> But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
A key part of running a business is risk management & mitigation. YouTube has very obviously been an ad-supported video platform for at least a decade. Hoping nothing changes about your little ad-free corner of that platform is not a sound business plan.
It's shitty that Google didn't give a heads up, but anyone whose business is riding on this should definitely have been expecting something like this and had a backup plan. Literally free content hosting is obviously not a thing that will exist for very long. Enjoy it while it lasts, but you know also have a Vimeo account ready to go as well or something like that.
I've seen a few YouTubers have a centralized site for signups and support where they host all their content. While the YT revenue is important, they at least have a way to engage their consumers should something terrible happen. This is BCP in a nutshell.
Similarly there's a reason LTT launched Floatplane. Risk management is important regardless of how big your business is. Even if you're large enough for youtube to assign you an actual person for support.
Also I don't think you can build a community on Twitter anyway. It's just shouting into the void. They could use it for announcements (and do, LTT is on Twitter, too), but little else.
Using it for announcements is precisely the primary reason they claimed to want to keep the forums. So in this case, Twitter would be appropriate.
You can put an html video tag and call it a day, but you'll be missing out on using the best codec for each viewer and bandwidth adaptation and (last I looked, hopefully I'm wrong) usable UI.
Bandwidth is an issue, although I've seen enough high bandwidth, unmetered server offers that I think it might work. Depending on where your viewers are and where you find cheap bandwidth, you might get poor performance just from distance, whereas YouTube and Facebook have CDNs with nodes everywhere.
A seriously crappy PC, poor bandwidth an some noisy old disks is enough to host 5 TB+
So you go for a reseller which there are many stellar ones but they'll either utilize a program with the datacenter akin to an reseller affiliate program with them being the 3rd party support or do it all themselves. If they do the reseller affiliate program they cant really offer anything outside of theie markups on the existing offerings by the datacenter. If they do it all themselves then it becomes much more expensive for the upfront costs.
What you want is a VPS and a CDN which provides a better experience and what every streaming platform uses. Not that expensive either!
Also, is Hetzner actually unmetered or do they claim they are with an asterisk?
Is there a way to do it with some p2p à la popcorntime?
Then if there was a surge, the peers could absorb some of it.
Does peertube do that?
other replies mention the client compatibility, quality and bandwidth issues with self hosting but i think this can be reasonably adressed with just going for a common denominator on the self-hosting side (eg. 720p h264)
There has been several moral panics incited by the conventional media (TV, newspapers etc) about adverts being displayed alongside edgy content a while back. Several rounds of this eventually brought about a TOS change where they could deem you "not advertiser friendly". This of course ignored that Google does targeted advertising.
Some claim it is "political" however I believe it is simpler than that. It gave youtube an excuse to stop paying people without outright removing them from the platform which saves them a fair bit of money and doesn't quite bring the same outrage from the respective fanbases as outright removing people. In addition to that the people that have been demonetised have ranged from progressives, anarcho-communists, people doing ben-shapiro compilation videos and edgy boys and girls that tend to shitpost. So I don't see anything political about it.
They've also made it harder to be monetised on the platform generally, IIRC you can't be monetised at all and cannot receive super chats if you have less than 1000 subscribers. You also can't put custom thumbnails on your videos which makes it harder for your content to get attention.
It's more complicated than that. Small time creators or others ineligible for the Youtube "partner program" have no choice but to monetize outside of Youtube. With this change, the only way you as a creator can choose whether ads appear on your video is to make partner.
The scummy thing here is that Youtube has made it harder and harder for creators to become eligible to monetize their channels, and now they're swooping in to take 100% of the ad revenue on those small-time channels.
Not sure how many small creators both can't manage that but can manage external monetization?
Also with 1000 subscribers you dont guarantee 1000 views, just potential views.
Perhaps their current pricing model is fair, I have no idea. But being the de facto video hosting site gives them tons of power. They have the ability to extract extra value out of their users---much more than a non-monopolized market would allow.
They didn't do it because they had a monopoly, they don't have a monopoly. It was more base than that. They did it because they wanted more money. Which is their right. I'm not complaining, but everyone's putting forth a great deal of high tone reasoning fro something that really is base venality at its root. They want more money. They believe they can get it even though they are not a monopoly. Even though Facebook is bigger. And even though their users will get mad.
The reality is, most of their customers aren't going anywhere. Consider all the times you use Youtube. Trying to find a music video, watching sports highlights, videos from your favourite creators. Can you switch to DailyMotion for all of that now? Are all of your creators posting their videos on Facebook? Even if they are, are the videos as easy to find and discover as they are on Youtube? For content creators, is there anywhere else they can share and expect to find the same kind of audience? Not really.
This is what I'm talking about when I say monopoly. It's true, there's other options. A creator can post their videos on Vimeo and host their own website to monetize, just like someone could have taken a horse and buggy instead of the new railroad. No one is forced to go by train, but doing it the old way is inefficient and expensive. n both cases they won't get the same bang for their buck.
I just become worried when they use their monopoly to extract as much value as possible, far beyond what they need to sustain their profits. I think monopolies are bad in principle, and Youtube is another example, just like Microsoft was, cable companies are, telecom was, railroads were, etc.
But I'm not sure that's clear. There's been a distinct increase in the number of in-video ads (Raycon, Skillshare, ExpressVPN, Squarespace, Curiosity Stream, and so on), which probably corresponds to a distinct decrease in Youtube enabled ads. So with that logic, Youtube is probably making less money from top creators, who have been skipping the middleman entirely. This seems more like a step to retaining existing profits instead of increasing them.
It's kind of business as usual for Google. Why would anyone expect them to be kind and generous suddenly when they have consistently for years pulled the rug out underneath previosly-free services. (or killed them off completely https://killedbygoogle.com/ )
gmail subscriptions are next, just wait and see.
But search is the thing that is essentially free advertising space for them. So it's likely to stay free...
Why I didn't do it myself, pure laziness, but starting to charge would be a kick in the right direction.
> Which other free email provider are you considering?
I think you're talking past each other?
I've been on fast mail for 10 years or so. I'm happy.
With GMail I got no spam in my inbox ever (but still lots of junk email from merchants and political campaigns).
With FastMail, I'm getting maybe 1 spam per week that doesn't get filtered properly. (And it's always from the same domain so far so at some point I'll set up a rule.
For search - I am not a power user and only search plain strings without ever clicking on "advanced" to filter on specific attributes. But every search I've run in FM has so far returned what I was looking for.
I can't speak for search as I've probably only searched a couple of times but I found what I was looking for so it's probably fine?
It is quite easy to migrate:
1. get a new mail account 2. forward everything from your gmail account 3. sort everything GMail into a separate folder in your new account 4. slowly change email addresses in accounts and let people know your new address.
I think after a year I had 99% of accounts migrated, and can only remember one or two that I moved after that.
It’s a good way to declutter accounts as well and was made a bit easier because I use a password manager.
Also with private emails, if someone contacts me after 5 years, they likely know someone I know and can get my contact Info via them or social media.
Take the opportunity to migrate to a domain you own, because then you are provider independent.
It’s awesome for filtering and sorting emails though.
It's especially good for apartment searches and job hunting. Companies that try to link buyer and seller are naturally spammy, so you create a new one for each contact. Then when you find one, you delete the others.
It's also makes it dead easy to filter all that information into folders, so you have a neat record of all your interactions with the various companies you're dealing with.
Most importantly: once you find a job / landlord / whatever, you really want a reliable line of communication. This way, your address with them never changes, but all the spam goes into the bit bucket.
Also, it's useful for have i been pwned. One of my few accounts which uses a grouped address is in today's data dump, and it wasn't clear what account it was, because of the grouping.
Report them under GDPR?
Still, it mostly works. I've got 383 aliases, plus 93 disabled aliases.
Most email providers will let you create aliases, but aliases are an upsell for business plans. Tutanota lets you get more aliases, but they charge you, not kidding, 5 euros a month for 100 aliases. 10 GB of extra storage costs 2.5 euros.
Some of them advertise using address+alias@domain, but that's basically useless.
Fastmail is pretty decent with 600 aliases. That's a definite maybe.
The only one I've found with unlimited aliases is TheXYZ, and they've been around a while.
1. Set up incoming E-mail forwarding from mydomain.org to Gmail. Exim will do this, probably all popular mail packages support forwarding well.
2. Start sending E-mail (from Gmail's interface) as [email protected], and tell your friends to use that one.
2.5. (optional) Get your local mail client to work with Gmail's IMAP and SMTP.
3. Take a deep breath and change that MX record.
4. Block out one or two evenings, pour yourself some Scotch, and go through each and every online account you have, changing your E-mail address. A password manager helps with this because it's also the definitive list of every online account you have. While you're at it, you might want to use [email protected] so you can tell which E-mails come from which company, and know who is selling your E-mail address around.
5. Wait until people switch over and the vast majority of your E-mail is going to [email protected] instead of your Gmail address. For me this took a year or so.
6. In the mean time set up locally hosted E-mail at mydomain.org. In my case I use exim4+dovecot+spamassassin. Don't forget to set up SPF and DKIM correctly.
7. Pick a time in your life when you don't expect to be getting urgent or important E-mail, like you're not buying a house or applying for jobs. Take a deep breath, and apply the exim config that changes you from forwarding to self-hosting.
8. Ask all your friends to send you some test E-mails, preferably from different providers. Make sure you can at least deliver mail from gmail, yahoo, comcast, verizon, etc. Send mails to them and make sure they're being delivered.
9. Assuming no problems in 7, pat yourself on the back for being part of the solution rather than the problem.
10. Periodically keep your eye out for trouble. Audit your logs every so often to make sure you're not having trouble sending or receiving. I had to change my IPv6 at one point because comcast decided mine belonged to a spammer, but other than that it's been smooth sailing.
11. Decide whether or not to keep your Gmail account. I kept mine, but it pretty much only gets spam now. Maybe once or twice a year I get a legit one there from someone I forgot to tell I changed my address. I keep an eye on my Gmail to find out when there are hot singles in my area or that there's a new sure fire diet pill that sheds fat instantly.
If there’s one thing I want an antitrust investigation to focus on, it’s the gradual monopoly that Google/Microsoft/etc have inadvertently built over “clean” IP addresses. It’s now practically impossible for independents and small businesses to run their own mail servers.
I’m not blaming Google/etc for it, but it is a situation that requires a fix.
If I need to access accounts from a different machine I use termux and manually type it in.
I'm not worried about it being a single point of failure (Data loss wise), as I have the password store backed up in multiple places. Security wise, I'm trading out my brain as a single point of failure for pass being a single point of failure. I trust pass more.
Wanted to look into other password managers, preferably open source, but at the time Enpass had the best syncing options combined with a good enough user interface that’s suitable for less tech folks.
Edit: I mainly use all the things on my devices, and don’t try to use things from untrusted devices. The only use cases with untrusted are:
- copy shop -> Sending the file via share drop
- PC of a Family member -> manually typing password from phone.
I’m was never as invested in gmail as a lot of people, but it was my primary email for many years.
It was still a pain to switch, especially since i started fresh (no email / contact transfers). Now they have better tools to transfer email but after some thought, i wanted to start over with everything.
It did feel really good once it was done. It forced me to evaluate what was important vs what wasn’t, and it got me pretty organized.
Not for everyone but its doable. My guess is it took 6 months for me. I do have my gmail account yet just in case but its been a few years since anything important showed up there. I mainly keep it for youtube anyway.
1/ if you're paying with money, you won't have to pay with personal information
2/ if you're paying with personal information, you wont later have to pay some other way as well
Monopolies (or near monopolies) like to double-dip. A good example of this is net-neutrality. You already pay to be a customer of your ISP, and for your ISP to provide you with Internet access. Your ISP stands to profit even more if they can charge the rest of the Internet for supplying that access to you.
12 years of free video hosting with no ads and a platform for people to discover your videos is quite the deal.
They always had to add ads at some point, hosting video, and the bandwidth and transcoding that goes with it, is incredibly expensive, not to mention the dev time going into creating such a massive platform.
If you thought you could eat a free lunch forever... Well, I guess this is your rude awakening. But you honestly should have expected it.
The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either. A large number of creators have most of their audiences because of Youtube. And honestly your example of Jim Sterling sounds like a smaller company would have gone out of their way to ban them. He's reaping all the benefits of the platform while giving nothing back.
It's a symbiotic relationship. Without content creators, Youtube is nothing. Without Youtube's massive user base, content creators will reach no one. Meanwhile, Youtube is the one making money over fist (4-5 billion dollars per quarter), so I don't understand why we should feel sorry for their hosting costs.
Without content creators who refuse to allow ads in exchange for free hosting, is it nothing? Probably not, most creators do enjoy making money, and most of the ones putting out content for free, but without ads, will struggle to find a competitor who will indefinitely provide free hosting.
>4-5 billion dollars per quarter
In revenue, not profit. Very, very important distinction.
~~Okay then, 15 billion in profits last year. I'm no businessman but to me that's pretty damn good profits with those revenue numbers.~~
Edit: Alright, Google search failed me. Searching for profits gave me revenue. Sorry about that. Profits are still secret, it seems. But the hosting costs won't eat the lion's share of that, I can assure you.
Well according to this $8.5 billion of that is given to creators. Leaving 6.5 billion for hosting costs, development, and all the management that goes with a platform of that size. About 2.8 billion hours were spent watching youtube in 2019.
This isn't about covering expenses that they couldn't afford otherwise. This is about making enormously rich people even richer.
So you truly believe people should be entitled to free video hosting?
It literally costs money to host content. If you make the platform no money, Youtube has no obligation to keep you around. Just because I pay for my groceries doesn't mean you get yours for free. Just because one person is paying doesn't mean an equal numbers of others don't have to.
It's entirely possible that YouTube has never been profitable. The costs involved with it are stupendous. It's far more than just bandwidth. Storage and CPU for transcoding, the enormous databases required for Content ID, recommendations, comments and anti-spam, all the private videos you can't even see at all, etc. Then there's software development costs to manage the bandwidth and operations.
Isn't Youtube still not making a profit?
just sucks & is such a Lucy pulling out the football move, that YouTube helps everyone & especially the very small folk, rises to meteoric heights/total monolopy, then won't let some small fry newcomers enjoy either an unbelievably modest revenue or give away an ad-free experience to their new watchers.
> The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either.
100% a video monopoly. youtube has us, has us all.
So just having content from multiple copyright holders doesn't necessarily stop ads from playing. However, that policy also says "If one of the assets claiming a video has missing ownership information, the default policy action is Track (owner missing)." which "Allows video to be viewable on YouTube and tracks viewership, but does not serve ads against it."[1]
An alternative might just be to add some content at the end of the video which is not advertiser-friendly, which would demonetise the video while not annoying the viewers too much.
That just comes off as entitled. Youtube is providing free bandwidth, hosting, and advertising for his patreon.
Youtube has been promoting that you can do that since 2008 - https://techcrunch.com/2008/03/12/youtube-the-platform/ - so maybe "entitled" isn't the word. It's expected because the capability has been promoted.
However, in the same article you'll note this little tidbit:
In general if a video is uploaded to YouTube, in some cases we serve ads into that on YouTube.com. When people embed those we reserve rights to serve ads in the future.
The article you posted doesn't mention that YouTube is promoting ad-free hosting that the creator doesn't have to pay for.
The article from 2008 doesn't mention that butterflys might be appearing across the video randomly either. How is what they didn't specifically say (or imply) relevant? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
I thought the messages from that far back was interesting, which hedged toward this eventual practice.
I must have misunderstood.
“Free” means he doesn’t need to pay for hosting, and he doesn’t.
It would certainly reduce the amount of junk uploaded to the internet.
It's easier to demand YT to host the content for free.
Personally, I don't consider it a valid point.
It only costs so much to share some data because of massive centralization by the likes of Google and ISPs, and can only be sustained because of t sustained because these "subsidies" from large players. It's not technically hard to distribute some videos efficiently, but the market is less than 1/10000.
Maybe in 5 years it will be near impossible to host a web site without being DDOS-ed, but I won't praise Cloudflare for their now-possibly-not-free service, I will blame them along side ISPs.
These were the prices before YouTube really became big and were still the prices after they became big.
I've worked in video streamin industry in years and I haven't seen YouTube be the fault of the high costs. It mostly comes from the fact that videos are large, they need a lot of CPU power to convert and need a lot of bandwidth to transmit to clients.
As for CPU, storage - I don't think 10+ different formats at extreme compression are a hard requirement.
Youtube ads are good, as people will have incentive to use peertube and similar.
¹ You need some seeds, but they don't need Tbps pipes.
And a willingness to steal...
It's illegal and if everyone did it, movies would not exist.
If everyone that wouldn't have paid pirates a movie then nothing bad happens and people enjoy things.
Arguing one of those facts while ignoring the other one is a mark of a bad argument.
You can't just assume that people that don't use your service would be paying customers if a specific alternative wasn't there.
For a video viewed a million times, it would cost a creator $6545 (.018 x 20/55 x 1,000,000) to keep the video ad free. I can't imagine anyone willing to pay that much to keep their videos ad-free.
This is what I don't get about YouTubers. They created a business with basically only one source of income. This is bad practice in every business book.
I am a freelancer. If I only had one customer my business would be instantly over when they didn't hire me anymore.
YouTubers put too much trust in an untrustworthy business partner.
More importantly, they also then decided to scam their source of income by getting money from other sources (e.g. Patreon) and are now acting surprised when their own data host isn't happy about not getting their cut of the revenue.
Reminds of a scam that cinemas attempted in my state - because the distributor wanted a % cut from movie tickets, they sold cheap tickets and then charged rent for 3D glasses required for a movie (e.g. 2EUR for ticket and 12EUR for the glasses). The distributors took their distribution rights because of that at all.
Trying to scam your most important source of revenue is just a really bad business decision.
Many of these content providers disabled the feature effectively making YT operate at a loss to host their video while continuing to use the platform.
I already have shown you other examples of these types of attempts which also didn't fly. You can't sell a TV in Walmart for 0.99$ and then have a hidden checque for 900$ in the box so you avoid giving Walmart their margin for the sale.
First they adjusted the cut.
Then came the copyright strike system which stops the creator being paid and diverts all and revenue to the claimant automatically.
Followed by the adpocalypse whe your video will be demonitised for reasons only known to YT for being "advertiser unfriendly" with recourse taking so long you've missed the most profitable time for views (the first few days).
Then came the algorithm changes that decimated discovery which negates the huge benefit of publishing on YT (exposure).
Let's not forget just straight up not showing subscribers your channels videos (Remember to like and subscribe, and smash the notification bell!)
And each time YT reply with "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further"
I can't think why creators would look to monetize their content with external sources.
(YouTube monetizes directly with its viewers too: https://www.youtube.com/premium )
So some are trying to get away from YouTubes monopoly but many cant.
For many of them, it is youtube or nothing.
Is this really true? I mean, there are hundreds of video hosting sites, is YT really the only way of making any money?
This is like saying that the only way to make your business sustainable is to get a reserved place on NY Times Square... are you really entitled to it?
I am pretty representative for typical user. Typical user turns on yoitube and only things in there exists.
This is definitely a Google push that will change the platform, I think. RoosterTeeth founders have pushed the whole "your content, your site, your store/etc" for a decade at least and though FloatPlane might be a capable rival as it builds more creators I think that is still true. You need to own your own distribution methods even if YT or another site is primarily where your views come from but that takes resources away from creating your primary content. Hard to do for a solo creator.
Hopefully Goog won't bring down the hammer on cross-posting videos!!
> It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
To me this sounds like a description of YouTube's business model — one that works for other services too, because people go along with it.
So this seems... unsurprising to me. I'm genuinely curious to know what YouTube users were expecting instead. I get the impression some people see this as a breach of trust, but to me it seems like the obvious thing YouTube would do.
I'm already paying Vimeo for a low-budget data plan, and I only continue to use YouTube as my main platform because of the extra exposure.
I would be willing to pay YouTube to opt out of adsFortunately that’s not entirely true, IIUC — LBRY and BitChute can automatically mirror their channels. Anecdotal accounts say LBRY pays orders of magnitude more per view IIRC, and doesn’t decrease YouTube growth. minutephysics uses it and still has >5 million subscribers on YT. And failing those, it shouldn’t be too hard to youtube-dl a channel and upload it to a Peertube or GNU mediagoblin (here ’s hoping ytdl starts using git the way its creators intended and moves issue tracking to an antifragile mailing list).
Why not implement an option for creators to share some of that load if they want to opt-out of advertisements on their videos? That way, everyone wins. YouTube gets money for the hosting of video, creators keep content ad-free.
Anyone who has invested in creating content and thinking that it would be the way it was forever is naive and has learned a lesson. Most 'old timers' would realize (I know I would) that any business situation can change.
Likewise I fully expect Amazon once they have killed off the competition to raise prices on many items. Sure they will have loss leaders and sure they are already doing it. But it's business no expectation that they won't do what is in their best interest. And this is not a 'shareholder' thing it's a business thing. Same thing would happen if it were a small pizza shop that decided to lower prices and drive others out of business. As long as no rules are broken it's not any worse than a sports team doing whatever they can to win the game. They are not 'in the business' of making it good for others to win. (Same with online gaming).
If you are not familiar with out google do things, They change terms and conditions and bandwidth allowances quite a lot. thats if they don't move their service to the google grave yard. https://killedbygoogle.com/
If they can coordinate their efforts of course. It is a big if.
[0] standard.tv
The content is great, though.
Many countries have regulations against non paid work. If google wants to limit monetization for creators but monetize themselves there is something that does not adds up.
Are people going to need to stipulate in their will to delete all uploaded content to stop crap like this?
YouTube is not obligated to host and serve content for free forever.
As many other big tech companies they have a very strong position in the market (edging into monopoly / duopoly territory), which essentially prevent competitors with different business plans to be successful.
To me this sounds like the market is broken and warrants a critical investigation.
That seems worse? All these videos that I uploaded become inaccessible just because I'm not around to approve monetization?
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
What if a backblaze or other backup service just decided it the copyright on all uploaded files after 1 month of non payment and started selling people’s home movies as stock footage?
This is like when you put into a contract "Party A may withdraw from this contract at any point" and then you withdraw at some point. That's playing by the rules.
If you want to make changes to your assets after you die, write a will and hire an executor.
The living aren't obligated to negotiate with the dead.
If your alive you fight such things by suing the company, but the dead don’t make such choices.
I somewhat understand Google's stance on this, as it's a service that should be allowed to make money even on people who don't want to make money. They don't really have such a way to opt out of pretty much any other service of theirs that has monetization.
But at the same time, there are people who have so heavily invested into the YouTube ecosystem with certain expectations for a very long time, and pretty much have their entire business on there, so they can't very easily take their business elsewhere if they're unhappy with the change.
This isn't a 'Netflix raising their subscription cost' scenario, where users can just cancel their subscription and sign up for a different service. It would be a massive undertaking to shift their backlog of videos onto another service, and they'd lose all their existing subscribers and have to build it up elsewhere.
So in that respect, it's kind of a shitty move by Google.