Yeah, I don't think so either. For lots of creators, YouTube is about earning money with ad revenue with their videos. And the audience comes to watch their videos. So unless we introduce lots of ads to PeerTube and pay the creators, it won't become an alternative to Youtube (in specific).

I think Peertube will stay it's own thing and not become a clone of Youtube. And as such it'll always target a different audience and have different content available. So it can't really become an "alternative".

[–] moncharleskey@lemmy.zip 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There's always the support via Patreon route.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Sure. I just think at that point it's no longer a "alternative to YouTube" since YT works a certain way and this changes quite a lot about the dynamics. It'd be more an alternative to something else, just not YouTube.

[–] moncharleskey@lemmy.zip 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That's fair, but the number one complaint about YouTube is the ads, and I do think content creators deserve to be compensated for their time. Perhaps a way within Peertube to donate to the creator?

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Yeah, PeerTube already has that. Everyone can add their info about sponsoring and it'll show up. I also think this is the correct path towards a good video platform. I don't think Framasoft wants to become a payment provider and hire lots of people to handle money, disputes and legal stuff, so this is the next best thing they can do... Just let the creators upload their patreon, ko-fi, buymeabeer or IBAN number, whatever they like. And all of this is already there for quite some time now.

[–] moncharleskey@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago

Yeah, I wouldn't want to do payment processing either. Thanks for the information though, as I haven't really used Peertube since I don't use YouTube much.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

YouTube is about earning money with ad revenue

If you watch anyone who actually discloses their income, adsense is usually a fairly small %.

Most of it comes from donations, direct sales, product placements, etc.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Do you happen to know anyone who disclose their income, and does both sponsorships and Adsense? I've tried looking it up but either it's old articles or the people are more tied to their community and don't really do sponsorings in the first place. I'd be interested to read some numbers... Ideally including all possible sources like advertisements, paid sponsoring and community donations.

[–] yessikg@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 days ago

Transport Evolved shares the info with Patreon supporters

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 3 points 2 days ago

LTT does long and detailed breakdowns periodically

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 7 points 2 days ago

I'd say it depends on your uses.

If you're an organization looking for a platform in which to publish your videos so that they can be spread in your newsletter/social media and embedded on your website, it's probably a very good alternative.

If you're a content creator who runs on donations and has a dedicated following already, it might be good. And as the fediverse grows, it will only get better.

For a lot of the content creators who live off engagement and clicks, it's much less likely to become a viable alternative. The kind of content people will watch for hours, but that nobody would ever consider paying for.

I think it's not about one platform replacing all of YouTube, but about providing viable alternatives for specific uses.

[–] Phegan@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Ideally the solution would be finding alternatives for creators to make money, sponsorships is one, they can make money on those no matter the platform and where they get viewers, same with support platforms like patreon and kofi.

The goal would be to watch videos there so creators have a reason to cross post and then support them in other ways, if possible, mentioning peertube as the avenue you watched them.

Cross posting to a peertube instance should be pretty light weight for creators and we should encourage it.

[–] illi@lemm.ee 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Might be wrong but doesn't majority of the money come from sponsors and such? I was led to believe ad revenue was just a nice little bonus.

Biggest issue probably will be how small it is so it would not be worth it to sponsors.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I guess you're right. Reportedly, ad revenue is getting worse all the time. I've tried finding some recent numbers from some channel but seems very few of them make their income transparent. I know one or two, but they don't do sponsoring in the usual way... But I guess it's true and lots of channels rely on sponsorships and Patreon these days. From what I read. That would certainly make it easier to switch to a platform that doesn't have ads in the first place. I kind of missed that. That'd mean it's down to the network effect. But I'd like to see some exact numbers. Ultimately, we'd need to cater for a lot of different creators, from Mark Rober to Kurzgesagt to someone doing it for fun. And ad revenue would have to be really bad, because lots of the popular and big youtubers earn their livelihood on the video platform. And even a paycut of like 20% might be unacceptable to them...

I think this is a really good point. If we now get the Fediverse bigger, and regular people start to have accounts on federated and interconnected platforms, we'd be okay without advertisements and invading privacy, if that's not the predominant business model anyway.

[–] illi@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Even minor revenue cut is a revenue cut, that's true. The creators would need to be believers, or YouTube would need to do a fuck up.

Realistically though, best we can hope for for now is them crossposting to both YouTube and PeerTube