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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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While there are a billion things Google does that annoys me I'm not able to figure out how to create and maintain a video streaming platform without ads or paywall that finances both creation and the providing material.
I mean, who are the competitors and how do they finance it if not in a similar way?
I'd argue Youtube was better when creators weren't paid and people were just having genuine fun. The internet used to be free and filled with content by people with passion. Much like users and the current state of the fediverse.
I really just hate the "influencer culture" it spawned, and every idiot trying to emulate that meta instead of just making content.
I can absolutely understand that point of view and even agree to an extent.
However, as a counterpoint: creative people being able to support themselves with their work means they can focus on their art instead of it just being a side hobby to their money making job
Yes, but then you get channels like Linus Tech Tips where it became less about product reviews and just about volume production garbage content and forced contraversial content to keep revenue stream.
You also get countless other smaller channels that are just large enough to have youtube be their primary income, but small enough where they stay true to their original intent.
Anytime it is your primary income there is built in propensity to stray to ensure you income is maintained when viewership might wane. I think the channels where a dude works full time and youtube is the side gig has more chance of maintaining integrity.
A channel where a dude works full time and YouTube is a side gig wouldn't buy a $250k sound chamber to measure how loud the fans are on a crappy prebuilt (GN - the people who made the initial video about LTT). There are significant benefits to being full time dedicated to creating this content, and being paid well in response. Something like this would only be possible following your model if they already made tons of money outside of YT, in which case, they're already rich so what's stopping them from going full time doing what they want anyway and uploading those videos?
Seems a lot of channels grow and employ more people but for like no reason now they have a bunch of employee's and costs and have to undermine their morals and quality to push out content to make money. In reality the quality of content has gone down so what was the point except employing friends and family at best.
This is just how art is in general.
You bring a great point I hadn’t considered before. Only people with passion for something will do it for free while many more people with so that for cash. Though it’s interesting to see that cash doesn’t make passionate people’s content better it just makes more mediocre content.
Well, people with a passion also want to do what they do for a living.
There's also a class issue at play. If it can only be an unpaid hobby, then only people with the time to dedicate to it (in lieu of a second paying gig) and the disposable income to buy the necessary equipment (financed entirely by their paid job) are able to participate. For example, I work with people who are also working artists. They use the income from selling their art from their hobby to pay for those materials. It's not enough to live off, so it's not their primary income, but they wouldn't be able to participate in their hobby at the level they currently are if they weren't able to sell their work. Allowing people to profit from their labor makes these spaces more inclusive and diverse.
Certainly - and there still are those channels that we all love for their dedication. But there are a lot more mediocre channels too
If they weren't paid there would just be way more sponsorship deals and ad reads.
I think this person pines for the days of "Charlie bit me" and the "Harder Better Faster Stronger"s, when people posted videos because they had free time and wanted to share their hobbies, not because they wanted money.
I'm a little torn on this and I think it is relevant beyond video. I can see an emerging non-commercial web coexisting with the commercial one.
On the same note, it is amazing how people complain about quality of journalism, but get mad if they see an ad or have to pay a subscription to news sites.
I do have to second that concept there. Giving everything away absolutely free is not a sustainable business model. If we don't like ads, and we don't like paywalls, we need to actually start figuring out a sustainable model. And no tiny ads that are nowhere near where anyone looks, do not actually generate revenue, because people don't fork over much money to put up ads in places where few people will see them.
So we either need a system to have people give money directly to avoid ads, or we need a system of ads that... well are appealing both to those who want to post ads, while being acceptable to end users.
Yea I dont think people realize how little those tiny lil ads around the corners of the display pay. It's very little
There's always Web Monetization, where you can put some fixed money in and it is supposed to be streamed to the sites you visit by your browser. But I've never seen it actually implemented as a requirement for a site.
There are some things like that. For Podcasting there is the value for value method (I forget the name) you watch / listen to content which sends you credits, you can also purchase credits. If you like a channel you can send them your credits. So it is direct support rather than ads giving portion of revenue. If cash is difficult they ask for value for value by donating your time to help in someway, completly optional though. odysee and LBRY were setup that way also, but too bad LBRY CEO was charged with securities fraud
I don't have much money right now to donate to help fund my favorite content creators, though I absolutely would, but I do have a lot of technical knowledge and I could donate compute time, disk storage space, and/or bandwidth to host redundant copies of data for a given web service (akin to seeding Torrents, or ZeroNet zites)
I've noticed that right-wing propaganda outlets generally do not paywall, but "center" and center-left outlets usually do.
That's because the content is not the product.
That's because those propaganda outlets are generally bankrolled by billionaires who profit through tax cuts enacted by politicians voted into power by people radicalized by the propaganda. Different business model
The opposite is true in Australia. All the Murdoch papers are hard-paywalled—they usually can't even be bypassed by tools like 12ft. The slightly-less-right-wing papers from Fairfax use a soft paywall that can be bypassed with Incognito mode.
The rigidly centralist ABC is required by statute to be freely available, and left leaning media like the Guardian and the Conversation use, at most, a modal requesting donations which can be dismissed.
YouTube has some competitors...
Twitch - Not for general purpose video uploads and sort of stingy with how much you can upload. Twitch only saves highlights and YouTube saves everything you've ever uploaded.
Tiktok - Chinese spyware. Every video is vertical. Every video has stupid songs playing in the background and that TikTok logo. Not really for long form videos or anything serious.
Vimeo - You pay them to upload your video.
...if not in a similar way
Twitch - not different from YouTube since they display ads and they have a premium service. On top of that I can add that without female streamers dressing sexy and not always playing video games Twitch would not have as high revenue.
Tiktok. - still shows ads so they are not financing things in a different way.
Vimeo - yes, they finance their services in a different way. But it still doesn't answer how their content creators make money since Vimeo charge the content creators and doesn't allow ads. But seriously, Vimeo isn't a competitor to YouTube. I have a hard time imagining how they would grow to even a third of the size of YouTube.
Finance creation? It promotes lazy copycat contents. Even respectful (at least before their YouTube career) tech/artisan/DIYers etc are falling for the clickbait, the YouTube's basic/teen humor... I pass on the tabloid stuff.
You want to make views. use these keywords:
The thing is that platform is just a TV.
I guess content creators should also pay for their access on the platform, not just a cut on the revenue. it will enforce good/honest creation .
You might criticize the content all you want but it's another discussion for another time. The question is still it still how to finance a site like YouTube, with the content and amount of viewers it has, without ads or fees.
Your solution with content owners/creators paying for the housing of their creation is Vimeo.
Not even close to YouTube
YouTube quality can't compete with premiere television. Or even the premiere league
It's ok that you have that opinion.
pretty sure yt has little competition, at least around western audiences (not sure how the situation is outside here), and i doubt hosting a website is actually expensive. If anything, a lot of banks are getting worried on the lack of real money they have. Thats apparently needed to revive us industry because us government doesnt want its facilities in china anymore (doensn't make sense though, the government has no problem creating money out of thin air, to save big banks). For that reason the entertainment sector is starting to monetize everything possible, squeezing out of people that on average, don't actally have all that much money.
At least that my understanding of it
Hosting regular websites with heavy traffic can start to get expensive. Video streaming is extremely expensive.
wait actually didn't know this. Can you expand on that? tbh i'm quite ignorant in technology
If one video stream to one user uses 128 kilobyte per second out of your 100 megabit internet connection 781 users can watch that stream at the same time. However, the ISP will charge you per transferred gigabyte each month. So let's say that you serve 781 users that video 24/7 in a full month of 31 days ... It will be 100 megabit divided by 8 to get 12.5 megabyte. So it's 12.5 megabyte per second. That's 750 megabyte per minute. That's 45 gigabyte per hour. That's 1 terabyte or day. So around 31 terabyte traffic per month. (If you use this much bandwidth you will get a discount but it's still not going to be
Now, that's just for 781 simultaneously users.
What is we need to serve 781000 simultaneous users?
Now, this far we've only been talking about one video on repeat 14/7. What about 100000 videos and enough programmers and computers to design as system that lets each and every user choose any video whenever they need to? Now you suddenly have thousands of servers and harddisks running in a couple of hundred places on earth 24/7.
Now this is for you to provide your users 100000 different videos even before you start to pay content creators for their hard work.
Also, you need to be available 24/7 so now you have to make backups, redundant servers on different location that can take over in case of an accident, dedicated internet connection (being alone on the internet cable is not the same as sharing it with 100 other sites) and a whole lot of other things you need to take care of.
What about offering the 500 million videos YouTube offers their users?
... and all of this cost is paid out of your pocket?
By your reasoning, every single platform should be in the same shitty state of yt. Google is not as annoying, and most users don't need access to those google services that are paywalled (at least in my country). as far as i've seen, only yt and sometimes twitch put ads that you must watch in order to access their services. At least they hope we must watch them, i guess. Your argument was wonderful big numbers, but you got me with more questions than before
Text things are extremely data light. All of wikipedia's text is smaller than a 2k movie. There is absolutely data stuff happening in the background on the server that makes it more complicated, but the actual piped data that goes from a google search result is actually quite small (though larger than it used to be).
Video is at the other end. There's only so many things you can do to a video to reduce the amount of stuff you send to the user (and a lot of the things you do put more strain on the user's computer to interpret what you've sent).
Music, singular images, video game data, and mass data tend to be somewhere in the middle, though context does matter for each of them.
Comparatively, sending videos and storing videos for later use is many times a more resource-expensive task than sending an image, forum post, email, weather updates etc.
It doesn't have to be ads before videos, but it does have to be something (subscription services, the page itself being littered with ads, state backing etc).
By your reasoning, every single platform should be in the same shitty state of yt
What comparable platforms are you talking about that is not running ads or have some sort of pay-to-watch?
If we talk about Twitch and their revenue I can promise you that they would not be very profitable without female streamers dressed sexy that doesn't always play video games.
We now live in a world where users got used to never have to pay for content or experience. Even though Google makes insane money in different areas the cost for running and developing YouTube is huge. I'm not a fan of ads (I don't see ads when at home because of how I have set up my network) and the subscription plans always seems too pricey for the value I get when using different streaming services
But all of this doesn't change the fact that even though I don't like ads or paying for content I still haven't come up with a better solution myself.
Could something built on ipfs not compete?
Just use PeerTube or Jellyfin.
Yea of all the things to bitch about with Google, this one's pretty understandable tbh