There are these periodic revolts against Youtube by creators who depend on them for their income due to Youtubes varous bullshit - which I agree with.
But, then they all just STFU and go back to continuing that dependence.
Why have none of these big creators banded to put their weight behind one of the fediverse alternatives? I am not ignorant with regard to the need for bandwidth, storage, and CPU to sustain these services, but I’m also not proposing anyone should just drop their lucrative Youtube situation and jump ship, either.
Get some of the big guys - especially the big tech Youtubers - to put their weight behind one of these alternatives, and I think it could build overtime.
But it’s not gonna happen until they do, so we just get a few dramatic events a year where everyone gets up in arms about how much Youtube sucks, and then returns to normal.
Edit: A bit disappointed how many replies seem to boil down to a belief that the Youtube business model is the only one that shall ever exist or ever could exist for content creators. Rome wasn’t built in a day, ya’ll. (And neither was youtube.)
To make a YouTube alternative you need a global ad platform, storage capacity for exabytes worth of data, a global network of CDNs, and a global payment system for creators. These all need to operate at a massive global scale delivering content to viewers.
It’s a sort of chicken-and-egg problem, also similar to the social media critical mass problem.
Creators won’t move until the audience is there. Audience won’t go until their favourite creators are there. Both won’t move until the platform can handle the traffic, but the platform doesn’t have the money to afford the required infrastructure until they have revenue coming in from large audiences…
The Pirate Bay is not hosting or delivering video, they are just indexing P2P content and hosting magnet links. Pornhub is closer but not at nearly the same scale as YouTube.
They are doing this with Nebula, even though that’s not federated. Judging by the reviews of the Nebula app, they can’t seem to get the usability of their app to an acceptable standard.
Youtube lets you monetize videos - I’d assume you can make more (and earn a living) more easily there than via an alternative. I agree they should be looking at alternatives but until they can earn a living there I doubt much will change.
Nebula, Curiosity, Floatplane. The problem is not the videos, it’s the revenue. Many popular YouTubers, don’t actually make a living out of YouTube. But out of sponsored videos. Many more just live out of Patreon. For example, James Stephanie Sterling intentionally doesn’t monetize the videos and intentionally break different copyrights with different litigious holders to avoid anyone monetizing the video (copyright lockdown). It’s the ones who are way too small to live off of alternatives or don’t fit other platform’s brand that get left out to fend on their own against YTs gargantuan and irrational stranglehold monopoly on the space. There’s simply not a large enough market of users willing to pay, Google made sure to make it that way.
For years YT has waged war against small niche channels. They don’t bring enough ad revenue, unlike the MrBeasts and the Michael Brownlees level channels.
Even the biggest YouTubers don’t make enough money to sustain something as large as YT. And if they wanted to, they would have to give seats and voice to the same type of undesirable stock bros that make Google the enshittified hellhole it is now.
Why have none of these big creators banded to put their weight behind one of the fediverse alternatives?
Because they can’t make money from them. Are the fediverse alternatives going to have ads? Require a subscription plan?
If their income will only come from in-video sponsors, then it doesn’t matter if they don’t have monetization on YouTube.
I just want to point this out: Louis Rossman is trying to fix this in a way, by allowing people to subscribe to a person and not one of their platforms, so if they get banned their new platform of choice will show up to all of their subscribers instead of them having to try and move their audience to a new nearly unused platform.
There are these periodic revolts against Youtube by creators who depend on them for their income due to Youtubes varous bullshit - which I agree with.
But, then they all just STFU and go back to continuing that dependence.
Why have none of these big creators banded to put their weight behind one of the fediverse alternatives? I am not ignorant with regard to the need for bandwidth, storage, and CPU to sustain these services, but I’m also not proposing anyone should just drop their lucrative Youtube situation and jump ship, either.
Get some of the big guys - especially the big tech Youtubers - to put their weight behind one of these alternatives, and I think it could build over time.
But it’s not gonna happen until they do, so we just get a few dramatic events a year where everyone gets up in arms about how much Youtube sucks, and then returns to normal.
Edit: A bit disappointed how many replies seem to boil down to a belief that the Youtube business model is the only one that shall ever exist or ever could exist for content creators. Rome wasn’t built in a day, ya’ll. (And neither was youtube.)
To make a YouTube alternative you need a global ad platform, storage capacity for exabytes worth of data, a global network of CDNs, and a global payment system for creators. These all need to operate at a massive global scale delivering content to viewers.
No one but Google has this.
Uh… pornhub actually does all of above though.
Today.
It’s a sort of chicken-and-egg problem, also similar to the social media critical mass problem.
Creators won’t move until the audience is there. Audience won’t go until their favourite creators are there. Both won’t move until the platform can handle the traffic, but the platform doesn’t have the money to afford the required infrastructure until they have revenue coming in from large audiences…
The Pirate Bay has this tho. And pornhub has.
The Pirate Bay is not hosting or delivering video, they are just indexing P2P content and hosting magnet links. Pornhub is closer but not at nearly the same scale as YouTube.
There is also PeerTube
Google is getting sued over that Global Ad Platform and teaming up with Facebook to control over 50% of the online Ad market
Google loses bid to keep Texas’ ad tech lawsuit in New York https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/google-loses-bid-keep-texas-ad-tech-lawsuit-new-york-2023-10-04/
They are doing this with Nebula, even though that’s not federated. Judging by the reviews of the Nebula app, they can’t seem to get the usability of their app to an acceptable standard.
Nebula is great. The app certainly isnt streamlined, just a lot of clicks to get to the video(s) you want to watch
I wasn’t aware of that, I’ll check into it, thanks!
But, IMO, I think we’re learning that services like that are inevitably going to be enshittified if not federated.
Youtube lets you monetize videos - I’d assume you can make more (and earn a living) more easily there than via an alternative. I agree they should be looking at alternatives but until they can earn a living there I doubt much will change.
Nebula, Curiosity, Floatplane. The problem is not the videos, it’s the revenue. Many popular YouTubers, don’t actually make a living out of YouTube. But out of sponsored videos. Many more just live out of Patreon. For example, James Stephanie Sterling intentionally doesn’t monetize the videos and intentionally break different copyrights with different litigious holders to avoid anyone monetizing the video (copyright lockdown). It’s the ones who are way too small to live off of alternatives or don’t fit other platform’s brand that get left out to fend on their own against YTs gargantuan and irrational stranglehold monopoly on the space. There’s simply not a large enough market of users willing to pay, Google made sure to make it that way.
For years YT has waged war against small niche channels. They don’t bring enough ad revenue, unlike the MrBeasts and the Michael Brownlees level channels.
Even the biggest YouTubers don’t make enough money to sustain something as large as YT. And if they wanted to, they would have to give seats and voice to the same type of undesirable stock bros that make Google the enshittified hellhole it is now.
Removed by mod
Because they can’t make money from them. Are the fediverse alternatives going to have ads? Require a subscription plan? If their income will only come from in-video sponsors, then it doesn’t matter if they don’t have monetization on YouTube.
I just want to point this out: Louis Rossman is trying to fix this in a way, by allowing people to subscribe to a person and not one of their platforms, so if they get banned their new platform of choice will show up to all of their subscribers instead of them having to try and move their audience to a new nearly unused platform.