As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.
I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor.
I have a pretty small channel (~100K subscribers) with no employees and relatively low upkeep costs (a few hundred dollars a month), and even I could not make this work if I didn't get at least $500-$1,000 per video on average, since it just takes so much time and money.
Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them. You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.
And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video. And the difference between a million views and a hundred is 10,000x. You cannot create a platform without big users.
I think any real competitor to YouTube nowadays would have to be backed by a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch. Otherwise it's just dead in the water.
You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider. Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube. Otherwise, you will always be subject to platform risk via YouTube's whims which has destroyed many content creators. That's the long term winning play IMO and it doesn't preclude tools like FreeTube.
Realistically, how many viewers will be retained should YT shut the OP down? Right now, that number rounds to 0. Practically speaking, YT is free internet video streaming for long-form videos on the US market.
Nobody is going to go to OP's personal site to watch videos. They are going to fire up YT and eat what the algorithm feeds them.
The reason PeerTube and Nebula are important is it provides the potential for a true alternative destination for people looking for videos. Once these platforms have an enough content to draw an audience naturally, then content creators will be able to survive a post-YT world.
For people like the OP, it's probably best to follow the model video games do with DRM. Post on YT first, to get the ad revenue, then repost on other platforms after some time to build up an alternative subscriber base. Presumably, in-video sponsorships will pay for these views as well, even if there's no direct ad-sense like revenue model.
> Realistically, how many viewers will be retained should YT shut the OP down? Right now, that number rounds to 0. Practically speaking, YT is free internet video streaming for long-form videos on the US market.
People have been following this strategy of creating their own mini-brands for years and have their own following. YT doesn't even have all of the their content, and YT is just one lead gen channel. Frankly, Ad Revenue from YT is pitiful, and it's an open secret the real money is made as I've described (although it is a long term play).
I don't disagree with you about PeerTube and the like, but it is a two-sided marketplace and you need to prime both sides of that pump (content creators and viewers).
Nebula is invite only, as far as I can tell, for creators.
People don’t really want another step in the already arduous process of making videos - especially when the return on investment will be $0. This website will die off in a couple years and everyone who wastes time on it will be worse off for it.
You need to build a product so good that my statement above sounds INSANE. Not just “I think he’s wrong” but “dude absolutely no way. Everyone will want this. Are you stupid?”
And this is not that product.
Edit: yeah. I was curious so I went searching for ASMR videos. The default search brought some (terrible-looking) ones up, but half of them were in French? I sorted by views instead, and even though I literally only searched for “ASMR”, there were no longer any ASMR videos near the top of the results. For something trying to compete with YouTube, this is a very mid experience. Nobody is going to waste time migrating.
I think for most people you're right, they just want to upload their videos, and maybe make a couple of bucks on the side. I was referring to folks who are truly committed to making this their career and want to have their own brand. Many, many people are already doing this, so it isn't something theoretical. Most YouTubers are automating their production pipeline, so another upload step isn't too hard, especially nowadays where it is easier than ever to build a bespoke, deterministic pipeline with agents writing scripts and programs.
Alright, you're hosting on FreeTube (paying for hosting & bandwidth costs) - how are you making money? Most YouTubers don't want to run their own ad network or sell a physical product. Sponsors make deals conditional on YouTube engagement metrics.
There are lots of strategies how to make money and it will vary based on your specialty. It could be premium content, premium services, exclusive engagement with your fans, merchandising (e.g., many cooking YouTubers sell their own brand of cooking utensils that they have designed themselves). It requires some thought, but the idea is to deepen the authenticity and engagement by building an actual community and your own personal micro-brand. The offering needs to feel organic and huge value to your community in some way. Many many people have done this on YT and now are making way more money than what's possible with the pittance that is YT monetization. YT then becomes just one part of your funnel intake strategy once you get big enough.
Edit: Of course, you do need to have enough demand/scale to make it worth your while, but that will depend on your audience size and how engaged/invested they are in your content AND you personally to an extent. Perhaps be creative and start out with small experiments. Not too hard with LLMs nowadays.
> You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider.
That one is likely the best use case while one monetizes on YT waiting for FreeTube to gain more popularity. Worth also for keeping a safer online accessible backup in case things go south with the YT channel being taken down for any reason, be it bogus copyright claims or else. What I'm not sure of though is how long until Google changes YT rules to disallow linking or even mentioning competing, or perceived as such, services. Companies always do that: I'm a Ebay user since 2008, 100% feedback both as seller and customer, hundreds of positives not a single negative or neutral in 18 years, but a while ago Ebay in their infinite wisdom blocked a listing of mine because I added the links of the documentation needed to use the device I was selling; no way to appeal successfully or have it restored, they evidently either used a monkey or AI to detect what they identified as an attempt to contact the customer outside of Ebay, for a €30 item nonetheless. Years ago they didn't enforce such idiotic limitations, so I wouldn't put any trust on YT to remain consistent with their current rules.
It doesn't have to be for your use-case. e.g. KDE has their own instance, as does Blender. It would perhaps be a good fit for MIT to host their OCW videos, or for Khan Academy to host their material, or people sharing conference talks, or governments, or quick home DIY videos, or vlogs and idle musings, or hobbyists showing/discussing their thing they like, etc. Videos that are meant to help people to better themselves or collaborate fit better on a platform that doesn't try to be a constant sales funnel.
There are many people who believe everything must be a grind to get rich. I wish more people stepped back and did things online because they were fun or educational, not because it was monetized.
they need a day job to pay the bills then, which does cut down on the scope of videos you can make
if we could have less working hours or cheaper rent or less expensive bills more people could do hobby stuff again ofc. but right now is tricky for that
Generally speaking, that's how hobbies work. You do them for fun or enrichment and do something else for money. People who try to turn hobbies into a day job seem to get this weird idea that they're somehow critical to the hobby when in fact they're just hyper focused on getting attention and crowding out actually sincere people so they can sell stuff.
e.g. this thread. Here you have people making software for themselves to host their own videos without being beholden to the likes of Google. Absolutely nothing to do with OP. So why is OP criticising them? Where in the README does this free software project discuss monetization (other than mentioning it's ad-free)? Why is the topic even slightly germane?
If it's tricky for people in software engineering (those still holding a job continue to have big salaries compared to most other industries) to have hobbies they are willing to pay for themselves, it's probably them finding excuses instead or living beyond their means.
Nope, there are still people doing this stuff to share what they are excited about, and they will continue to be people like that.
Economy has nothing to do with this — as mentioned, a lot of this comes out of university students and low rung staff, and they were never best paid.
There are 100M+ channels uploading on YouTube regularly and only 2-3M of them are monetized. Not everyone wants to upload videos on the internet with the explicit goal of making money. Professional creators are a very tiny minority, and a platform like YouTube will always be better suited for them (your "small" channel with 100K subscribers is actually in the top 0.5-0.1% of YouTube). There is no reason for Peertube to go after this specific demographic.
Yet those 2-3M channels get the lions share of the views. It is a two-sided system. And if you want to attract viewers, you need what they want to watch. Looking on the front page of peertube the most viewed video I see has 29 views. If I sort by hot, the "hottest" video has 692 in a month. If the intent is to publish videos to have people watch it, PeerTube is clearly not the place to do that.
If you want real numbers start selling hard drugs. You don't have to "serve the people". YouTube is a cesspool.
Then there's even less reason to host outside of YouTube, why would I want to host a server that costs money if I'm not making any money from the videos? It works for those who want to own their content and verify its safety, or for ideological reasons such as supporting OSS but I'm not sure why the average user would care about PeerTube.
The problem is that big creators have many subscribers, because they're the only ones making videos people want to watch.
If a channel has 100 subscribers - (except if it's a brand new channel) - it's because people saw the videos and decided, no, I don't want to see this, I'm not going to subscribe.
Put all of those people on a platform together, you will just end up with a platform with more creators than viewers.
So? Why is that a problem? My wife occasionally watches this old lady who's vlogged every day for over 14 years straight. She averages 150-200 views. The people who try to build a brand end up getting outsized attention so it seems like that must be what anyone would want, but most people actually aren't trying to do that.
Well, do you want a platform people watch videos on, or a platform people simply upload videos to, never to be seen?
It's not an either-or, but generally speaking, a platform centered around getting more people to watch is probably worse to have in the world than one centered around people just expressing themselves to a handful of e.g. family/friends/small communities. Especially if the former is really just a conduit for ads.
I heard that main source of income for some professional YouTubers are Patreon and sponsorships. Ad revenue is dead last and very unstable. Also, if you are building your business on single platform, which one day might decide that your content does not adhere to their rules - that's a high risk to take.
Sponsorships are definitely the highest if a youtuber actively engages in them, ad revenue vs patreon depends highly on if you have i.e. a small but highly active fanbase of core fans, versus a wider more general audience that you entertain a bit.
I think people should be more aware of the perverse incentive of YouTubers saying, "my guaranteed source of income is very little and unstable guys, I need you to also subscribe to my patreon" where - could YouTubers perhaps have a reason to act like their ad revenue is very little? In my experience, while ad revenue isn't great, for any decent-size YouTuber its still enough to live on and in any case it always stays a significant income stream.
You say your target is $500-$1000 per video and let's assume you do videos weekly. That would mean your optimistic goal is $4500 a month. Let's say you create a voluntary donation subscription at $5 per month for people willing to support your work. That means you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them to hit your $4500 goal. That's a 0.9% conversion rate from subscribers to donators. Doesn't seem that impractical when looked at in those terms. This is often the default monetization model for small podcasts because RSS feeds don't have built in ad revenue the way YouTube does.
Voluntary donations are practically impossible. Sure, you get the odd straggler, but it’s so, so rare.
I have the most popular NSFW LoRA (actually a LoKR but whatever) for at least one major text to image model on CivitAI.
Once it blew up I made a Patreon, maybe 6 months ago? I get $50 a month from it. I doubt that even covers my electricity costs for training.
Podcasts and videos do have the advantage of being able to ask for people to donate with every podcast/video, but people just aren’t inclined to give their money away when they don’t have to. It’s a rare trait.
Quite frankly, I don't think you can compare image generation, let alone NSFW image generation, with YouTube and podcasts. You are simply operating in a medium in which this is going to be dramatically tougher, primarily because most people who consume your content are likely there for the content and unlikely to have any relationship to you specifically. But either way, "It's a rare trait" isn't disagreeing with what I said. The successful conversion rate in my last comment was below 1%.
At that point I'd just make a Patreon (that offers various benefits including exclusive videos not on YouTube) while also monetizing via YouTube ads and sponshorships.
Yes, there is a reason I said "you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them". I'm not claiming this is a new concept, I was making specific allusions to Patreon and the idea of 1000 true fans[1].
[1] - https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
> most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.
I get your point, but many of them fail to hit some hundreds of views due in large part to all of the large, professional channels that are spending hundreds of man hours as week producing content.
If the production was less professional do you think total viewership hours would drop significantly, or would it be distributed across more channels?
its fine for the genre of video thats just someone narrating while filming with there phone and almost no editing. if someone is doing something interesting, i prefer this to something well produced, its more candid and relatable, and lacks the artifice most projects designed for youtube have
This is exactly why TikTok won. It is so much cheaper to iterate ideas on 10” videos.
You make non interesting 20’ YT video? Well too bad your 80 labor hours & equipment time are lost.
TikTok won? YouTube is significantly larger, with over 2.7 billion monthly active users compared to TikTok's 1.6 billion.
Even if you count TikTok's higher average watch time per user, YouTube's broader demographic more than makes up for it.
> As a professional YouTuber
Well, there's your problem.
You want the numbers that come from mass consumption, which means catering to the lowest common denominator thus producing shit with gold plating while then complain the gold plating is bloody expensive.
Some people just are knowledgeable and want to share with the rest of us mortals like say someone like Terrence Tao. Putting someone like him on "YouTube" is a goddamn travesty. We need an alternative and yes, you won't make money and no, it's not for you then.
YouTubers are now blurring out women's cleavage.
Not bare breasts. Cleavage. Nearly all of Pamela Anderson's notable body of work would need to be censored to avoid risking loss of that precious, precious monetization. It's like fucking Iran.
And of course you can't say "die", "kill", "suicide", etc. You have to talk like a parody of 80s cartoon censorship—literally. (The neologism "unalive" came from Deadpool in an animated series called Ultimate Spider-Man, who realized he was in an animated show but thought it was 80s Saturday morning fare and constantly minced his intent to kill by saying he was going to "unalive" his target.)
Monetization has had a chilling effect on the kind of content people put on YouTube. I do not mourn its lack, at least on alternative video platforms.
> As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.
As a video watcher, the main issue I have with YouTube is the presence of monetization.
Honestly I found that the videos I come to Youtube to watch are either personal, non-monetized hobby video, or just a head talking to camera.
That's great, but you represent 1% of viewing patterns.
According to another comment, youtube gets ~2.7B MAU. Then that 1% would mean 27M people are looking for that kind of thing.
Got a source for that claim?
You can compare view counts of those channels to more clickbaity or professionally produced channels. And you'd also be surprised that many of those "head talking to camera" YouTubers also have production teams behind them, at a certain scale and revenue they're not editing their own videos.
Yeah, I think a lot of people on Hackernews fall into the "advertising never worked on me" or "I'm too smart for propaganda" camp.
Clickbait is not just big red arrows and "OMG" in the title. It certainly can be, for some demographics. For other demographics, clickbait can be a video titled "The Theorem That Changed Math Forever" and a blurred out formula in the thumbnail.
If you ever saw a video and just instantly had the urge of, "I have to see this", you successfully got clickbaited. If you dislike constant sound effects and transitions and just want to see someone speak - a lot of adult audiences feel the same way, which is why many big channels deliberately produce content in that way. It's still a similarly skilled editor who probably could make overproduced content if they wanted to - they're just making the choice to make the video more relaxed.
Your issue is assuming that this is trying to replace YouTube for those who wish to try and make money from this. I suspect this is much more closer to a Google videos or YouTube back in the day which was pretty much just random videos, plus lots of conferences on there (which don't get enough views to monetize). This can easily replace that and is something I would support. YouTube hasn't always been monetising and it is good if we have a competitor against it.
It's not about people "trying to make money", it's about viewers wanting to see high quality videos.
High quality videos just cost a lot of money and labor to produce. There is simply no way around this. Any platform which doesn't let creators monetize effectively will be stuck with what people produce in their free time. Which will essentially always be worse, because the competitors will have creators with actual budgets and time to work.
They don't necessarily. e.g. I'd consider Ravi Vakil's Algebraic Geometry videos[0] among the highest quality videos on youtube, and its just him talking over a screen share. Fields medalist Richard Borcherds likewise has posted a ton of lectures of him just talking while he writes on paper.
In fact, I'd expect the highest quality videos to have a relatively low viewership. Most people seem to want Mr Beast or whatever.
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=WTEZjR5aNjw&list=PLoaXcYRr65txn8...
Having your own distribution has it's benefits as a fall back or alternatives, in addition to publishing elsewhere like youtube.
The cost of creating and editing videos going to come way down, there's already ways to do it in the past few years.
Maybe the purpose of Youtube going forward is to be a quarantine for content whose purpose is to be monetized.
If YouTube becomes a quarantine for high-quality content, then it will also become a quarantine for viewers.
the fundamental issue a lot of people here don't seem to get is that high quality videos that people want to watch are expensive to create. Besides the huge amount of high-skill labor, there's also just production costs, software, equipment, upkeep, etc.
At the very least, ignoring all other costs, a single person making good videos somewhat regularly is a full-time job. People who make entertainment also need to eat and pay rent, the money has to come from somewhere.
Big corporations that pay big creators millions per production are just normal studios like Disney and Paramount and nowadays Netflix and Prime. YouTube is the competitor to that. No matter how professional you think of your operation, you're not Christopher Nolan or even BBC Earth and neither is anyone else whose primary distribution channel is YouTube.
Good examples of more or less "free" content that fits PeerTube are cited in other comments, though. Conference footage, MIT OCW, archival footage of any kind of live event. Productions where the work is in putting on the event in the first place. Holding the conference, creating a course, putting on some kind of skateboarding competition, whatever it might be. Incidentally filming it and uploading the footage costs next to nothing in comparison, isn't expected to drive revenue compared to the live attendance, and it doesn't make much difference to the viewers if the footage is terrible. Shitty quality Feynman lectures is still watching Feynman lecture. It was really cool, for a recent example, that somebody found and uploaded phone footage of Caitlin Clark's fabled scrimmage against the Iowa men's team from however many years ago. Nobody cares about the quality of the video or who filmed it. Likely nobody subscribed to whatever channel it first ended up on, but how cares? People who wanted to see a rare real world event would still have been able to find it and it cost nothing to the person who pulled out a phone and turned it on while that event was happening.
Virtually all of the content I watch on youtube does not fall into this category. The content I watch is a mixture of raw footage, a guy speaking to a camera with minimal editing for 10 minutes (think Rick Beato, for those who know him), edited down footage of people working (pool cleaning guys, chefs, etc) or people playing music.
Frankly I wouldn't care at all if all of your over-produced thumbnail-bait disappeared overnight.
This is just a great example of people who aren't in content creation fundamentally not understanding the ecosystem.
This isn't about "over-produced thumbnail-bait". This is about all high-quality media.
You mention Rick Beato. Do you really think Rick Beato sits down behind his laptop to edit his own videos? He has nearly 6 million subscribers and produces around 10 long-form videos per month. He has at the very least an editor (probably full-time) and a thumbnail designer (part-time), and I assume also a manager who sets up brand deals and contacts musicians for his interviews. He also records his videos on expensive cameras inside his well-lit studio, which also isn't cheap. It's very difficult to tell how much YouTube channels generate but I wouldn't be surprised if the Rick Beato channel is at this point a >$20K/month operation.
Edit: Also, do you really think Rick Beato making "The Secret Weapon Behind Dr Dre" or "The Real Reason Music is Getting Worse" is not clickbait? It's just clickbait, but for people like you. Part of good advertising is making people feel like they're not even being sold anything.
Indeed. Even streamers who just speak to the camera and play video games have a team of multiple people behind them, which some streamers discuss the economics of openly.
I think the problem is that the "act" of a lot of streamers and content creators is that they are relatable, in the sense that, part of watching a video game streamer is the appeal of, he's just a guy like me playing games in his bedroom. The problem is that this is all an act, or kayfabe as they would call it in wrestling. But it's an act so good that unlike wrestling, which everyone knows is fake, most people that are not at least adjacent to the content industry genuinely have no idea.