cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/5294605
Youtube, for so many years, was just too good. Yes, they changed the 5 star rating system to likes and dislikes and a few years later disabled dislikes altogether, but their algorithm mostly digs up interesting content and it just works for creators and viewers.
This might change soon. Their new strategy to disallow ad-blockers will frustrate a certain kind of viewer. Those who dislike surveillance and like open-source tech, those who use uBlock Origin and know why.
Just like a few years ago mastodon suddenly reached a certain kind of popularity, because twitter had their first big fuckup, maybe Peertube is next. It certainly is the most polished decentralized solution that doesn’t use a blockchain. Creators or fans could easily host their own videos, fans can watch it, without ads.
And I don’t think we can solve this easily. I’ve heard bigger creators say they want to make money with their videos. And Peertube doesn’t do ads, so it doesn’t pay the creators. And we’re kind of going in circles now anyways because your initial suggestion was to switch to Peertube because of the YouTube ads. We can not have them and don’t have them at the same time.
Maybe the solution is sponsoring. I heard ad revenue had declined anyways and many creators mainly rely on sponsoring nowadays.
I don’t think it’s an issue. If your content is good, you should be able to find an audience and if you have an audience you’ll be able to find sponsors. That doesn’t have to be by directly reaching out to sponsors themselves, you can work with intermediaries.
Youtube obviously dominates the space right now but it’s hardly the only viable business model. In fact I think it’s better if content creators have more control than YouTube provides.
As far as I’m informed YouTube doesn’t treat them well. The creators are completely at mercy of ‘the algorithm’. It decides how much it wants to pay them per 1000 views, how many people it wants to recommend a video to, and there is little to no transparency from YouTube’s side. And if they encounter problems they get to talk to an AI. There aren’t many human contacts to solve an issues even if the creator’s livelihood is in danger.
