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.
> 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.
That's an absurd statement.
Every video I've uploaded has gotten some views. Very few videos get zero views.
People forget that historically, Youtube wasn't a place for "content creators", but really just for people to share stuff with friends. Easily 95% of uploaders are not trying to make any money.
i upload unlisted videos to share privately with a single family member. or as a backup so i dont have to store it on my phone etc. silly to assume that people post things because they want it to be seen by e v e r y o n e.
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.
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.
that works for people you regularly watch, but what about the people that put out the rare random great video. or a video on a topic when you're trying to fix something. People dont subscribe to those patreons, and thus those kind of creators rely on ad revenue.
What an absolutely bizarre thing to write in response to a link to a completely free software project with 541 contributors. Here you have hundreds of people who are exactly giving away highly skilled work for free.
Software has such a vibrant open source scene because software has probably the biggest impact-per-unit-time out of anything ever created and it has close to zero development cost and distribution cost. It's basically, skill+laptop+time. That's all you need to get a product in the hands of millions.
There is a reason why there is mountains of free software and comparative dust mounds of free media, free hardware, free services.
LLM progress in the last year notwithstanding, software is not cheap to develop. I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. this project had multiple millions of dollars of labor embedded in it.
Software, like media, is simply free to replicate, and there's a much stronger culture of "I made this for me, and it costs me nothing to give it to you too, so you can have it too." There is a lot of free media out there though: music, art, short films, games or game mods, etc. What they don't have is marketing.
Software is the cheapest of all engineering disciplines by far. Literally the only cost is time and a $20 computer.
Compare to open source hardware, where you need a lab with thousands of dollars in equipment, need to consume supplies to build stuff and need to pay manufacturers for prototyping.
Software benefits enormously from having zero dependance on the physical world. Its about as resource intensive as building houses in Minecraft.
Just like doctors' and lawyers' consultations are cheap? That time is extremely expensive if it's something you are buying. Companies spend over $200/hour for the time of a competent engineer. Like I said, I wouldn't doubt this project here "costing" 7-figures despite being free. Things like Blender or KDE are probably 8 figures.
Not really sure how people need to be explained this, but for whatever reason, this most basic of information is seemingly skipped over. Even if peertube wants to pay 65%, that's just a bigger percentage of nothing.
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".