Folks, it really is time for us to either adopt a federated alternative like PeerTube, or improve it until it becomes a suitable alternative.
So you really like a channel, and I am assuming not all are poor, that is a big difference. I wonder what the friction is here. (As someone who is very aware of the effort some creators put in)
This task falls on the creators, not the viewers. There are already several options such as sponsorship, merchandise, patreon, asking for donations, et cetera.
18% of revenue being sourced from YouTube ads doesn't sound like much, but extrapolated from $4.6M over 9 months to a year is ~6M in ad revenue, out of a total of >$33M from all sources. It's not as simple as "flicking a switch" to replace that revenue with $3M of extra in-video sponsorships (those are already being bid on at market price, and they're in as many places in the video as the viewers will handle) and/or $3M of extra merchandise revenue, for example.
And no creator does good by asking for direct donations. Only patreon/a way to pay for early access to content does anything for revenue, and this is not scalable since the vast majority of <every> channel's viewers only watch it when it's conveniently shown to them via their recommended videos/subscriptions tab.
0: https://x.com/linusgsebastian/status/1609468262219403264?s=2...
There is no real community on YouTube, you're there to watch videos, not making friends. And video hosting is flexible, one video can be hosted on different places.
Sure, YouTube was very smart that they changed how the home page worked, so now people rely on YouTube to explore and discover video for them, BUT it won't change the fact that you're still there to watch videos.
Now I through about it, maybe that's why YouTube is so careful about their public relationships.
Plus, the recommendations engine itself is a limitation. I been using YouTube for years before knowing the existence of YouTubers such as Casey Neistat, Mr Beast and SomeOrdinaryGamers. Even through they are popular and talked the topic that I'm interested in, YouTube never pushed them to me, instead, I manually discovered them through the trending page, what an irony.
As an added bonus, creators remove sponsorships from Nebula videos, so unlike YouTube Premium it really is completely ad free.
this does not scale. bandwidth costs will crush small platforms and they will eventually be absorbed into bigger ones.. the only exit is closure (especially from a rouge patent troll or DMCA lawsuit) or buyout. see justin.tv as an example
edit: all costs will crush you. you need a mod team to prevent runaway piracy and child porn. you need a security team to prevent attacks. you need a network team to try to minimize bandwidth loss. video delivery is not a cheap game, so i'm not really sure how free platforms will survive
> you need a mod team to prevent runaway piracy and child porn.
Nebula doesn't because it's an invite-only platform. The creators are all part of an old-school social network and can vouch for each other.
> video delivery is not a cheap game, so i'm not really sure how free platforms will survive
So don't be a free platform! Nebula is doing just fine at serving me and many like me. Most of the creators I follow make a solid living on Patreon, with Nebula and YouTube ads just layered on top. The idea that every app must be free and must scale to ~every human being on the planet is killing the internet.
It's just not only matter of scale. I follow content creator that posted some of his content on his personal website. but man, the user experience is night and day compared to youtube. loading video is slow, cant fast-forward before hit buffering, also no content discovery either.
Paying for Youtube premium is no-brainer because i just get more value of it compared to even Netflix.
I pay for Nebula to support the creators who I get the most value out of, and happily start watching any new ones who join that platform, but I don't want to spend money reinforcing the near-monopoly that is YouTube.
Why use YouTube then? There really isn't much of an option. Some creators I subscribe to don't post anywhere else. Some do post on peertube or LBRY, so I'll watch there if available.
I view it the same way I view piracy. I'd be willing to pay for more media if it were available, from a company that won't spy on me, without DRM, and my money went to the people that made the thing instead of some rent seeking business sitting between me and them.
I don't have a problem paying for stuff, I have a problem with paying Google specifically.
And ultimately my use of ad blockers accounts for an infinitesimal fraction of a percent of any one creator's ad revinue. It costs Google a lot of money to serve the video, and the creator earns only very slightly less. If there's a sponsored segment (as there always is these days), that more than makes up for the disparity.
It hurts Google and is virtually unnoticeable to the creator. Sounds good to me.
Only in some segments. Car videos have extreme CPMs, probably because it's all exclusively watched via iPhones (or at least people who don't want to delve into sideloading an alternate YouTube client on Android) - they probably won't notice. But the CPMs for gaming videos have historically been fairly low because of the percentage of users using an ad blocker.
And I illustrate here[0] how AdSense revenue is still a large chunk of a creator's revenue, and LTT's situation is fairly special with how much they really plug and invest in their "merch", with a lot of their revenue being custom products and not just cool design T-Shirts. They can't just get video sponsors to pay more for the same ad space, and putting more sponsorships in the video devalues all sponsors and hurts the viewing experience.
If everyone just uses YouTube subscriptions and the YouTube homepage (or push notifications) then they are not easily able to start following people publishing on other platforms.
Google/YouTube is a relatively good actor during the entire shenanigans, but they certainly got a high enough chair to bare the lost of few users. And if you look the current financial and employment situation, they and their employees/C*Os might even got motivations too.
The environment has changed, maybe it's time to go back to the fundamentals, and maybe something new and better can come out of it.
This is the hidden cost of all these platforms, the moderators have PTSD from this shit.