Good luck getting that through the system… the cost to run something like YouTube is… well, let’s just say the lack of real competitions speaks volumes.
Japan has nicovideo.jp as well. Russia has Yandex Efir (gone through a couple rebrands, Efir was the name in 2020 when we were discussing deals; it was operating under another name prior, and I think it is superseded by dzen). Off to the side I think vK also has a small video delivery presence like how Facebook has videos in their feeds. China has several platforms: Tencent Video (owned by Tencent), Youku as you’ve called out (owned by Alibaba), XiGua (ByteDance), Haokan (Baidu), and then slew of smaller ones like KuaiShou, BiliBili and that video thing WeChat tries to push. None of these are public service operated by the State, by the way. List really goes on… and I’d know, because I’ve worked in the space for almost 12 years now.
China’s great firewall aside, all these platforms are tiny in comparison, and in the grand scheme of things, and barely have any reach. In general, these regional are all taking a backseat just like Nebula and alike — if creators’ content are hyperlocal/super niche, they might be okay with smaller regional platforms; but if they’re trying to extend their reach and monetization (to ensure they have money to continue producing content), the creators’ presence on these platforms are really just auxiliary to their primary presence on YouTube.
Getting viewers to these smaller platforms is going to pose a significant chicken or the egg problem — creators aren’t incentivized to be there because lack of viewer, viewers aren’t incentivized to go there because lack of content. Worse yet, I’ve also seen situations where creators are paid for some period of exclusivity and then when the deal lapses they just go straight back to YouTube.
Real competitors do not exist, and likely will not exist for the foreseeable future. YouTube is the million pound behemoth when everyone else barely registers on the radar.
There are lots of peertube instances. The issue is that YouTube uses ads to pay content creators, and so everyone puts their content on YouTube in the hope of becoming the next big thing.
The issue isn’t userbase size. Plenty of creators have tried to have their own private hosting over the years. The fact that the “successful” ones are Rooster Teeth (dead), Giant Bomb (basically dead), and Linus Media Group (unfortunately not dead, but shifting ever more toward right wing grifting) says a lot.
The issue, as those channels learned, is discoverability. If your entire fanbase go to giantbomb.com to watch videos then you aren’t getting surfaced in the youtube/whatever algorithm. So as your userbase leaves (get pissed off, get older, die, etc) you don’t have a good way to replace them and you more or less wither and die. You could see this on the forums (and the threads on sites that still have forums) where you almost never saw a new fan show up and it increasingly became all about the more vocal members of “the community” as even the fans started to nope out of chat (because nobody gives a shit about the guy whose gimmick is that he kept saying he was a duck…) and forums (because we don’t care about the guy who can’t stop talking about how “kino” Snyder films are).
And that is why stuff like Nebula, Gun Jesus’s latest side hustle, Corridor Digital’s site, etc are very much dependent on relying on Youtube for the “advertising”. It says a lot that most of us only even check Nebula when we see a new Legal Eagle or Nile Red video on youtube and want to watch the ad-free version.
The list of all the horrifically shitty things LMG has done over the past few years will fill up a thread on its own and I strongly encourage you to educate yourself before even thinking of defending them for… anything.
But some highlights:
Over the span of a week or two went from “Companies aren’t your friend. I am not your friend” to “Written warranties are worthless and can only hurt you so you shouldn’t want them. Also, if there were a written warranty and I were to die then my wife (who just so happens to be the CFO and second biggest shareholder in the company…) would suffer from harassment. So written warranties are bad and just trust me bro”. This was bad enough that his decades long crony (Luke) even openly criticized him
Stole a GPU from a small company, shit on their prototype for weeks on end even after knowingly using it with the wrong card, and then sold the prototype cooler to a random third party. Proceeded to make claims (that the timeline doesn’t even work for) that they resolved this before anyone caught them and their main argument is they accidentally removed said company from those emails where they were “solving” it.
Have increasingly openly acknowledged they will do big pieces on products they hate if the money is right. I think the most recent shitfests are a pool cleaning robot that barely functions and now sponsorshipps from one of the shittier VPN companies because the money is really really good.
Responded to an “internal investigation” of sexual harassment and assault claims (where at least one perpetrator is literally recorded sexually harassing the entire company… during the all hands about sexual harassment… literally the day after his direct report left the company because of being sexually harassed) by talking about how they will sue any future whistle blowers or accusers for defamation.
Went full “but the white man is the real victim” after even d-brand acknowledged a fuck up where they “roasted” an Indian guy because they thought his name was funny
Basically turn every single accusation into “They are personally attacking Linus Sebastien because they are jealous of his success and genius” level cancel culture nonsense
They are rapidly circling the drain and I for one am waiting for the “Well, these aren’t tech so we don’t have a conflict of interest and you should buy some joe rogan branded supplements” within the next few months. Likely because more and more actual tech companies don’t even want to deal with them for the PR boost.
Yep, definitely. That’s the allure. From what I can tell, it’s likely there are tens of thousands of people making over $1m a year. However, there are hundreds of millions of people uploading videos.
Most people won’t make much at all, but if you don’t have the people at the top making millions then no one has any incentive, so those people are critical.
It’s also the hosting. YouTube has hundreds of hours of high-res video uploaded to it every single minute, and then has to process and mirror that content across its global distribution network. Just the hardware required to make that function, alone, is prohibitively expensive for any other contenders to enter this space.
Ads are not just inconvenient but very often annoying and misleading, so I can’t blame anyone for that.
Micropayment donations might, though. It’s not annoying, not misleading, and there is a considerable amount of people even now that regularly donate/otherwise support their favorite content creators, and this would be even more convenient because it is automatic and the amount depends on how much time did you watch videos.
And it doesn’t even necessarily depend on cryptocurrencies.
The amount of people who would pay is going to be near zero in the grand scheme of things.
Next time you’re anywhere where you could discretely look at people’s phones, see how many of them run apps with ads. Most apps will offer very cheap IAP to remove ads, but people choose to not pay it. Vast majority of the users have already decided that their time wasted on ads are worth less than whatever tiny monetary cost it would be to remove them. Same thing here: Vast majority of the users have already decided they’re not going to pay to get rid of the ads. This in turn means due to how few people who would be willing to pay, it is not going to be nearly sufficient to keep the infrastructure required up and running, as well as keep the creators compensated for creating the content.
We need a publicly funded video hosting service like PBS.
Good luck getting that through the system… the cost to run something like YouTube is… well, let’s just say the lack of real competitions speaks volumes.
China did it…https://www.youku.tv/ probably the EU could do it too, if it cared about owning its own critical infrastructure.
Japan has nicovideo.jp as well. Russia has Yandex Efir (gone through a couple rebrands, Efir was the name in 2020 when we were discussing deals; it was operating under another name prior, and I think it is superseded by dzen). Off to the side I think vK also has a small video delivery presence like how Facebook has videos in their feeds. China has several platforms: Tencent Video (owned by Tencent), Youku as you’ve called out (owned by Alibaba), XiGua (ByteDance), Haokan (Baidu), and then slew of smaller ones like KuaiShou, BiliBili and that video thing WeChat tries to push. None of these are public service operated by the State, by the way. List really goes on… and I’d know, because I’ve worked in the space for almost 12 years now.
China’s great firewall aside, all these platforms are tiny in comparison, and in the grand scheme of things, and barely have any reach. In general, these regional are all taking a backseat just like Nebula and alike — if creators’ content are hyperlocal/super niche, they might be okay with smaller regional platforms; but if they’re trying to extend their reach and monetization (to ensure they have money to continue producing content), the creators’ presence on these platforms are really just auxiliary to their primary presence on YouTube.
Getting viewers to these smaller platforms is going to pose a significant chicken or the egg problem — creators aren’t incentivized to be there because lack of viewer, viewers aren’t incentivized to go there because lack of content. Worse yet, I’ve also seen situations where creators are paid for some period of exclusivity and then when the deal lapses they just go straight back to YouTube.
Real competitors do not exist, and likely will not exist for the foreseeable future. YouTube is the million pound behemoth when everyone else barely registers on the radar.
We have torrent technology, we just need to make it a little more dynamic.
If we fund a peertube instance we could do that.
There are lots of peertube instances. The issue is that YouTube uses ads to pay content creators, and so everyone puts their content on YouTube in the hope of becoming the next big thing.
Most YouTubers rely on sponsorships and/or Patreon subscriptions. Getting compensation is not a platform problem.
The reason why content creators choose YouTube is because that’s where all the viewers are. Few people know about peertube. Even fewer have used it.
Sort of.
The issue isn’t userbase size. Plenty of creators have tried to have their own private hosting over the years. The fact that the “successful” ones are Rooster Teeth (dead), Giant Bomb (basically dead), and Linus Media Group (unfortunately not dead, but shifting ever more toward right wing grifting) says a lot.
The issue, as those channels learned, is discoverability. If your entire fanbase go to giantbomb.com to watch videos then you aren’t getting surfaced in the youtube/whatever algorithm. So as your userbase leaves (get pissed off, get older, die, etc) you don’t have a good way to replace them and you more or less wither and die. You could see this on the forums (and the threads on sites that still have forums) where you almost never saw a new fan show up and it increasingly became all about the more vocal members of “the community” as even the fans started to nope out of chat (because nobody gives a shit about the guy whose gimmick is that he kept saying he was a duck…) and forums (because we don’t care about the guy who can’t stop talking about how “kino” Snyder films are).
And that is why stuff like Nebula, Gun Jesus’s latest side hustle, Corridor Digital’s site, etc are very much dependent on relying on Youtube for the “advertising”. It says a lot that most of us only even check Nebula when we see a new Legal Eagle or Nile Red video on youtube and want to watch the ad-free version.
Ltt right wing grifting ? Are we on the same planet ? They’re milquetoast liberals at worst and they try not to, sometimes.
The list of all the horrifically shitty things LMG has done over the past few years will fill up a thread on its own and I strongly encourage you to educate yourself before even thinking of defending them for… anything.
But some highlights:
They are rapidly circling the drain and I for one am waiting for the “Well, these aren’t tech so we don’t have a conflict of interest and you should buy some joe rogan branded supplements” within the next few months. Likely because more and more actual tech companies don’t even want to deal with them for the PR boost.
deleted by creator
Yep, definitely. That’s the allure. From what I can tell, it’s likely there are tens of thousands of people making over $1m a year. However, there are hundreds of millions of people uploading videos.
Most people won’t make much at all, but if you don’t have the people at the top making millions then no one has any incentive, so those people are critical.
Classic pyramid scheme of capitalism.
Very true. It’s not so much the hosting, it’s monetary value.
It’s also the hosting. YouTube has hundreds of hours of high-res video uploaded to it every single minute, and then has to process and mirror that content across its global distribution network. Just the hardware required to make that function, alone, is prohibitively expensive for any other contenders to enter this space.
What people need to do is start self-hosting PeerTube IMO.
People refuse to even let an ad play but sure, they’ll participate in the pledge drives
Ads are not just inconvenient but very often annoying and misleading, so I can’t blame anyone for that.
Micropayment donations might, though. It’s not annoying, not misleading, and there is a considerable amount of people even now that regularly donate/otherwise support their favorite content creators, and this would be even more convenient because it is automatic and the amount depends on how much time did you watch videos.
And it doesn’t even necessarily depend on cryptocurrencies.
The amount of people who would pay is going to be near zero in the grand scheme of things.
Next time you’re anywhere where you could discretely look at people’s phones, see how many of them run apps with ads. Most apps will offer very cheap IAP to remove ads, but people choose to not pay it. Vast majority of the users have already decided that their time wasted on ads are worth less than whatever tiny monetary cost it would be to remove them. Same thing here: Vast majority of the users have already decided they’re not going to pay to get rid of the ads. This in turn means due to how few people who would be willing to pay, it is not going to be nearly sufficient to keep the infrastructure required up and running, as well as keep the creators compensated for creating the content.
deleted by creator
What is it?
deleted by creator
Can I freely upload my niché videos of USB cable testing there? PS, I’m not a US citizen.
deleted by creator
Then how is it a replacement for YouTube?
at that point why not just subscribe to yt premium?
Public service =/= privately owned mega corp