that most content creators are doing it themselves.
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Examples...
People hate the fact that there are so many paid streaming services now, they just want one, that has everything and pay about $15 a month for it.
People don't and won't switch away from twitch.tv, mixer tried to compete by poaching two of the biggest streamers in the world, their own audiences wouldn't follow them from twitch to mixer.
But YouTube isn’t where you should keep the rest of your business.
Granted, they probably shouldn't give it any favoritism... but often I'll google for a video clip and have to refine search to just show me youtube results as i don't want to deal with some beast of another site.
Back in the day at Demon Internet (well known 90s UK ISP) every customer got a free 10MB of webspace - barely any of them used it.
But it should have been how we all hosted our blogs and our videos. And it would solve a multitude of social media issues.
If Facebook and youtube did not host its hard to see how they could compile trustable usage stats (#) and so hard to see how we could all find out we must watch Gangnam Style. Similar problems seem to hover over crypto-currencies.
Edit: some random thoughts
- DNS: In a world of individual producers, curated aggregation still has value as it provides a quality / interest gate. A TV channel implies curation, a review guide the same. Perhaps it is no coincidence Marvel has found its footing in a world where choice is infinite and curation zero. Every TV show hopes to land a few million dedicated fans.
- Social media companies basically have zero curation (this is weirdly tending towards including Amazon who are dumbing down curation in marketplace)
- Our natural curation signals are usually based around proximity (geography, recommendation, similarity). These fall apart where the same DNS hosts nazis and nannies. Especially where recommendations are controlled by (one?) algorithm.
- If enough viewing moves off YouTube (not merely the bits over pipes, it off the influence of the algorithm) then these other effects might start to show through.
- But even if we could gather reliable distributed usage stats (book publishers managed it for decades), distributed discovery becomes a strange animal. A dumb algorithm that recommends what is the most watched video in the world, followed by the second, would have some strange chaotic behaviour but would at least have twin virtues of simple and transparent. Start adding in anything else (here is my past history, make a recommendation, or here is my aspirational set of people (my twitter follow list is watching) or just show me what Barry Norman recommends, all of these can be made transparent - and open to a cottage industry of discovery algorithms.
- This cottage industry fascinates me - it's like the other industries I expected to exist but don't (decent job search, dis-intermediated real estate). Duck Duck Go seems the model here - there is likely to be a (regulated?) split in discovery - much like railways or phone lines - where the underlying monopoly bit (we scraping) gets hived off and everyone can access it at common fees - and the add on bits, the start of distributed discovery - appears as a more competitive market. And one hopes a less behaviour driven one (I am still wanting to know the revenue difference between Google storing my every move and returning what it thinks I want and Duck Duck Go just using the context of my query - and returning what I asked for.
- But hopefully after a Cambrian explosion of companies offering discovery - not just search or for videos and entertainment but even shopping (as Amazon hits the same split the Google inevitably will), after all that, we are still a long way from where I hope we can get.
- Everything online should treat me as a citizen, as even a patient - where do no harm is the first principle. If we live in an internet where my individual best interests are the legal and cultural norm, as professions are supposed to be, then we enter a totally different equation. We are all exploited online now, and the discussions are about harm reduction. But that's not the real end goal. Making sure quacks don't charge too much for the snake oil is not what made medicine work.
(#) ignoring facebook lying to advertisers etc etc
Even the first broadband providers I used offered web space. I can't remember when it stopped being a thing.
And I don't want to hear anything about any startup 'disrupting' decentralized tech like the web, RSS (and by extension Podcasts), or email.
How and when that point could be reached though, I couldn't say.
My take is this: whenever I see a startup being described as "disrupting" some market, I interpret it in the other sense of the word: disruption, as in the effect of a disruptor, a fictional energy weapon used predominantly by the main villains of Star Trek franchise, Klingons and Romulans.
I watch Linus Tech Tips so I've heard of floatplane but I haven't heard of the others mentioned. Even one of the three links in the article just goes to another site called tubefilter which itself doesn't link to this nebula thing. It took me ten minutes to find the site because I had to read the articles trying to see if they linked to https://watchnebula.com/ (admittedly, that link doesn't really do a great job of selling the product either)
What is the point of doing stories about other web sites without linking to them?
If newsvertising as a word takes off, you know who to blame :)
A lot of people already know they're the less powerful economic actor on Youtube platform. Regardless, people upload videos to Youtube instead of their own domain because of tradeoffs.
For unknown creators with no audience, Youtube doesn't suck (in comparison to hosting videos on personal domain) because:
(1) you don't have the money to pay for variable hosting bandwidth costs
(2) you don't have any business relationships with advertisers to monetize which helps with (1)
(3) you have no network effect platform recommending your videos (e.g. repair smartphones and drones) to audiences of like-minded channels such as Linus Tech Tips -- which helps with (2)
There is a timeline that creators can't avoid to build financial/platform independence and leverage. Today, Linus can realistically host videos on his Floatplane alternative because he already used Youtube to build his 13 million subscribers. He also already built his own advertiser relationships to embed native ads with him as spokesperson outside of Youtube pre-roll and mid-rolls. In contrast, it's quite a different challenge for him to start in 2008 with his own Floatplane.com domain and build an audience of 13 million outside of Youtube.
Having said that I think I paid under $20 for a year's subscription for the bundle. At this rate it's cheap enough to be worthwhile even if you only watch a few hours of content per month. And I do hope these folks can make Nebula's business model work, there's some worthwhile stuff in there.
i remember using Lotus 123 on my dad's laptop. Lotus was the king at the time and Microsoft kill them slowly. if i'm not mistaking Microsoft with hold Win32 api or something that make Microsoft's own Office software run faster.
http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
> If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft’s terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS.
> And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.
I simply don't understand why anyone would ever choose to put themselves in such a disadvantageous position.
Apple have been doing it with Apps since the iPhone started, first it was jailbreak apps and then any app became fairgame.
Having one's own website is a luxury for the big man, the little man aspiring to be big one day has no choice but to kneel for “what he calls his “benevolent overlord””.
What strikes me as do that people still use twitch with its disappearing content and crap discovery - and these are shows who have major sponsors FFS.
Suttons Law applies 'because that's where the money (ie audience) is'.
I am not sure how is this (lack of) feature mentioned as an advantage over youtube. Afaict there's certainly a video tab on the yt channel that displays videos sorted with time uploaded (and probably is modifiable). I understand that the point must be that people may want to not see the recommended videos, but don't most such visitors directly visit the yt channel. At least I use it like that.
(mandatory: googler, don't work on youtube)
(How do I know? Because most creators I follow will mention their last video.)
Limited experience with the bell, since I only did that for one channel, which I'm also a Patreon for. (Chrontendo: I usually watch the episode early and then listen to it again when it's public.) But 100% success rate with that notification thus far.
I didn't mean to imply this was frequent behaviour, as it's not. My point is more that I can understand Youtube channels wanting to have more control over their distribution and ensuring people who want to watch their content are aware of it, because sometimes Youtube won't make them aware.
I have seen a case where a video from a channel I'm subscribed to did not appear in my Subscriptions feed, and only appeared when going directly to the channel. From reading the comments I wasn't the only person this happened to. Though I can't see whether this was a bug on Youtube's end, or one of its endless tweakings to "the algorithm".
I could develop something myself but it would be way better if someone already put the effort into it. Also because I suck at UI and would probably wrote a CLI for it, which probably doesn't mesh with content creators.
One of the reasons why my backends are based on self sufficient architecture that I can move to any arbitrary VM / dedicated server in no time. There is no cloudy dependent stuff in my stack at all.
Kudos where it's due for fighting fascism and all that jazz, but it does raise a pretty large concern: where do people draw the line for this stuff? A private platform like that can ultimately decide which videos they want to accept and which they want to reject, which really defeats the purpose of making your own platform in the first place. It doesn't matter if there's no content aggregation algos, since everyone consumes a homogeneous slurry of videos. Instead of preventing gatekeeping in the first place, they just changed who can open the gate.
I don't think I'll ever be very interested in a platform like Nebula, and I'm really only tangentially interested in Floatplane. YouTube will always be a dominant market because it's free and offers a functional user experience. Even if half of the people watching YouTube videos got a Nebula subscription, they're still going to be using YouTube alongside it. As long as that YouTube audience exists, people will continue to capitalize it. As long as the two platforms compete, they'll be in a constant struggle for power over their viewers. It's the definition of a lose-lose situation.
Are there any viable alternatives out there? Vimeo?
I'm not particularly knowledgeable on video streaming, is cost the main barrier?
Putting the "you" in YouTube
I run my own website, but 85% of my traffic comes from Google. It's pretty much like getting 85% of your income from a single client.
How to escape this fate? Do not become a big monopoly.
We live in an age where various resources that are essentially indispensable public resources are provided by private, for-profit companies at their own whims and the law should recognize that.
Even non-profit services such as Wikipedia of course have the power to influence and steer the world to a degree that no non-democratically elected organization should have.
The government is unlikely to be able to dictate algorithm changes, but reacting to and forcing favorable behaviors to the current regime to be preserved is certainly within their power.
Hyperbole, yes. But you get the point.
It just so happens that big tech firms have a shot of actually achieving it.
If you are reliant on search terms, I can understand, but otherwise, Google does not have control over your domain name resolving to your server’s IP address.
On dialup people tended to be more independent you jumped on the Internet then jumped off to preserve your precious 60 hours/month (and to allow your landline phone to get calls). That time offline was used learning about things and you couldn't Google every little thing.
I was much more into the fundamentals of the computer itself more than the stuff you could see on it. Making boot disks, adjusting settings in Windows, discovering Linux, learning HTML, sending lots of email, some IRC. The Internet grew in complexity and usefulness, and always on cable got cheaper but early on the computer itself was my main focus.
Now it seems as if a computer is simply a conduit to watch YouTube videos. It seems like people are realizing they need to be more independent.
Now it takes a few seconds!
Everyone agrees that most, if not all, of them are horrible people, but it is totally possible to lose your domain name if no one will provide registrations and such services to you.
That's a considerable development effort and probably out of reach for youtube creators who are large enough to make a living and depend on youtube, but not large enough to justify that kind of investment.
as for the "very good" part, yes, youtube is extremely successful at aggregating and displaying useful videos. It is also extremely good at searching through its library and displaying individual users useful videos. Google is far less effective at this, of course. Also, replacing channels with individual websites will vastly increase the internet traffic, not just a minor surge.
I disagree on youtube being very good at its job, however that is a very subjective assessment.
I think as it stands now, you are correct, but I believe these sites will give rise to more decentralized video sharing infrastructure as people slowly see the need to control their own destinies.