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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

#121

Post by infamia »

dymk wrote: post #59
infamia wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#122

Post by BrenBarn »

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…

> 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.

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

#123

Post by WarmWash »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #119
WarmWash wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one donates money. It doesn't happen. Conversion rates across the board are around 1%. And then of those donations, most are the lowest tier/lowest increment. It's the most annoying and persistent counterpoint brought up in these discussions, but it has no grounding in reality. The most popular contingent of viewers are ad-supported, close behind are ad-blocking, then the last 5% are your subscribers and donators.

Counter example: I supported and still support a little a few great creators. So "no one" is already wrong. It does happen. It might not amount to a high monthly salary. Most likely not. That's a point you can reasonably make, but you can only wrongly claim, that no one donates. (I deem periodic support as donations.)

>Conversion rates across the board are around 1%. And then of those donations, most are the lowest tier/lowest increment.

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

#124

Post by nonameiguess »

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…

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.

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

#125

Post by infamia »

kulahan wrote: post #96
infamia wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?…

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.

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

#126

Post by karmakurtisaani »

al_borland wrote: post #31
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy is pretty ok actually. The lack of big user base is more of a feature than a bug.

Has it normalized? When I first tried Lemmy it was mostly communists talking about communism. Then after some Reddit drama it seemed to be a bunch of people complaining about Reddit. I generally like smaller sites, but those topics weren’t exactly engaging for me.

I got banned from some community for pointing out how shitty Soviet Union was in WW2, but learned to avoid that instance from that. It's a "federation", so you get all kinds.

There's discussion on all topics these days.

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

#127

Post by boca_honey »

whatever1 wrote: post #113
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…

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.

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

#128

Post by necovek »

nemomarx wrote: post #104
treesknees wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#130

Post by underlipton »

flaburgan wrote: post #78
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #18

I like the idea of all of these federated services but why does the UX always feel like an afterthought when it is the most important factor for adoption?

Do you have precise suggestion of what to improve? I'm genuinely interested.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48764717

You say that you're genuinely interested, but chances are that any given maintainer is not. Willingness to actually listen to UI/UX critique is what separates the Blenders from the GIMPs.

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