Why would you want advertisers? Advertisers are part of the problem.
Realistically I should be aiming to replace Google's revenue for my eyeball traffic, because that covers all of the costs as well. Still seems very doable.
It would be nice if Patreon partnered up with them and handled the transactions.
That's like 1-2 dollars worth of 'penny' donations per day. I'm not sure i would be willing to pay that, esp. if for videos that i'm only mildly interested in, and would not have gone to watch if it weren't free.
I doubt I skim through even 10 video a day. I think people like myself are more likely the norm than the exception.
A common "digital fallacy" people make is assuming 'everyone' uses a site like they use it. Most people don't.
Ads are a revenue stream mostly for the platform e.g. YouTube itself. You can have a look at this[1] or any other "how my YouTube channel makes money" video to see that's the case.
In-video ads, on the other hand, are indeed a significant revenue stream for creators, but those have nothing to do with the platform and everything to do with the single creator.
For smaller Youtubers (LTT is a very large channel) the gap between AdSense and in-video tends to be wider. I don't have hard data on this but it's the result of talking to several youtubers in person. If someone has the data, it would be cool to share it here.
I would much rather the old internet come back where "content creator" was never a word that existed, or could exist.
Why does money have to touch everything? Why do I continue to make comments on HN? It's certainly not because I hope to monitize this. It's fun and you share your ideas.
Acting like removing the ability for creators to get money from ads is going to eliminate all creators is silly, so yes it's a hard sell for existing creators, and if forced upon it'll remove a lot of the profit driven creators, and I view that as a good thing.
Sure, content creation is a job whether they're compensated or not. I'm not saying that we deserve free content, I'm saying that there will always be people bored enough to create content they want to share.
Image macros are created daily but nobody is creating them with the expectation of compensation. (There are social media accounts who compile them so they can gain followers / post ads, but the original creators aren't)
People write blogs knowing they get 20 views per month. That's the voices I want to hear. Not from someone who reads a book about how to get $5k in passive income per month by churning blog posts and growing a mailing list!
The number #1 post on the front page about blogs has this comment
"As a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to."
Just replace blogs and newsletter with YouTube channels and that's my sentiment.
There are many Youtubers whose content I like, but if I had to pay monthly fee (or pay per view) for their videos I wouldn't watch them. I think this was pretty much confirmed with the Youtube Red experiment. Many of the channels I follow got picked up for the program, but I have no desire to pay for the shows they produced for Youtube.
And how the ads work on Youtube makes it completely unwatchable without AdBlocking and I am not paying for the Youtube Premium to remove ads because A) it won't remove the ads and sponsorships that are embedded in the videos and B) I don't want to give Youtube as a platform any cut.
You're willing to watch the content, just not pay for it.
This is why concepts like PeerTube will never attract the majority of content, because it isn't free to make it, it isn't free to show it, it's only free to consume it.
Yeah, I can watch someone pour molten metal on safety glass, that seems interesting, but I wouldn't pay for it. It isn't that interesting.
Ironically, when I go to Peertube, all the content there is objectively low quality with extremely poor production value, little to no editing, and clearly done with the lowest of budgets.
The content airing on Youtube from the top ~1000+ creators is easily as good or better than the majority of cable TV.
It's often extremely high quality content, frankly.
And yes there are some Youtubers whose I have subscribed to and their content is often great. However it is not consistently great enough to pay for it just like cable TV. And that is just the top 1% of the top 1%. Rest is at best mediocre and often just grabage.
We're talking about business models here, we're talking about a whole industry, and you should realize that your opinion is worse than useless, it's actively harming your ability to understand and predict
If PeerTube wants to be a 0.00001% write off for radical CopyLeftists and "Hackers" to put up some low effort, low value, "good" content then so be it but to even bring up Youtube in a conversation of yet-another-tiny-site is silly, because that concept is not competing with Youtube and could never compete with Youtube.
As for PeerTube I don't care. Sadly video is currently expensive to host and only Google has the pockets to operate a site like Youtube. I won't pay for it and the day my adblocker stops working is the day I stop watching it.