The platform is important but the content creators and the viewers are 10x more important.
We used to have a "pay for what you consume" economy and I don't see why that suddenly can't exist anymore.
Tell me how many of these content creators are exclusively supported by Patreon.
Also, ask any of these content creators (that supposedly are able to be sustained by Patreon) if they would be willing to move away from YouTube and into another platform like Peertube.
None of them will. Some of them won't mind creating the Peertube channel and distributing their content as well, but no one will leave YouTube, because they all know that YouTube is still the platform that enables all the economy to exist.
I'm not saying this because I don't like the Patreon model. Quite the opposite. [0]. But it's hard to argue with numbers, and the numbers are just not in favor of this idea that a whole industry can be supported by a minority of enthusiasts.
[0] : https://blog.communick.com/communick-collective-a-zero-commi...
LGR is another one that comes to mind that I think barely ever does sponsors and makes most of his income from Patreon. I’m sure there are many others as well.
Not a rhetorical question. If there is anyone that is not dependent of YouTube's revenue and already amassed enough supporters, is there anything holding them to Google?
They’re both techie enough to set one up, so I feel like the best approach if they were interested would be to set it up as a mirror and see how it goes with traffic. That way they’re at least not beholden 100% to YouTube for their livelihood.
Another thing that just came to mind, how is discoverability of PeerTube in search results compared to YouTube? I wouldn’t be surprised if Google promotes YouTube links over PeerTube in search results which could also have a big impact.
"Hey everyone, big update! I'm leaving YouTube and moving my channel to PeerTube. You can follow me at @myusername@myserver. My last video on this channel will be a quick tutorial showing how PeerTube works and why it's better than YouTube. See you there soon!"
> If they’re not showing up in people’s recommended they’ll have significantly lower viewership which could ultimately affect their Patreon income over time.
Why? If they already have a substantial amount of patrons, surely they are not worried about pleasing the algorithm. They can live off solely off their fans who support them directly. Right? Right??
> I feel like the best approach if they were interested would be to set it up as a mirror and see how it goes with traffic.
Ahem, which part of "Some of them won't mind creating the Peertube channel and distributing their content as well, but no one will leave YouTube, because they all know that YouTube is still the platform that enables all the economy to exist." did you miss in my original comment?
Sorry about the caustic response. I'm just tired of wishful thinking passing for grounded reasoning. When/if you find me one creator brave enough to put moral principles over their own livelihood by leaving YouTube, then I'll accept that Patreon alone is a viable alternative. Until then, it's just signaling and posturing.
> We used to have a "pay for what you consume" economy and I don't see why that suddenly can't exist anymore.
Piracy and entitlement.
The nice thing about this era for a creator is that having 10,000 dedicated fans is enough.
Dedicated fans will happily monetize on you. 100,000 low engagement fans won't make nearly as much.
But the absolute overwhelming majority of content creators are putting all the work with the hopes of achieving that scale of success.
> The nice thing about this era for a creator is that having 10,000 dedicated fans is enough.
For one creator, yes. For a whole economy that can bring billions of dollars per year, you will need to have a much larger consumer base, and you'll need to have a substantial part of them willing to support a lot more than a handful of creators.
I don't think the existing product placement industry will suffer on alternatives, but Tiktok has what its competition lacks: an excellent algorithm, not bogged down by any ethics, optimised for pulling in as many people as possible. Filtering out ugly or disabled people and algorithmically censoring speech all across the spectrum would never pass on any open system, but it has worked wonders on Tiktok.
That's why I don't think open source alternatives will ever be popular, even if they find themselves backed by investors and paying out creators: they're still too ethical to be profitable.
For every Mr. Beast, there are tens of thousands of other people with 10k-1M subscribers who produce valuable content which would never exist if it were not for the already existing audience.
Look at video thumbnails and "YouTube face". Look at how many videos are feature-film length ordeals: there is no way everyone is actively watching all that content; they're all putting it in their TVs in the background. Look at how every video on YouTube is at least 10 minutes long: that happens because it means the video will get a second ad spot. If it comes down to making a 9.5 minute video it a 10.1 minute one, well, nobody is going to pass up stretching an extra 36 seconds out of the B-roll.
If you're an advertiser, it's gotta be driving you mad. All this micro-optimizing for length to get ad spots has to be really destroying their click through rates. Which is fine with me, actually, cry me big crocodile years. But it's probably also why they've spent so much effort on in-video sponsorships. Now that really pisses me off, because I'm paying YouTube for an ad-free experience and yet YouTube turns a blind eye to its content creators circumventing my preference.
But all of this would go away if YouTube didn't pay content creators. "Why shouldn't people get paid for their work?" They should. But posting to YouTube shouldn't be someone's job. Because the remuneration system is perverse.
Why not? Should they instead be kissing someone else's ass to get an unpaid internship at some lawyer firm? Aiming to get a stable job at one of the Big 4 accounting firms? Helping big fat cats get even fatter by working on VC? Toiling at some farm? Taking care of our kids at salaries that barely affords them to live close to where they teach?
No one is being forced to do YouTube videos, and if that's what they are preferring to do, maybe it is better than the alternatives?
I said why not. Because the remuneration system is perverse.
The vast majority of people on YouTube are not going to make any money for what they post. I don't just mean "pocket change they wouldn't have had otherwise". I mean literally 0 dollars versus YouTube easily taking in millions over the long tail.
As an example, I'm one of these such creators. I have a few videos that have been up for a long time and in that time have gathered low 100k+ views.
If those views had all occurred in one month, YouTube would pay me somewhere around $2000. But because this happened over 10 years, YouTube has always said, "eh, you know what, it's not enough to bother."
I'm sorry, but in any other case, if someone wasn't paying me $200 a year that they owed me, I'd be pissed. But I digress, that's not the issue, and that's not why I post videos to YouTube.
The issue is that this is the case for the majority of content creators on YouTube. YouTube makes a massive amount of money by exploiting people's content that they will never pay 1 red cent for. For a lot of those people, they continue on because of a misguided dream that they might one day get to be they anointed few who gets to have their "fair" share of their content.
Through the revenue sharing model, YouTube has created a perverse incentive structure that pushes content creators to do things in ways they wouldn't otherwise have done, on a promise that is likely never to occur. YouTube creator shouldn't be a job not because I think YouTube creators should find "something better to do", but because YouTube is a shit company that shouldn't be allowed to operate the way they do.
If your problem is with the implementation from one company and not the whole idea, fine. But this is not an issue with the "revenue share" model.
Also:
> For a lot of those people, they continue on because of a misguided dream that they might one day get to be they anointed few who gets to have their "fair" share of their content.
It's not different from basketball/baseball/football players that spend all their young years working for free and expecting to become pro. Or musicians who get into pay-to-play circuits in the hopes of ever becoming the next star, or fashion models who endure all the crazy routine of a talent agency based on the dream of being as rich as Gisele Büdchen, and even to the batches of YC founders that are given 500k and are told "no, no, this money is not for you. This money is for you to try to make a billion dollar business. Your first priority is to make me even richer, not your well-being."
If you follow some of the creators that got big in YouTube and are also now big in Tik Tok, you'll see that it's actually worse in Tik Tok. Unlike YouTube that distributed a percentage of revenue, Tik Tok has a flat "creators' fund" that gets doled out proportionally. So where a boy account on YouTube draws more revenue to YouTube, that makes the pie bigger, so pre-existing accounts aren't losing out just because someone else is doing better (e.g. they serve different demos). On Tik Tok, each account is not just in competition for existing eyeballs, they're in competition with all other accounts regardless of overlap of audience.
People happily post on Bluesky or HN for free. I think paid content is a different genre, and we need to figure out how to get people to pay for it other than advertising.
I think this is so important and something that gets missed a lot, especially any place that is even tangentially related to "entrepreneurship" like HN. "Why wouldn't you try to monetize every single aspect of your life?"
I do wood working as a hobby. People keep asking me if I have plans to sell my stuff, then they look at me weird when I say no. Some of them even look like they've been personally insulted, which is weird considering I'm the one being pressed.
I do it because I can make nice things for my family and friends, unique things that have a lot of meaning to them. It's not possible to monetize what I do because what I do only works because it's not monetizable.
> Some people will [...] build a beautiful future
Hope so.
I'm sure TikTok and Facebook won't live forever. But I think they will not be overtaken by "tiktok, only distributed". Horses were not made obsolete by mechanical horses and all that. But that's just nitpicking.
But there is another non-trivial difference: these are open source projects.
The real Achilles heel is having a viable business model. But all business models, whether good or bad are inventions. Unless we think predatory adtech is the end of human ingenuity people will come up with ways.
Other activitypub projects are going well with a small minority of people donating the server costs, and project leaders just keeping those servers there because they want it.
X is now a place where you can post the most anodyne comment like “Happy Saturday folks” and immediately get 50 trolls arguing that it’s NOT a happy Saturday, and BTW you’re an ugly BIT*H. Every one of Elons’ 50 daily posts will be boosted and you have to see them. Your feed is now filled with right-wing content 24/7 from anyone who paid for a checkmark. From the moment you log into the system, you may be in fight-or-flight mode, and every single interaction is a potential argument. That’s our collective definition of a social network now, and if you want to opt out of that, you’re in a “liberal echo chamber”.
No, Bluesky lets folks actually use a network as before - finding interesting content, connecting with others, and yes, having civil disagreements. The change is that trolls whose only purpose in life is to find as many people as possible to argue with and shout at, can now be blocked from a user’s feed. It’s not a new innovation - it’s the way it used to work.
Bluesky has a nuclear block which is awesome.
The way our social networks optimize for engagement is the root cause, since boring balanced content doesn’t create advertising revenue.
I also think it's naive to accuse any particular group of people to be more or less prone to seeking echo chambers. That's endemic to humans in general, though certainly not completely pervasive.
What Pixelfed (and Loops and various other still half baked initiatives) prove is that there is an entire space of very interesting applications that are possible with the technologies of here and now. Bluesky was better resourced but essentially still in the same dwarf category versus big adtech.
Some people will take these proof-of-principle efforts to heart and build a beautiful future while others will cling on milking the totally broken paradigms of yesteryear.