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PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

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Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#51

Post by deepsun »

djaro wrote: post #41

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…

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.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#52

Post by paxys »

djaro wrote: post #41

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…

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.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#53

Post by djaro »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #40
WarmWash wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creators get 60% of youtube's ad revenue from youtube. What does Peertube pay? There is your answer. If people want good stuff, there needs to be money flowing to the source of it. The internet desperately needs to shed this "everything good is totally free" mindset, because what it actually manifests as is "I love taking without the requirement of giving".

The matter of compensation or donation can be handled completely separately. Creators can be supported on other platforms like Liberapay, Patreon, Kofi, and many creators are supported that way. If we are talking about clickbait and making money from getting unwanted ads in people's faces, no thank you we don't need more of that.

About as likely as opening a grocery store where people can pay through voluntary donations.

I'm a professional YouTuber. The problem with a "donation" system is that, unlike something like tweets or even blog posts which are either free or low-cost to produce, high-quality video is really. expensive. to produce. And people just will not pay if they don't have to.

A good 20-minute video can easily cost 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor to produce. That is, a whole week of labor. And that's not counting expensive equipment, software, licenses, etc.

I cannot run a business on people deciding to give me money for nothing out of the goodness of their heart. And I am still a one-person business, imagine having 5 full time employees. Even YouTubers with millions of subscribers and mature audiences with disposable income often struggle to clear like $5K/month on Patreon. Which, for a multi-person business, is simply not enough. Meanwhile, that same creator might be pulling $20K/month through ads and a similar amount through sponsorships.

YouTube is more similar to Netflix and HBO than Twitter or Reddit. Yes, in theory anyone can upload to YouTube, but the majority of content that is actually watched is at this point produced by full-time creators, some of which are solo self-employed while others are at this point running whole media production companies. And those are the people you need to make a service succeed.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#54

Post by ndriscoll »

djaro wrote: post #41

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…

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.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#55

Post by an0malous »

pocksuppet wrote: post #9

PeerTube has some interesting technology with the P2P sharing between users who watch at the same time. But with these kind of projects I think there are unfortunately social factors that impact their success as well as technical factors. It's one thing to put a element on a HTML page (or implement video over webtorrent), it's quite another to make people actually watch it instead of their TikTok feed.

The P2P stuff will take off once AI slop is done destroying the current web, like a new ecosystem emerging out of the carcass of a dead whale

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#56

Post by dinkleberg »

paxys wrote: post #52
djaro wrote: post #41

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…

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…

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.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#57

Post by mywittyname »

infamia wrote: post #48
djaro wrote: post #41

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…

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…

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.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#58

Post by djaro »

paxys wrote: post #47
WarmWash wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creators get 60% of youtube's ad revenue from youtube. What does Peertube pay? There is your answer. If people want good stuff, there needs to be money flowing to the source of it. The internet desperately needs to shed this "everything good is totally free" mindset, because what it actually manifests as is "I love taking without the requirement of giving".

Online video sharing doesn't have to exclusively mean professional "creators" who make content with hollywood-like budgets and expect massive returns. There are 100+ million accounts regularly uploading on Youtube and only around 2-3 million of them are in the partner program. The overwhelming majority get nothing.

The problem is that all of those accounts that don't earn money don't earn money because they get no views, because they make videos no one wants to watch. I don't know the exact statistics but a simple Google search says that 3% of videos on YouTube get 95% of the views. Remove the top 3% of creators, you remove 95% of views.

The top channels get all the views because they're the only ones making videos people want to watch, and they're monetized because making such content is really, really expensive.

The problem is that beyond creators with "hollywood-like budgets", even just making 1 good video a week is a full-time job. Most creators are not looking to get rich or get massive returns, they just want to survive and pay rent. Which means any channel of any value has to be able to generate at least few thousand dollars month.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#59

Post by dymk »

infamia wrote: post #48
djaro wrote: post #41

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…

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…

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.

Re: PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform

#60

Post by dymk »

deepsun wrote: post #51
djaro wrote: post #41

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…

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.
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