I wonder if there's a businessmodel for selling self-hosted video streaming solutions for this kind of content creators. Would be a fun product to build if nothing else. Putting the "you" in YouTube
Hosting the videos is not the issue but discovery. Not being on youtube might work for big channels but even they probably get a large % of their views from searches/recommendations.
Hosting the videos is definitely an issue. The cost for distributing a single FHD video with a million views is staggering. YT benefits from Google infrastructure to do it “for free”.
Personally, I think the way to end centralization is to introduce enough viable options that are willing to cohabitate and even cooperate. These viable alternatives can't be interested in total dominance and probably need to have agreements that allow transfer of content and data. Personally hosted sites backed by centrally maintained software is a logical choice if you can optimize for the lack of bandwidth sharing…
There's a fundamental tension between competition/choice and low friction. On the internet it seems like whatever has the lowest friction wins.
Examples...
People hate the fact that there are so many paid streaming services now, they just want one, that has everything and pay about $15 a month for it.
People don't and won't switch away from twitch.tv, mixer tried to compete by poaching two of the biggest streamers in the world, their own audiences wouldn't follow them from twitch to mixer.
I did not even know that Linus had his own site. Fantastic. I won’t be watching his videos on Youtube anymore! Hopefully, everyone I watch will have their own websites, so that I don’t have to visit Youtube.
LTT fan here. Just a couple words of warning about using LTT as a source of serious tech information. He had something along the lines of a “best laptops for typing” video without mentioning the Thinkpad. He continuously promoted Razer laptops without mentioning that they had an internal 50% failure rate of their own Razer laptops. (Thanks for keeping it real during a WAN Show, Luke.) I still watch LTT as entertainme…
TIL the word "gurn". Never once heard it before and even just now autocorrect tried to insist it was "turn". The description is indeed apt for what I see in a lot of thumbnails. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurn
It's competitive in the UK: https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/41282197
It's also quite well-known to users of certain psychoactive drugs.
The thing I've heard is "1,000 views = $1". I don't know how true that is anymore but it's my metric. Mark Brown, of Game Maker's Toolkit, puts out vids on Youtube that get a couple hundred thousand views (1 or 2 vids a month). So he could theoretically get a couple hundred from those. But his Patreon following nets him a couple thousand a month ($11k!) When you have niche content you can end up getting way more per…
Youtube ad rates seem really high for the personal finance dudes. Graham Stephan and Andre Jikh come to mind. I think that genre allows for showing those scammy get rich quick motivational guru type ads, which pay well. Everyone else has to be sponsored by ExpressVPN and CuriosityStream.
Adds are based on the viewer, I occasionally get adds for Bentley when I watch back the streamed AP games I play in.
I also get a lot of Farage's new presumably penny stock product adds ( just let those play out to maker sure he's paying out)
What strikes me as odd is those super low quality portrait videos with uncanny valley synthesised like I am going to buy that crap?
> Linus Sebastian Something to understand, for those who might have just seen some youtube videos of him being goofy, is that he's an actor . The guy on camera doing stupid stuff is a stage persona. It's an intentionally cultivated image and media persona to get as many video views as possible. I sort of see him as one possible aspect of the low/medium budget TV production stuff which is common in his home city, Vanc…
Yeh he's just amping up aspects of his personality - and didn't Linus actually start as an employee of one of the lager Canadian pc suppliers.
> Linus Sebastian Something to understand, for those who might have just seen some youtube videos of him being goofy, is that he's an actor . The guy on camera doing stupid stuff is a stage persona. It's an intentionally cultivated image and media persona to get as many video views as possible. I sort of see him as one possible aspect of the low/medium budget TV production stuff which is common in his home city, Vanc…
Linus Tech Tips is essentially the "Top Gear of Tech" - it's over the top, hammed up, but eminently watchable and there are plenty of nuggets of useful information.
It's more watchable than Top Gear for me. Maybe LTT employs better actors but in any case I believe in its candid elements more. On Top Gear it's completely obvious it's all scripted but we're expected to believe it's not. I find it very annoying and quite uncomfortable to watch.
I never really thought of it that way, but I suppose you're probably right to some extent. Though I'd wager you could achieve similar technical/artistic results with a decent local college that has an arts program or an engineering school. I always thought it was a suprising success, because he's actually located quite a distance from Vancouver proper, in kind of a suburb called Langley. As a local, I've been there a…
As a person in the Vancouver area: a lot of the film industry is out in east Burnaby, the industrial area of New West/Poco/Coquitlam, Surrey and the Fraser Valley for access to lower cost warehouse space, for sound stages/sets, and parking spaces... I don't know precisely where the Linus studios are but I wouldn't be surprised if they're in the industrial area near the south side of the golden ears bridge.
Oh, I forgot about those areas. Used to work in South Burnaby and there was definitely some filming happening there. I guess I normally think of North Shore studios, and areas more directly around Van, but certainly you'll save money going further out. Forgot about the Coquitlam areas as well, with such places as the well-known mental hospital. In east-van now, so as is tradition, I assume nowhere else exists ;)