this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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A mass migration to a federated YouTube alternative couldn't come sooner.
I keep seeing people throw this idea out there but I have yet to have received a reasonable answer to a simple question: How would content creators get paid on a federated video platform?
@I_Comment_On_EVERYTHING @CowsLookLikeMaps
Patreon?
Yes, content providers make money on YouTube, but considering that Google makes more than then they do as a percentage certainly begs for some other solution.
I have a bit over 60 YouTubers I'm subscribed to on YouTube. Am I supposed to pay $60+ every month to have access to them? The cheapest patreon I've ever seen was for $1 and that wasn't even for full access just a "buy me coffee, thanks" tier.
What about discoverability, how am I supposed to randomly stumble across niche content creators that don't have a huge following?
Not saying it isn't possible I just can't seem to wrap my head around how it would work.
I think Nebula aims to solve that.
The other big question is who's paying for the infrastructure? If payments are done through a third party like Patreon, the host can't take a cut. Serving lemmy text and image content from a home server is one thing. Being a 4k streaming host is an entirely different business. Way more computing load and bandwidth, which means higher hosting costs.
Ideally, it would be a P2P protocol where the main seeder is either the content creator directly, or a service paid by the content creator (who is funded by their audience and/or sponsors).
I believe there are many podcasts that work somewhat like that (minus the P2P part, they just simply use RSS). Some hosting services have features to insert ads into the audio podcast being hosted.. so the content creators still can choose to do that if they want, but the advantage is that there's isn't a monopoly for a single hosting provider and you can access the podcasts from many different podcast apps without needing to rely on a specific website and company that decides how you can watch it.
Patreon should offer a donation bank. Donate $10 a month. Then you can add patreons to the bank and the ten gets split equally between them?
Instances could probably find ways to be ad supported or creators could do 3p sponsorships or ads in videos. Not everyone has to chip in to everything they subscribe to. It's still impossibly hard compared to youtube though.
e: what about opt-in ads (banner or otherwise) for channels you want to support? could be cool
That will never work. It simply doesn't work at scale like that, and it's very confusing for the non technical. Creators shouldn't have to worry about anything except uploading and moderating.
I wonder how that would work. My understanding is running a video site is extremely expensive. Transcoding compute, massive amount of storage, etc. Sure, a few small ones could exist, but enough to replace even a fraction of YouTube's userbase? I just don't see how the math works out. I mean, text-based Lemmy and Kbin had slowdowns/outages for months with just tens of thousand of users...
And that's to say nothing of the copyright hurdles. Imagine people who don't own the original videos start replicating content from YouTube -> fediverse-style video sites. The lawsuits would crush the new platforms to dust.
Believe me, I'd love to see competition. YouTube has had too much power for too long. It sucks how they treat their content creators, and even their users to some degree. But just like how no one up and starts a new electric power company, there's a reason big players are entrenched: MASSIVE startup costs.