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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

Is youtube really worth it at this point? You can publish using activity pub now and most youtubers are funded by patreon and paid sponsors anyway.

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I'm sitting at my work machine. You have seen an interesting video on ActivityPub and you want to suggest I watch it. In the ActivityPub world, what is the equivalent to the following set of steps?

   1. You send me a Youtube URL
   2. I load that page in my browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Android, iPhone, Desktop, anything)
   3. I watch the video

In my experience, occasionally watching videos its almost the exact same.

   1. You send me a peertube -- any peertube URL
   2. I load that page in my browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Android, iPhone, Desktop, anything)
   3. I watch the video

I'm not sure what the peertube mobile compatibility is like but newpipe supports it and i assume modern mobile browsers work.

And how much did the owner of the video earn from that link?

YouTube is not popular because it's easy for YOU, it's popular because the creator can get money for a video with a few clicks while Google manages ad contracts, bidding and infrastructure to make the money making happen.

PeerTube doesn't give you that.

Agreed, but I get the feeling that many people here are fervent believers that adtech doesn't work/shouldn't exist, etc... so they tend to gloss over just how important monetization is.

There is nothing with the distributive power and monetization potential like YouTube.

Couldn't the creator deploy AdSense or another ad-based video monetization tool on their site? https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1705822?hl=en Or am I misunderstanding how PeerTube works?

Many youtubers simply incorporate an advertisement in their video in agreement with some company. Has been working for many years already.

To be fair, the tax policies that triggered this discussion wouldn't apply in that case.

There's a huge jumpgap between "click there to monetize video" and finding + negotiating a sponsorship contract with a partner.

You hid giant amount of work behind that "simply".

It's exactly the same? Activitypub just changes the way subscriptions work.

>Is youtube really worth it at this point?

I'm not sure there are many video platforms with as much reach as youtube has.

I'll admit as a user I often ignore video links that aren't youtube because of the kludgy experiences on other video sites...

Doesn't patreon also need to follow the US tax code? Just because they haven't it doesn't mean that they don't have to. Countries taxing content creators from other countries will get crazy.

> Is youtube really worth it at this point?

Since the middle of June 2020 I've been growing my channel, now it has 40k subscribers.

I'm not there yet, but I can easily see a near future where I make more money from YT directly than I ever made as a Software Engineer (NOT FAANG level). So I just film what I love doing (exploring, hiking, tinkering, travel), and that's my career.

I think YT's discovery and reach is - and will be for some time - unparalleled for a lot of types of content?

I haven't "discovered" any new channels from youtube in years. Reddit is better at steering me toward content that I want to consume.

YT discovery only brings you new stuff if you only use it in icogneto mode.

No one else has an active user count close to the same order of magnitude. Not to mention apps for every platform.

Why on earth do you need an app to watch a video in a web page? It doesn't even store anything locally, IIRC the iOS one just displays an astronaught cartoon and a fake apology when there's no connection.

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