All: please let's try to avoid repeating the generic discussion about how being on someone else's platform leaves you vulnerable to someone else. It's not wrong, of course, but it's been repeated for many years and won't lead to fresh conversation.
The goal on HN is curious conversation. Curiosity likes diffs [1], not generics [2, 3]. Try to comment in a way that leads to a new place rather than an old place.
The easiest way to do this is to respond to the specific new information in an article. As a nudge in that direction, I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases).
You don't only have to react to the specific new information in an article. Whimsical tangents and reactions are also ok. Just ask yourself if it's expected or unexpected [4], and prefer the unexpected.
I follow CGP Grey’s stuff and it’s been interesting and instructive to see how he diversified.
* His Youtube channel is his main platform
* However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there
* He also earns income from a podcast, Cortex
* The Podcast has its own brand of sellable things, currently journals and Tshirts
* He had a second podcast, hello internet, currently on hiatus. If ever something went catastrophically wrong with youtube this could be reactivated via the feed
* He has a large email list which he uses to reach people directly and drive traffic to videos if people request these updates
* He is also prominent on twitter etc and maintains secondary youtube channels, useful if main one taken down
* He runs a large subreddit for his following
So it is layers and layers of redundancy, built on a mix of other platforms and also two he controls directly (email and rss)
Still faces a youtube risk but it would take a an earthquake across platforms to truly wreck his income streams.
As someone who runs an online business and follows him it’s been impressive to watch how diversified he has made his comms channels.
CGP Grey is strange, so to say. He effectively abandoned Hello Internet. They once mentioned that they have 900K subs. Grey fully controlled HI, and it was way more popular than Cortex. If he wants to diversify so much abandoning project like this just doesn’t make sense.
Also he has no basic decency to announce cancelation and left Tims hanging, for many of whom it was the podcast.
> However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there
Did he break that down publicly or do you get your info from elsewhere? I've always been curious to know what a typical high profile youtuber income flow looks like, and how much they're really tied to Youtube.
> So it is layers and layers of redundancy, built on a mix of other platforms and also two he controls directly (email and rss)
Not really.
There is some kind of "channel" redundancy but no "revenue streams" diversification outside ads and patreon.
Without actually paying for content, one can usually find:
- google ads, low effort low reward
- brand sponsorships, high effort, fixed reward
- patreon subscriptions, high effort high reward
- tips and super chats and twitch
- sometimes brave BAT rewards
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, Vancouver BC. People who've met and worked with him in person report that he's a much more normal, calm, rational individual off screen.
I won't judge him for being goofy on camera because it's hard to make a living as a working actor. For every person who gets a job in a vancouver-produced TV drama that might last 2 or 3 seasons, there's dozens more people who are working as restaurant servers while trying to get their big break.
Linus learned all of this over the years, and optimized it over time. He's great at it now, but was pretty rough at first -- but he was never an actor, he was a geek that loved technology. He worked for a large computer reseller that gave him lots of resources when he was starting.
He actually built this in spite of all the production resources that Vancouver has to offer, and is more a "growth hacker" than actor I'd say.
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.
People watch videos largely for entertainment, even when the subject matter is a review of computer hardware or advice concerning technology. For pure informational value, a written format with occasional short illustrative video clips is usually more useful.
I think every successful youtuber has a cultivated stage persona because that's more entertaining than just watching an everyday person talk about a mechanical keyboard for 15 minutes.
This article is a little on the surface level, but it's true.
People were screaming about where platforms and digital sharecropping was headed all along... and we're here now. Youtube, which is basically digital free-to-air is even more centralised than old free to air.
Youtube really is an extreme situation. They really dominate a whole medium single handedly and youtubers have shockingly little power in the whole thing. There either needs to be some neutrality, competition or youtubers need to organize somehow... unionize even. Trying to have a relationship with audiences that doesn't run through youtube won't work for most channels... even ones with millions of views.
I always expected a porn company to come in and compete with youtube at some point. They have the infrastructure. I've also been surprised at how restricted youtube manage to be, and still succeed... just the skin censorship if nothing else.
a good story about floatplane: i signed up pretty much as soon as it was announced, then i forgot about it and also forgot my password.
i was billed -very little- for a while then i opened a support ticket to have my account restored, since i had been billed for a while i at least wanted to watch some content.
but apparently something in the backend had changed and they plainly refunded me from the time i had my last login (iirc) and then they allowed me to re-signup.
it's been nice because i had then been able to re-signup and also recover some money that were pretty much lost, and i wasn't expecting that nor asking for it.
The problem with Floatplane is that new creators who have ideas and skills but aren’t publishing elsewhere online (e.g., because they dislike the ad-driven model and don’t want their videos to appear alongside junk content) have nothing in terms of online optics that they could put into the application form—so they’d have to either support the likes of YouTube first by publishing there, or be capable of running their own site. I wish Floatplane charged a moderate fee upfront rather than having the vetting/review flow (which could still be an option for those who can’t afford the fee).
I think that's a great decision. Many people like to complain about Youtube and its policies and its algorithms but it's simply very hard to compete with it. Its offering is really unparalleled.
Hopefully these creators will manage to carve enough of a niche to create healthy competition, especially with a business model that doesn't rely entirely on ad revenue. It's going to be very hard though, making money from video hosting is a very difficult thing to do.
This is my view too. I'm hopeful that eventually some combination of technologies that already exist (peer-to-peer sharing, tor, blockchain, homomorphic encryption, maybe even wireless mesh networking) will evolve into a decentralised hosting and delivery system that everyone will use.
I'm woefully uninformed to speculate about how feasible this might be though, so it remains just a hope for me.
I spent some time a while back trying to build the “Shopify for Video streams” where creators could have a custom hosted channel that enables them to monetize however they’d like! Ultimately I didn’t do a great job of marketing it, but if anyone’s interested in giving it a spin for their channel feel free to fill out the beta interest form here: https://yourchannel.rreichel.dev
I think there's definitely a need for this and have thought about building something similar myself. I think one thing that is crucial which I don't see mentioned in any of your pricing plans is the ability to self host. You could dockerize your application and make it super easy for creators to set it up on their own infra. Otherwise they still have a large platform risk, they've just shifted it from youtube to your company.
Floatplane as explained by Linus doesn't make sense, you support a creator by getting videos a little earlier. The cost of building and maintaining a platform like that must be large and seems unnecessary for what is essentially video Patreon.
What is sad is that you see youtubers talking in code on videos, not saying words, self censoring because youtube's detection is so good, videos get demonetised instantly. This is also why most people have seen an Ad in a video for PIA or surfshark or worse, raid shadow legends.
That's the reality. I can't speak for other youtubers, but I have an audio DSP plugin called BitShiftGain. It does exact offsets of 6dB, because doing that alters the exponent and only the exponent of the floating point word without touching the mantissa, making it lossless if you had headroom for the adjustment (for instance, if you can go up without clipping, you can go up and down losslessly)
On YouTube I have to call it 'wordlength shift gain' because YouTube thinks I'm saying 'bitch'. And I don't know, maybe that would increase my YouTube discovery at some times when they're leaning more in the direction of provocation-for-engagement, but that's not the kind of channel I do, so I self-edit.
I don't find it sad so much as it's simply a step into the future: awareness means understanding what the algorithms will make of you. Fail to grasp that and you get caught in the gears. I also openly talk about how I allow YouTube to run ads even though I'm a uBlock Origin guy myself and encourage people to adblock likewise: I assume that if I balk YouTube on this, or fail to pretend that I'm after what meager revenue YouTube promises, that I'll be eventually punished for it. So, I keep up appearances, 'cos it's a key platform for me.
I'm currently watching the Linus Media Group playlist on how they make money and why they make clickbaity thumbnails, with interest. I could probably put some words into my thumbnails and construct them better. I earnestly believe Google is good enough to automate discovery of whether people are doing these things, and reward/punish them algorithmically based on whether they're in compliance, so I am probably blocking myself from discoverability by failing to include text on thumbnails even without a single Googler making a human decision on the matter. I don't know whether I need to make faces too: it's an experiment I could try if I felt like it. Gurning for dollars :)
> Floatplane as explained by Linus doesn't make sense, you support a creator by getting videos a little earlier.
You support creators by giving them money. In return for supporting a creator you get video content in return. Floatplane as a platform for the most part doesn't dictate what that content is other than it being in the format of a video.
LTT themselves have actually been moving away from pushing videos early to Floatplane and more towards giving unique video content on Floatplane such as behind the scenes videos.
You run into issues with promising videos early to only part of your community. For example when you have review embargos and want to make drop a video at the same time as every other YouTuber,
> The cost of building and maintaining a platform like that must be large
It isn't that crazy really. Unlike YouTube which streams most of it's video for free and has to recover that cost via ads, every person streaming on Floatplane has paid money to stream that content.
Floatplane has been scaling slowly which has allowed them to stay on baremetal instead of going to the cloud. They don't need a lot of the advantages the cloud has, such as the ability to scale on demand. This isn't your normal unicorn startup from silicon valley that needs hyper growth to attract more investors for an eventual IPO or buyout.
Linus and Luke are putting their own money into it because they want to have a fallback incase YouTube pulls the plug on them. They are not taking lots of investment to try and build a YouTube competitor.
Their costs are actually really reasonable. They have a much better profit sharing model with other creators than YouTube does. They recognize that they have a base line cost for a given creator, that is the cost of storing the video and processing it for example. Then they have a cost per user of that content. This may have changed but their model was recover that base line cost from the subscriptions and then take a much lower cut afterwards. So from a creators point of view you get more value as your scale the number of users from your community on the site.
> seems unnecessary for what is essentially video Patreon.
Eh, maybe. It does however let them focus very much on that video aspect and provide users with a solid experience dedicated to videos. I imagine over time they will add more features to Floatplane that help differentiate it.
I can’t help but wonder why services like Vimeo don’t come up more often when getting off of YouTube? It seems like Vimeo offers similar functionality already. Is there something about it that I’m missing / is it just not cool for content creators?
I think the problem is that once you get to a certain volume of content it becomes eye wateringly expensive on Vimeo. Louis Rossmann explained this in a couple of his videos (I never bookmarked them). Even if he were to push just his repair videos (i.e. not including his opinion pieces) he'd fall into into a whole other universe of cost.
Independent short films, animation, motion graphics - this is what Vimeo is associated with and the image they have cultivated of their brand.
You'll find other types of content, but Vimeo is not try to compete with YouTube's content scope. You won't find 'How to unblock your kitchen sink with baking soda' on Vimeo, or 'Learn Javascript in 60 mins', but you'll find these (and dozens more) on YouTube.
There's not much value add. Youtube is all about reach. It has 1000x the reach of vimeo. Once you've solved your reach issue, the most cost effective is to build your own platform (or white label something) and collect more revenue.
This discoverability on vimeo is poor to terrible.
Youtube feeds me a diet of videos that are hard to turn off, spanning literal decades and with some really weird stuff thrown in (and based on the comments, others have same experience - I'll be on a 10 year old video with positive comments from a day ago).
A common youtube quote:
No one: I want to see five year old archery videos
Youtube: Here, try this
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 entertainment for some reason, but come on Linus. I have major respect for your biz acumen, but you can do better for your audience.
Partially due to his recommendations, I once recommended a Razer to an exec above me, he eventually had to do a credit card charge back after it started to bend all on its own. Not a good look. Lesson learned.
If only there was some kind of really simple syndication so I didn’t have to visit 40 different sites to check if my favorite video creators have released anything new.
You comment made me realize that if it becomes reality RSS might finally make a much needed comeback. You'll just poll various decentralized website to find updates for content you actually want. Aaaah, now you got my hopes up.
If you had told me in 2005 that'd I'd become nostalgic for Flash-ridden, PHP backed, IE6-compatibilized internet I wouldn't have believed you, and yet here we are.
Ally Law needed to do this. He regularly trespasses to the top of sky scrapers and other unique buildings. YouTube tried to bring him down so he started his own site. He still posts on YouTube but it was a long process to get back. If you want to see a guy living, check out Ally Law. It’s a madness.
Maybe not totally on subject here. But Cleetus McFarland is one of the people I think is starting to make his move away from YouTube, or at least, diversifying dramatically.
Merch is huge for YouTubers in a lot of ways. He's been doing solid merch for a long time.
He also has been doing his Cleetus & Cars events for a few years now and those bring in big numbers.
Last year he announced purchasing an abandoned race track. Which he opened officially this year. This past weekend he had an event and the place was packed (COVID not withstanding... it feels like in Florida, where this is all located, COVID isn't a thing). He seems to have successfully saved an abandoned race track.
In an extremely creative maneuver they had to tear up part of the race track for repairs. To help fund the repairs he sold chunks of the track in a bottle with a t-shirt and a few other merch goodies. He literally sold chunks of the track.
He's now doing Pay-per-view events, which he started last year.
I'm sure a good chunk of his income still comes from YouTube, but in a lot of ways he's seemingly finding creative ways to make his business bigger. Eventually, I anticipate that YouTube and him part ways and he starts his own platform where he can make it more of what he wants it to be.
Because they are finally learning that all it takes to destroy their business is an algorithm glitch, or having 'wrong' political views, or just falling on the wrong side of an overzealous moderator.
When you use someone else's platform you are completely dependent on the owner of the platform, and being dependent on something you don't control is a huge business risk.
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 economy. If my hypothesis is true, then this is the tide turning in video sharing, though the tide may be a long tide.
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.
We are still a very long way from distributed discovery.
Back in the day at Demon Internet (well known 90s UK ISP)
every customer got a free 10MB of webspace - barely any of them used it.
But it should have been how we all hosted our blogs and our videos. And it would solve a multitude of social media issues.
If Facebook and youtube did not host its hard to see how they could compile trustable usage stats (#) and so hard to see how we could all find out we must watch Gangnam Style. Similar problems seem to hover over crypto-currencies.
Edit: some random thoughts
- DNS: In a world of individual producers, curated aggregation still has value as it provides a quality / interest gate. A TV channel implies curation, a review guide the same. Perhaps it is no coincidence Marvel has found its footing in a world where choice is infinite and curation zero. Every TV show hopes to land a few million dedicated fans.
- Social media companies basically have zero curation (this is weirdly tending towards including Amazon who are dumbing down curation in marketplace)
- Our natural curation signals are usually based around proximity (geography, recommendation, similarity). These fall apart where the same DNS hosts nazis and nannies. Especially where recommendations are controlled by (one?) algorithm.
- If enough viewing moves off YouTube (not merely the bits over pipes, it off the influence of the algorithm) then these other effects might start to show through.
- But even if we could gather reliable distributed usage stats (book publishers managed it for decades), distributed discovery becomes a strange animal. A dumb algorithm that recommends what is the most watched video in the world, followed by the second, would have some strange chaotic behaviour but would at least have twin virtues of simple and transparent. Start adding in anything else (here is my past history, make a recommendation, or here is my aspirational set of people (my twitter follow list is watching) or just show me what Barry Norman recommends, all of these can be made transparent - and open to a cottage industry of discovery algorithms.
- This cottage industry fascinates me - it's like the other industries I expected to exist but don't (decent job search, dis-intermediated real estate). Duck Duck Go seems the model here - there is likely to be a (regulated?) split in discovery - much like railways or phone lines - where the underlying monopoly bit (we scraping) gets hived off and everyone can access it at common fees - and the add on bits, the start of distributed discovery - appears as a more competitive market. And one hopes a less behaviour driven one (I am still wanting to know the revenue difference between Google storing my every move and returning what it thinks I want and Duck Duck Go just using the context of my query - and returning what I asked for.
- But hopefully after a Cambrian explosion of companies offering discovery - not just search or for videos and entertainment but even shopping (as Amazon hits the same split the Google inevitably will), after all that, we are still a long way from where I hope we can get.
- Everything online should treat me as a citizen, as even a patient - where do no harm is the first principle. If we live in an internet where my individual best interests are the legal and cultural norm, as professions are supposed to be, then we enter a totally different equation. We are all exploited online now, and the discussions are about harm reduction. But that's not the real end goal. Making sure quacks don't charge too much for the snake oil is not what made medicine work.
(#) ignoring facebook lying to advertisers etc etc
I was just thinking the other day that a lot of us in the 90s chose our ISPs based on how much web space was provided by the ISP, how many news groups the ISP gave access to, number of included email addresses, etc.
Even the first broadband providers I used offered web space. I can't remember when it stopped being a thing.
Why wouldn't you? It's becoming increasingly clear that you cannot trust your web presence (and by extension, your business) to one or two social media companies ... though that should have been obvious in hindsight.
And I don't want to hear anything about any startup 'disrupting' decentralized tech like the web, RSS (and by extension Podcasts), or email.
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
The goal on HN is curious conversation. Curiosity likes diffs [1], not generics [2, 3]. Try to comment in a way that leads to a new place rather than an old place.
The easiest way to do this is to respond to the specific new information in an article. As a nudge in that direction, I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases).
You don't only have to react to the specific new information in an article. Whimsical tangents and reactions are also ok. Just ask yourself if it's expected or unexpected [4], and prefer the unexpected.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[+] [-] graeme|5 years ago|reply
* His Youtube channel is his main platform
* However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there
* He also earns income from a podcast, Cortex
* The Podcast has its own brand of sellable things, currently journals and Tshirts
* He had a second podcast, hello internet, currently on hiatus. If ever something went catastrophically wrong with youtube this could be reactivated via the feed
* He has a large email list which he uses to reach people directly and drive traffic to videos if people request these updates
* He is also prominent on twitter etc and maintains secondary youtube channels, useful if main one taken down
* He runs a large subreddit for his following
So it is layers and layers of redundancy, built on a mix of other platforms and also two he controls directly (email and rss)
Still faces a youtube risk but it would take a an earthquake across platforms to truly wreck his income streams.
As someone who runs an online business and follows him it’s been impressive to watch how diversified he has made his comms channels.
[+] [-] vl|5 years ago|reply
Also he has no basic decency to announce cancelation and left Tims hanging, for many of whom it was the podcast.
[+] [-] verve_rat|5 years ago|reply
He was one of the driving forces behind Nebula, but I believe he is no longer involved in running it.
[+] [-] simias|5 years ago|reply
Did he break that down publicly or do you get your info from elsewhere? I've always been curious to know what a typical high profile youtuber income flow looks like, and how much they're really tied to Youtube.
[+] [-] jeromenerf|5 years ago|reply
Not really.
There is some kind of "channel" redundancy but no "revenue streams" diversification outside ads and patreon.
Without actually paying for content, one can usually find:
- google ads, low effort low reward - brand sponsorships, high effort, fixed reward - patreon subscriptions, high effort high reward - tips and super chats and twitch - sometimes brave BAT rewards
[+] [-] walrus01|5 years ago|reply
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, Vancouver BC. People who've met and worked with him in person report that he's a much more normal, calm, rational individual off screen.
I won't judge him for being goofy on camera because it's hard to make a living as a working actor. For every person who gets a job in a vancouver-produced TV drama that might last 2 or 3 seasons, there's dozens more people who are working as restaurant servers while trying to get their big break.
[+] [-] leoc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] desiarnezjr|5 years ago|reply
He actually built this in spite of all the production resources that Vancouver has to offer, and is more a "growth hacker" than actor I'd say.
SOURCE: Linus is a friend...
[+] [-] philjohn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zak|5 years ago|reply
I think every successful youtuber has a cultivated stage persona because that's more entertaining than just watching an everyday person talk about a mechanical keyboard for 15 minutes.
[+] [-] dalbasal|5 years ago|reply
People were screaming about where platforms and digital sharecropping was headed all along... and we're here now. Youtube, which is basically digital free-to-air is even more centralised than old free to air.
Youtube really is an extreme situation. They really dominate a whole medium single handedly and youtubers have shockingly little power in the whole thing. There either needs to be some neutrality, competition or youtubers need to organize somehow... unionize even. Trying to have a relationship with audiences that doesn't run through youtube won't work for most channels... even ones with millions of views.
I always expected a porn company to come in and compete with youtube at some point. They have the infrastructure. I've also been surprised at how restricted youtube manage to be, and still succeed... just the skin censorship if nothing else.
[+] [-] znpy|5 years ago|reply
i was billed -very little- for a while then i opened a support ticket to have my account restored, since i had been billed for a while i at least wanted to watch some content.
but apparently something in the backend had changed and they plainly refunded me from the time i had my last login (iirc) and then they allowed me to re-signup.
it's been nice because i had then been able to re-signup and also recover some money that were pretty much lost, and i wasn't expecting that nor asking for it.
i really hope to see floatplane grow!
[+] [-] strogonoff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bakary|5 years ago|reply
This is why those services as so necessary.
[+] [-] simias|5 years ago|reply
Hopefully these creators will manage to carve enough of a niche to create healthy competition, especially with a business model that doesn't rely entirely on ad revenue. It's going to be very hard though, making money from video hosting is a very difficult thing to do.
[+] [-] swlkr|5 years ago|reply
You host the content, and you can pick from UIs/algorithms for the discovery.
[+] [-] Sophistifunk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philistine|5 years ago|reply
It’s the same as the old Apple saying: if you’re serious about software, you have to make hardware.
[+] [-] JProthero|5 years ago|reply
I'm woefully uninformed to speculate about how feasible this might be though, so it remains just a hope for me.
[+] [-] Daho0n|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madprops|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rreichel03|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alex-wallish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dblooman|5 years ago|reply
What is sad is that you see youtubers talking in code on videos, not saying words, self censoring because youtube's detection is so good, videos get demonetised instantly. This is also why most people have seen an Ad in a video for PIA or surfshark or worse, raid shadow legends.
[+] [-] Applejinx|5 years ago|reply
On YouTube I have to call it 'wordlength shift gain' because YouTube thinks I'm saying 'bitch'. And I don't know, maybe that would increase my YouTube discovery at some times when they're leaning more in the direction of provocation-for-engagement, but that's not the kind of channel I do, so I self-edit.
I don't find it sad so much as it's simply a step into the future: awareness means understanding what the algorithms will make of you. Fail to grasp that and you get caught in the gears. I also openly talk about how I allow YouTube to run ads even though I'm a uBlock Origin guy myself and encourage people to adblock likewise: I assume that if I balk YouTube on this, or fail to pretend that I'm after what meager revenue YouTube promises, that I'll be eventually punished for it. So, I keep up appearances, 'cos it's a key platform for me.
I'm currently watching the Linus Media Group playlist on how they make money and why they make clickbaity thumbnails, with interest. I could probably put some words into my thumbnails and construct them better. I earnestly believe Google is good enough to automate discovery of whether people are doing these things, and reward/punish them algorithmically based on whether they're in compliance, so I am probably blocking myself from discoverability by failing to include text on thumbnails even without a single Googler making a human decision on the matter. I don't know whether I need to make faces too: it's an experiment I could try if I felt like it. Gurning for dollars :)
[+] [-] regnerba|5 years ago|reply
You support creators by giving them money. In return for supporting a creator you get video content in return. Floatplane as a platform for the most part doesn't dictate what that content is other than it being in the format of a video.
LTT themselves have actually been moving away from pushing videos early to Floatplane and more towards giving unique video content on Floatplane such as behind the scenes videos.
You run into issues with promising videos early to only part of your community. For example when you have review embargos and want to make drop a video at the same time as every other YouTuber,
> The cost of building and maintaining a platform like that must be large
It isn't that crazy really. Unlike YouTube which streams most of it's video for free and has to recover that cost via ads, every person streaming on Floatplane has paid money to stream that content.
Floatplane has been scaling slowly which has allowed them to stay on baremetal instead of going to the cloud. They don't need a lot of the advantages the cloud has, such as the ability to scale on demand. This isn't your normal unicorn startup from silicon valley that needs hyper growth to attract more investors for an eventual IPO or buyout.
Linus and Luke are putting their own money into it because they want to have a fallback incase YouTube pulls the plug on them. They are not taking lots of investment to try and build a YouTube competitor.
Their costs are actually really reasonable. They have a much better profit sharing model with other creators than YouTube does. They recognize that they have a base line cost for a given creator, that is the cost of storing the video and processing it for example. Then they have a cost per user of that content. This may have changed but their model was recover that base line cost from the subscriptions and then take a much lower cut afterwards. So from a creators point of view you get more value as your scale the number of users from your community on the site.
> seems unnecessary for what is essentially video Patreon.
Eh, maybe. It does however let them focus very much on that video aspect and provide users with a solid experience dedicated to videos. I imagine over time they will add more features to Floatplane that help differentiate it.
One example of that is live streams. If you want to live stream to your Patreon members they suggest you use Crowdcast, something you have to pay for separately (https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002973506-M...).
Floatplane supports live streaming.
[+] [-] scrose|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teh_klev|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imwillofficial|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Raed667|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] open-source-ux|5 years ago|reply
You'll find other types of content, but Vimeo is not try to compete with YouTube's content scope. You won't find 'How to unblock your kitchen sink with baking soda' on Vimeo, or 'Learn Javascript in 60 mins', but you'll find these (and dozens more) on YouTube.
[+] [-] tootie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|5 years ago|reply
But I would rather talk about the similarity between Vimeo and YouTube - they both are walled gardens. I would rather have many Vimeos that federate.
[+] [-] random5634|5 years ago|reply
Youtube feeds me a diet of videos that are hard to turn off, spanning literal decades and with some really weird stuff thrown in (and based on the comments, others have same experience - I'll be on a 10 year old video with positive comments from a day ago).
A common youtube quote:
No one: I want to see five year old archery videos Youtube: Here, try this
[+] [-] fakedang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] g42gregory|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] consumer451|5 years ago|reply
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 entertainment for some reason, but come on Linus. I have major respect for your biz acumen, but you can do better for your audience.
Partially due to his recommendations, I once recommended a Razer to an exec above me, he eventually had to do a credit card charge back after it started to bend all on its own. Not a good look. Lesson learned.
[+] [-] simongr3dal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simias|5 years ago|reply
If you had told me in 2005 that'd I'd become nostalgic for Flash-ridden, PHP backed, IE6-compatibilized internet I wouldn't have believed you, and yet here we are.
[+] [-] thoughtstheseus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selykg|5 years ago|reply
Merch is huge for YouTubers in a lot of ways. He's been doing solid merch for a long time.
He also has been doing his Cleetus & Cars events for a few years now and those bring in big numbers.
Last year he announced purchasing an abandoned race track. Which he opened officially this year. This past weekend he had an event and the place was packed (COVID not withstanding... it feels like in Florida, where this is all located, COVID isn't a thing). He seems to have successfully saved an abandoned race track.
In an extremely creative maneuver they had to tear up part of the race track for repairs. To help fund the repairs he sold chunks of the track in a bottle with a t-shirt and a few other merch goodies. He literally sold chunks of the track.
He's now doing Pay-per-view events, which he started last year.
I'm sure a good chunk of his income still comes from YouTube, but in a lot of ways he's seemingly finding creative ways to make his business bigger. Eventually, I anticipate that YouTube and him part ways and he starts his own platform where he can make it more of what he wants it to be.
[+] [-] Andrew_nenakhov|5 years ago|reply
When you use someone else's platform you are completely dependent on the owner of the platform, and being dependent on something you don't control is a huge business risk.
[+] [-] aninuth|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodah|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dageshi|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Swizec|5 years ago|reply
But YouTube isn’t where you should keep the rest of your business.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|5 years ago|reply
Back in the day at Demon Internet (well known 90s UK ISP) every customer got a free 10MB of webspace - barely any of them used it.
But it should have been how we all hosted our blogs and our videos. And it would solve a multitude of social media issues.
If Facebook and youtube did not host its hard to see how they could compile trustable usage stats (#) and so hard to see how we could all find out we must watch Gangnam Style. Similar problems seem to hover over crypto-currencies.
Edit: some random thoughts
- DNS: In a world of individual producers, curated aggregation still has value as it provides a quality / interest gate. A TV channel implies curation, a review guide the same. Perhaps it is no coincidence Marvel has found its footing in a world where choice is infinite and curation zero. Every TV show hopes to land a few million dedicated fans.
- Social media companies basically have zero curation (this is weirdly tending towards including Amazon who are dumbing down curation in marketplace)
- Our natural curation signals are usually based around proximity (geography, recommendation, similarity). These fall apart where the same DNS hosts nazis and nannies. Especially where recommendations are controlled by (one?) algorithm.
- If enough viewing moves off YouTube (not merely the bits over pipes, it off the influence of the algorithm) then these other effects might start to show through.
- But even if we could gather reliable distributed usage stats (book publishers managed it for decades), distributed discovery becomes a strange animal. A dumb algorithm that recommends what is the most watched video in the world, followed by the second, would have some strange chaotic behaviour but would at least have twin virtues of simple and transparent. Start adding in anything else (here is my past history, make a recommendation, or here is my aspirational set of people (my twitter follow list is watching) or just show me what Barry Norman recommends, all of these can be made transparent - and open to a cottage industry of discovery algorithms.
- This cottage industry fascinates me - it's like the other industries I expected to exist but don't (decent job search, dis-intermediated real estate). Duck Duck Go seems the model here - there is likely to be a (regulated?) split in discovery - much like railways or phone lines - where the underlying monopoly bit (we scraping) gets hived off and everyone can access it at common fees - and the add on bits, the start of distributed discovery - appears as a more competitive market. And one hopes a less behaviour driven one (I am still wanting to know the revenue difference between Google storing my every move and returning what it thinks I want and Duck Duck Go just using the context of my query - and returning what I asked for.
- But hopefully after a Cambrian explosion of companies offering discovery - not just search or for videos and entertainment but even shopping (as Amazon hits the same split the Google inevitably will), after all that, we are still a long way from where I hope we can get.
- Everything online should treat me as a citizen, as even a patient - where do no harm is the first principle. If we live in an internet where my individual best interests are the legal and cultural norm, as professions are supposed to be, then we enter a totally different equation. We are all exploited online now, and the discussions are about harm reduction. But that's not the real end goal. Making sure quacks don't charge too much for the snake oil is not what made medicine work.
(#) ignoring facebook lying to advertisers etc etc
[+] [-] jjbinx007|5 years ago|reply
Even the first broadband providers I used offered web space. I can't remember when it stopped being a thing.
[+] [-] macspoofing|5 years ago|reply
And I don't want to hear anything about any startup 'disrupting' decentralized tech like the web, RSS (and by extension Podcasts), or email.