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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to point out that one of the main reasons people publish content to YouTube in 2021 is because that content will be monetized (or, they want to be big enough to monetize their content).

I see zero competitors that offer anywhere near the revenue that YouTube offers. Until you have another platform that can offer anywhere near this level of revenue for content producers, there will only be YouTube. (Twitch is a different market and doesn't compete with non-streamed YouTube content, which I think we'd both agree on)

For that matter, perhaps it's a good opportunity to regulate YouTube's monetization policies, so that other companies can compete for content producers more evenly.

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Streambus already offers a higher revenue model than Youtube.

A Youtuber with a million subscribers that can convert 1% of their audience to paid subscribers at $5 a month makes $540k a year on Streambus.

And they'd do it on their own domain name, with the full ability to leave at any time without losing their subscriptions or audience.

They don't need to leave Youtube, or turn off their existing monetization models either.

Meanwhile, their audience can use an app they already have on their phone, and don't have to watch ads from a middleman.

That's an insane price ($5 a month). HBO subscription costs $14.99 a month. Expecting indi artists to get that level of revenue is insane.

I currently pay this price for several of the Patreons I support, I'm not sure what makes this any different. I'd certainly rather throw money at a small handful of good content creators; quality over quantity, and my time is limited anyway.

And yet people do it already just for a bunch of emails on substack. It’s worth it for somebody, that’s all that matters.

Not to pile on, but people give small monthly sums to all kinds of individuals and organizations for any number of reasons. It’s a huge factor for small and large publishers and creators alike. In many cases it’s outpacing ad revenue entirely. It’s great because it allows more freedom and incentivize quality.

You only need a few; I have a Patreon for my comics and so far I've gathered about eighty people willing to pay $1-5 per page, times 6-8 pages most months. Which covers most of my rent and expenses; doing private commissions fills in the gaps. They mostly have IT jobs and like the stuff I'm putting out for free enough to support it, fifty bucks a month is a drop in the bucket compared to what they're paying for rent in SF or Seattle or whatever.

And I am absolutely nobody, I have all of like 1700 followers on Twitter, and am pretty much absent from other corporate social platforms.

i like your art style, digging the cools vs warms for character distinction

Thanks <3

Except for the fact that YouTube already has a membership model for creators on top of their ads model, so you can be a paid subscriber (which includes other benefits) on YouTube too to support your favorite creators.

How would this compare to Patreon? Which seems to be used already by many Youtubers.

From what I can tell, Patreon allows you to export customer contact info, but you can't take the financial relationship with you. They're not subscribing to you, they're subscribing to Patreon. If you want to leave for another service you have to awkwardly email everyone and ask them unsub and then resub somewhere else, which will probably not work.

Streambus seems more similar to substack/supercast -- you as the content creator own the stripe account, and streambus only makes money so long as you feel the service is providing a good value to you, otherwise you can leave any time.

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