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Comment by mvdtnz | Hacker News Reader

You're welcome to go to Peertube right now, nothing stopping you. Content creators won't follow you, of course, because they (rightfully) want to get paid for their work. How do you plan to compensate content creators on Peertube?

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It’s surprising how little people pay for content. Not saying they are obligated to, but take the instance of a channel you really like, quality content. When you see the stats you can see sometimes a 1000x difference in paying customers (take for instance a youtuber with a patreon or YTsubscription)

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)

>” How do you plan to compensate content creators on Peertube?”

This task falls on the creators, not the viewers. There are already several options such as sponsorship, merchandise, patreon, asking for donations, et cetera.

Other options include Youtube Premium and Youtube ad views, both of which turn out to be far more reliable sources of income.

I watched a couple of guides by rich streamers, and they consistently point out that the unofficial means make them the most money.

When they're very big, yes. Mid size and small channels, I doubt it.

I don’t know about YouTube premium, but regarding twitch partnership they said that only the top streamers get good deals, but even then they are problematic because they require exclusivity.

Small channels make their money from super chats — a handful of $20 super chats will outweigh your ads until moderately large.

Yeah, but then you're giving money to Google. Better to pay the creators directly.

No, they aren't. Many creators are "demonetized", and if you ask the ones who aren't, they'll tell you they barely make anything from YouTube itself. They get all their money from other sources: Patreon, merchandise sales, sponsor segments, etc.

YouTube Premium pays out even on demonetized videos. And Premium watch time pays out a lot more https://x.com/LinusTech/status/1486935690315112455?s=20

But for sponsorship, aren't people using sponsorblock as well?

Take an organization like Linus Media Group/Linus Tech Tips. He shared his earnings from Ads here[0] and a breakdown of revenue here[1] - it's 2021 vs 2022 revenue, but it should be fairly close.

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...

1: https://x.com/LinusTech/status/1486918784401088515?s=20

Moving creators might be easier than you think, it only take a few mess ups on the YouTube side to trigger it.

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.

YouTube recommendations are a huge source of traffic for creators. Even if they could move all of their subscribers to another platform they would be losing a ton of traffic (and therefore ad revenue). I think this discovery is the biggest difficulty in making a YouTube competitor.

Discovery has different modes, plus, it's not something only YouTube can have. That's to say, it would work for YouTube, but only to a point.

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.

Content creators don't get paid (much) on YouTube either. That's why they all added sponsor segments, sell merchandise, ask for Patreon donations, etc.

They absolutely do get paid on YouTube.

Patreon/ko-fi/Paypal/Monero/etc.

Nothing stops you from having ads in the video directly.

I think creators lived in a sweet spot. I might be a minority, but I would rather stopa watching YouTubers. It is not that their content is worth my money. It may be worth my time, but not necessarily money.

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