They can do whatever they want and they won't lose a single user.
In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest, while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view.
- Curiosity Stream/Nebula (Adam Neely, Mary Spender, Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank, Super Bunnyhop)
- LBRY/odysee (DistroTube)
- FloatPlane (Linus Tech Tips)
None of these has a nice recommender like YouTube, so you'll likely either have manual curation (Nebula, Floatplane) or drown in a sea of bad/uninteresting content (LBRY)
The main point of that list was: there are multiple platforms that try to be a "YouTube for people who don't like YouTube, for a point in time when YouTube gets horrible", with some people creating content there, and e.g. odysee lets creators sync their videos so you get exactly the same videos from them on YT and on Odysee. But for most creators this is still additional work for little benefit since their main audience is on YT.
But the more important point is that even if all the many dozens of mostly small channels I subscribe to were on some other paid video service, I wouldn't want to track down and check in on all those services. Even just 3 would be a vastly worse experience than YouTube, especially since there would almost certainly be huge variation in the features and quality of their various web, mobile, and TV apps.
The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.
Absolutely, as long as there was widespread agreement in both the distribution mechanism and important video features like closed captions.
> The relatively closed nature of YouTube isn't necessarily something you'd want to replicate.
No, but the consistency and ability to get everything in one place is pretty vital, and is something you pretty much get for free from single centralized sources. The closed nature is obviously one of the huge downsides.
> The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.
Yep. Another big one is the cost of serving videos.
It would take over a hundred years for a person to watch a single day's worth of YouTube uploads. At this point it would take the literal apocalypse to stop them.
That's why I choose to reward them through non YouTube platforms like Patreon. I've also noticed a huge trend in content creators making sponsorship deals that they embed in their own videos. I sense that canceling your YouTube premium won't hurt them as much as it used to in the past. Plus, you can give a portion of your subscription to them directly, should you so choose.
Monthly donations are cool but limited as they only distribute the money among few people because they're expensive and a commitment.
My dream, if I had the patience to build it, would be a platform that distributes some amount of budget among every content creator you have watched. Out of my $100, everybody gets $2. A bit like Brave Rewards, without the crypto stuff.
Long running project of mine. "Corporate change bounties". Customers leave some supplier and then state why and somehow demonstrate how much cash has exited with them as a customer.
Here's an example. Let's say att lobbies hard against net neutrality and customers were fed up and left. They could go to this site and somehow select "att + net neutrality + i will return if they support it" and then through some black magic prove that they were a long time att customer that paid $X/month that just cancelled.
There's a way to avoid the black magic by making it a "crowd funding" style site but in many conversations effectively zero people would want to give, say Nestle or Walmart, a gift in return for them not being an evil prick.
So there's gotta be some kind of balance. A number representing potential money on the table that can be captured if a policy change happens.
I made two versions of it a while back but new ideas are hard so oh well. But maybe a third time it will work, who knows
Simplifying dramatically, there's new solutions to acknowledged problems and unacknowledged problems.
What you say satisfies the first one.
The unacknowledged problem requires you to first connect desperate ideas and consolidate them together in the prospect's mind. Then you need to convince them that it's a suboptimal state of affairs. Then you need to convince them that an amelioration is attainable. Then you need to convince them that you provide it.
Contrast this to the first one. The prospect knows things are suboptimal, has a current insufficient remedy and is open to a better one. You need to convince them that you provide it.
That's way way easier - like orders of magnitude, a "completely different problem domain" kind of easier (It's worth noting that elevator pitch templates address the easier type of new)
Next task, solve the first one in under 5 or so seconds of exposure: connect ideas, show it's a problem, demonstrate the mechanism, and propose a plausible solution that's easy to participate in.
Maybe that's trivial for you but I personally have very little aptitude for that and struggle immensely with it
[1] all those startup books become a giant soup after you read a bunch so sorry if this was like Moore or Christensen, I think it's Blank. If anyone remembers exactly where this was I'd love to find it again.
"Your app predicts when my lightbulbs will go out and it costs $1? Wait, why wouldn't I just do what I do now which is have some spares and wait till one actually goes out?"
If the target customers have already found each other, it's an easier sell. If they haven't then you have a "customer diaspora"
For instance, if I have a new game, there's plenty of organizations, institutions, and forums I can introduce my game on.
If instead, I have productivity software that helps disorganized people manage time better, there's no "disorganized users group" or "decluttering news" website to find the people ... it's a slog. Where would those people concentrate? A bar on a weekday night maybe? The most inconvenient parking spaces of an office park? I don't know.
At least to me this is a harder problem
About the software, I have a dream (tm): NNTP expanded so that it can be integrated with other services, include small binaries natively, or magnet links when above a certain size, the torrent being automatically created, seeded and linked by the originating user's client, employ enough security to become troll/vandal proof, etc. The infrastructure is already here, but the protocol is too tied to the limitations of the Internet in the 70s and 80s and takes for granted that everyone is a gentleman, which makes it hardly usable today.
This is not a logical conclusion.
Twitter is different to blogging (also shorter) it has killed a lot of the blogging market.
In fact, a lot of Youtube is too long, as the content producers chase the ad revenue.
Logically things will continue and everything will go to smaller chunks.
As I grow older, I watch longer and more informational videos than I did 10 years ago.
I something learned from the MMO boom back in the days of WoW. After WoW came out, there were a glut of other MMOs. Game companies were like, "Look at WoW! Players love MMOs! If we make MMOs, we'll be rich!"
Almost all of them failed. The problem wasn't that the games were bad. Many were technically and artistically better. It definitely wasn't that gamers couldn't afford them. Cost was within the level of disposable income for most. The problem wasn't even network effects and userbase, though those do have an effect. Gamers move to new games all the time.
The problem was that there is one fundamentally scarce commodity: human time.
Thinking of competition in terms of physical goods is using an Industrial Age definition of competition when we're living in an Information Age. Consumers need a wide variety of unrelated physical things, so competition is only really meaningful between the products of the same kind. Also, producing goods has a significant per-unit cost.
With information—especially entertainment media—anything that takes user attention competes with every other product that does the same. It doesn't matter if the products are completely unrelated: they burn the same scarce resource, so users using one are less able to use the other. And this is the only scarce resource in the equation since the marginal cost of streaming the same movie to one viewer or a million is essentially the same.
YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Fortnite, Instagram, Fox News, Minecraft, Reddit, Spotify, they're all competing against each other.
As Reed Hastings said once, "You get a show or a movie you’re really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep. And we’re winning."
I don’t know how well Nebula is doing, but I don’t see it as impossible that there is going to be some fragmentation in the video space in the future.
I wish Peertube or something would take off. The kind of centralization YouTube has isn't healthy, and it's easier and cheaper to host video now than ever since HTML5 video became a thing. If you're running a business, depending on the goodwill of a third party company's free offering (which costs them a fortune to run) is nonsensical.
Not an uncommon state of affairs, for open sources va proprietary.
TikTok has a horrible conversion rate though.
Basically, I've stopped using YouTube as a source for finding new content. If I get linked to a video from a trusted source (here, reddit, etc), then I'll watch the video, but they lost me as a member of the community.
Gotta get that gold.
If only I could calculate the total electricity burn planet wide because 4 billion people can't turn their screens off. I wonder how a 4 billion screenburn compares to 1 million Bitcoin miners, or whatever the total is.
I listen 95% of the time, lectures, opera, podcasts, other stuff, and there are multitudes of data that don't need me to be staring at my screen.
Over time this should put pressure on them to be open to a better platform and make the move as soon as such platform exists.
Over time means nothing until there's actually competition, and there's nothing on the horizon that can compete to the scale of YouTube. Your content creator is not moving anywhere any time soon.
So no, they probably won't lose "users", but they may lose "engagement," however they're measuring that at the minute.
Rumble and Rokfin, where more and more them are moving. History is littered with bankrupt companies who thought they were untouchable because people had nowhere else to go.
[1]https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-spac-...
YouTube is becoming the place you find content, not necessarily though where you spend money. They're going to start caring about this.
You may be a HN TikTok skeptic (there are many) but TikTok is already expanding to things you’d find on YouTube historically, like tutorials, DIY, arts and crafts.
Once you move the discovery off YouTube, it becomes trivial to move the content to another video host. The discovery is the lock-in.
A lot of them are cross-posting to Odysee, and some are also on Nebula.
Edit: Do any of these content creators posting to other non-YT sites mention the availability of these sites in their YT videos? If not, then they are not really convinced of their staying power themselves.
Yes. EEVblog mentions Odysee all the time, and many many channels mention Nebula when shilling Curiosity Stream. They tend to tread lightly on YT itself because of the reverse of the prisoner's dilemma.
Why so? Are these other platforms unable to payout as much as YT? Seems natural that ad revshare would not be the same on a site that nobody has heard of compared to the numbers available from YT. Doesn't seem too enticing for creators to go to other platforms where there is less revenue potential.
I'm just not seeing the prisoner's dilemma here. I just see people placating a noisy herd by offering content on other sites while still firmly attached to the teet of YT.
I assume this is less of a risk now than it used to be, because more creators are promoting alternative sites, and I'm even seeing ads for TikTok on YouTube itself.
Paying for the privilege of interacting with some shitty thing I don't like to be entertained.... doesn't seem entertaining to me.
lmfao