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I was actually kinda wondering the other day why super large content creators with good cash flow from what they already do, don’t ditch Google and Patreon or anything else that takes a cut to be nothing more than a middleman to accessing the content? They don’t need to host on the same level as YouTube; they could probably make more money hosting their videos on their own website, where they can control what is free or paid for, and can work directly with advertisers themselves.
I love that entrepreneurial attitude. If an online service is unsatisfactory, just develop your own software from the ground up and provision the infrastructure from your pocket. Car industry sucks? Just build your own car! GPU prices high? Grab a soldering iron and a handful of sand, how hard could it be?
Things are always more complex than they appear. The whole point of services like Youtube and Patreon is to offload that complexity onto the provider in exchange for a fee (or some other form of compensation) from the user. Just look at how many early Lemmy instances have gone offline because of the overwhelming financial or administrative burden. Hate the companies all you like, and by all means look for independent solutions, but don’t pretend they offer no value whatsoever.
Sauce plus and dropout as well. Basically run by youtubers to make content without relying on YouTube. A lot of this is running on pre-existing tech for running a streaming service and I assume it’s dependent on AWS (Amazon) hosting but yeah lots of smaller paid streaming services run by youtubers because YouTube sucks. I believe sauce plus is essentially the same as Floatplane on the backend, they mentioned working with LTT to make it.
And how do they get big? How do they get discovered? SEO ?
They’re getting huge because of the platform.
I’m not saying google is not evil but it literally gives them their audience.
I watch YT more than anything else by a mile, and if my top subscription moved to their website, and I had to jump through hoops to watch them on my TV device, by installing a browser or something I probably would stop watching them or watch them way less. Another TV friendly app sure that wouldn’t be a problem, but I don’t see many doing that.
Yeah, even an established creator is going to have a hard time moving their audience.
If YouTube weren’t a near monopoly it would be different. Then other companies would be competing for creators.
Making it worse is section 1201 of the DMCA. It makes it a crime to circumvent access controls. In the past, Facebook was able to grow by providing tools to interface with MySpace. People didn’t have to abandon their MySpace friends, they could communicate with them through Facebook, and Facebook could ensure that messages sent on its platform arrived to people still on MySpace. But, if you tried that today Facebook has access controls in place that make that a crime. The same applies to YouTube. Nobody can build a seamless “migrate away from YouTube” experience because YouTube will use the DMCA to block them.
The governments of the world need to bring back antitrust with teeth and force interoperability.
I’m talking about those who have already gotten big, like PewDiePie or Good Mythical Morning (the latter of which started on their own website before youtube even existed, btw). Not the dude who just started a channel last week and has nothing to do shit with.
The lift of running your own platform is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to creating your own video hosting platform.
It’s not that challenging with a partner to help manage infrastructure which even at his scale is not going to cost an obscene amount of money.
Edit: there’s a very massive difference between a single content creator hosting their content and a site hosting everyone’s content like YouTube as well in terms of cost, infrastructure, security and management.
You are correct. Websites, the stack to supply video encoding, even scalability is a solved problem.
The hard work isn’t technical, it’s getting people onto your platform in the first place (marketing), getting people to continue using your platform (retention) and the perennial problems of SaaS evolving with other SaaS platforms (how many dev hours are you willing to eat trying to keep up with the Joneses?).
SaaS, and in this case, SaaS offering content, is a losing game. You will either lose your shirt, sell your business, or become entrenched in a position whose inertia is difficult to break. How much of any of those you are willing to take a firehose of is the question.
It’s not easy, but you’re not guaranteed to end up
either lose your shirt, sell your business, or become entrenched in a position whose inertia is difficult to break
It depends on the personalities involved and the business model they go with.
Nebula has done really well with consistent growth as a premium offering where people pay one subscription fee to get ad-free videos from exclusively high-quality creators across a quote broad range of niches, in addition to bonus extras and Nebula Originals.
Dropout seems to have a lot of success with a range of mostly unscripted comedy, centred around a core cast of trusted comedic actors with a larger range of guests.
Floatplane, on the other hand, seems much less successful, probably owing to its business model being basically Patreon’s, but only for video. Instead of the wide range of content you get for surprisingly reasonable amounts of Nebula and Dropout, Floatplane ends up looking very expensive if you want to support more than one or two creators. Plus the creators on it haven’t got the same degree of trust; it ends up reeking of the sort of techbro vibes that people are explicitly trying to get away from.
I’m sure these are accurate statements, but the fact remains that I’ve never heard of dropout or nebula. At all.
And the only reason I’ve heard of floatplane is via LTT and Jeff Geerling, and I don’t actually use the platform itself.
That’s what I mean about inertia, google has it now and can coast for years on people just being lazy and staying with YouTube. That alone will be a loooong hill to climb for any other platforms.
LTT seems to have enough clout and has worked out a survivable business model, but notice that they remain on YouTube to capture and keep new views.
I must admit, I find that astonishing. Not that the average person on the street wouldn’t have heard of them, but that someone online enough to be having these sorts of conversations wouldn’t have.
Are you familiar with CollegeHumor, perhaps? After their corporate owners got screwed around by Facebook’s pivot to video (and the fraudulent data involved), they were going to shut down CH entirely until the head of the creative group reached an agreement to buy it out, and under his ownership he created the private streaming service Dropout. Today it’s mostly entirely private, with promotional content like the occasional episode or clips uploaded as Shorts put onto YouTube.
Nebula got its start as a sort of multi-channel network owned by and for YouTube creators, to avoid many of the big pitfalls that MCNs became known for. Its earliest more well-known members are Sam from Wendover/Half As Interesting, Brian from Real Engineering, Colin from CGP Grey, and Philip from Kursgesagt. The latter two later left over “creative differences” (leaks have seemed to imply, basically, that they wanted to keep it a small elite group at the core which could profit from increased growth while adding more creators, while the rest of the people then involved wanted a more equitable arrangement). It’s since grown to way too many channels to name, but if you’re interested you can see the full list here. A few choice selections might include tech reporter TechAltar (whose recent “1 month without US tech giants” and the Nebula Plus follow-up “Which alternatives am I sticking with?” video are reminiscent of the one this thread is about), astrophysicist Angela Collier, Canadian cultural commentator J.J. McCullough, history & video game design analysis channels Extra History & Extra Credits, TLDR News, human geography (with a focus on conflicts) from RealLifeLore. Linus from LTT has talked about Nebula once or twice, though his commentary on it gets wildly wrong, claiming it was a sort of pump & dump scheme where the main goal was to sell to private equity or something, seemingly because he’s projecting his own techbro capitalist attitude onto them. As I sort of mentioned above, Nebula basically serves as an uber-patreon. You pay a single subscription fee (when I signed up it was $30 per year, but it may have changed) to get mostly content that could be gotten for free (but with ads) on YouTube, plus some bonus content, some stuff a bit earlier, and a few Nebula Originals. Lindsay Ellis might be the most notable one there. Since getting harassed off the Internet by Twitter, all her videos have been Nebula Originals apart from 2 promoting her new book.
Neither of these are really meant to be a complete YouTube replacement, but rather a way for them to create more control over their stuff and get the stability of knowing they aren’t relying on the fickle YouTube algorithm (and the whims of YouTube censorship).
YouTube still offers them a service in directing them new viewers. The big creators all lose viewers but YouTube funnels replacement views faster than they lose. They could host their own videos but they are gonna see very little growth without Google either in search or with YouTube as they start to lose the base that followed them.
They also won’t be able to negotiate as good as rates for pre-rolls or in video sponsorships as if they were on YouTube.
The only real alternative would be to band together like the creators that are a part of nebula are doing. Hosting on peertube really isn’t an option unless you are independently supported and you are doing it as a passion project and don’t care about audience growth or retention.
Streaming video is expensive. LTT did it with Floatplane, even going so far as to develop their own backend. Watcher and some other YouTubers did it with Vimeo as their backend, but Vimeo still takes a large cut.
At the end of the day, people are doing this, but YouTube still offers a compelling value compared to other platforms. It’s hard to beat their scale, sophistication, and the discoverability of their platform.
Well, there is Nebula, which is kinda like that. But most of them also put their videos on YouTube, using Nebula as the premium ad-free option with a little bonus content.
I’m worried about Nebula’s business model being profitable enough to be sustainable in the long term but given their business model includes making every creator on the platform a part-owner of the platform that does limit how bad things can get
From everything I’ve heard, they’re already profitable, and are explicitly choosing only to grow in a sustainable way, without taking on outside investment which could force them into enshittifying down the line. With a relative lack of need to show extreme growth, and a lack of reliance on outside factors like advertising (being subscription-based), the only major risk that I can see for them long-term is user churn. Which is definitely a risk, but with the ever-creeping growth of the range of content they have and (at least for now) an attitude of being customer-friendly, churn seems a relatively low risk.
As far as I can see, at worst, the platform dies if the YouTube channels of the people on the platform die because of the YouTube algorithm, and they get bad churn (with fewer new subscribers because of the aforementioned dead YouTube channels at the top of the funnel), and they don’t get new more successful channels on before that happens. A scenario that’s far from unlikely, but which I would describe as “catastrophic, whether or not Nebula exists today”, so its existence for now as a hedge against more likely bad scenarios is still worthwhile.
That’s super cool. I’d love to know more about Nebula’s business practices, do you know where I could find that information? I’ve seen some interviews with their leadership that didn’t go into anywhere near the depth that I’d like and that’s about it
I was actually kinda wondering the other day why super large content creators with good cash flow from what they already do, don’t ditch Google and Patreon or anything else that takes a cut to be nothing more than a middleman to accessing the content? They don’t need to host on the same level as YouTube; they could probably make more money hosting their videos on their own website, where they can control what is free or paid for, and can work directly with advertisers themselves.
Literally all of them have tried at some point. But honestly you just end up with a bunch of effectively streaming services that you have to pay for.
I already have hbo, Netflix, krangle + and Hulu and YouTube and now I need «randomyoutuber+» x10 too?
Yeah no thanks
I love that entrepreneurial attitude. If an online service is unsatisfactory, just develop your own software from the ground up and provision the infrastructure from your pocket. Car industry sucks? Just build your own car! GPU prices high? Grab a soldering iron and a handful of sand, how hard could it be?
Things are always more complex than they appear. The whole point of services like Youtube and Patreon is to offload that complexity onto the provider in exchange for a fee (or some other form of compensation) from the user. Just look at how many early Lemmy instances have gone offline because of the overwhelming financial or administrative burden. Hate the companies all you like, and by all means look for independent solutions, but don’t pretend they offer no value whatsoever.
There are open source alternatives that already exist.
They have. Nebula is biggest im aware of, floatplane is another.
Sauce plus and dropout as well. Basically run by youtubers to make content without relying on YouTube. A lot of this is running on pre-existing tech for running a streaming service and I assume it’s dependent on AWS (Amazon) hosting but yeah lots of smaller paid streaming services run by youtubers because YouTube sucks. I believe sauce plus is essentially the same as Floatplane on the backend, they mentioned working with LTT to make it.
And how do they get big? How do they get discovered? SEO ?
They’re getting huge because of the platform.
I’m not saying google is not evil but it literally gives them their audience.
I watch YT more than anything else by a mile, and if my top subscription moved to their website, and I had to jump through hoops to watch them on my TV device, by installing a browser or something I probably would stop watching them or watch them way less. Another TV friendly app sure that wouldn’t be a problem, but I don’t see many doing that.
Yeah, even an established creator is going to have a hard time moving their audience.
If YouTube weren’t a near monopoly it would be different. Then other companies would be competing for creators.
Making it worse is section 1201 of the DMCA. It makes it a crime to circumvent access controls. In the past, Facebook was able to grow by providing tools to interface with MySpace. People didn’t have to abandon their MySpace friends, they could communicate with them through Facebook, and Facebook could ensure that messages sent on its platform arrived to people still on MySpace. But, if you tried that today Facebook has access controls in place that make that a crime. The same applies to YouTube. Nobody can build a seamless “migrate away from YouTube” experience because YouTube will use the DMCA to block them.
The governments of the world need to bring back antitrust with teeth and force interoperability.
I’m talking about those who have already gotten big, like PewDiePie or Good Mythical Morning (the latter of which started on their own website before youtube even existed, btw). Not the dude who just started a channel last week and has nothing to do shit with.
If they somehow even got 10% of their audience to go to another platform that would be a miracle
The lift of running your own platform is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to creating your own video hosting platform.
It’s not that challenging with a partner to help manage infrastructure which even at his scale is not going to cost an obscene amount of money.
Edit: there’s a very massive difference between a single content creator hosting their content and a site hosting everyone’s content like YouTube as well in terms of cost, infrastructure, security and management.
Websites work very well and are scalable af. A plugged in person with a track record like that could go Web 2.0 and probably net more.
You are correct. Websites, the stack to supply video encoding, even scalability is a solved problem.
The hard work isn’t technical, it’s getting people onto your platform in the first place (marketing), getting people to continue using your platform (retention) and the perennial problems of SaaS evolving with other SaaS platforms (how many dev hours are you willing to eat trying to keep up with the Joneses?).
SaaS, and in this case, SaaS offering content, is a losing game. You will either lose your shirt, sell your business, or become entrenched in a position whose inertia is difficult to break. How much of any of those you are willing to take a firehose of is the question.
It’s not easy, but you’re not guaranteed to end up
It depends on the personalities involved and the business model they go with.
Nebula has done really well with consistent growth as a premium offering where people pay one subscription fee to get ad-free videos from exclusively high-quality creators across a quote broad range of niches, in addition to bonus extras and Nebula Originals.
Dropout seems to have a lot of success with a range of mostly unscripted comedy, centred around a core cast of trusted comedic actors with a larger range of guests.
Floatplane, on the other hand, seems much less successful, probably owing to its business model being basically Patreon’s, but only for video. Instead of the wide range of content you get for surprisingly reasonable amounts of Nebula and Dropout, Floatplane ends up looking very expensive if you want to support more than one or two creators. Plus the creators on it haven’t got the same degree of trust; it ends up reeking of the sort of techbro vibes that people are explicitly trying to get away from.
I’m sure these are accurate statements, but the fact remains that I’ve never heard of dropout or nebula. At all.
And the only reason I’ve heard of floatplane is via LTT and Jeff Geerling, and I don’t actually use the platform itself.
That’s what I mean about inertia, google has it now and can coast for years on people just being lazy and staying with YouTube. That alone will be a loooong hill to climb for any other platforms.
LTT seems to have enough clout and has worked out a survivable business model, but notice that they remain on YouTube to capture and keep new views.
I must admit, I find that astonishing. Not that the average person on the street wouldn’t have heard of them, but that someone online enough to be having these sorts of conversations wouldn’t have.
Are you familiar with CollegeHumor, perhaps? After their corporate owners got screwed around by Facebook’s pivot to video (and the fraudulent data involved), they were going to shut down CH entirely until the head of the creative group reached an agreement to buy it out, and under his ownership he created the private streaming service Dropout. Today it’s mostly entirely private, with promotional content like the occasional episode or clips uploaded as Shorts put onto YouTube.
Nebula got its start as a sort of multi-channel network owned by and for YouTube creators, to avoid many of the big pitfalls that MCNs became known for. Its earliest more well-known members are Sam from Wendover/Half As Interesting, Brian from Real Engineering, Colin from CGP Grey, and Philip from Kursgesagt. The latter two later left over “creative differences” (leaks have seemed to imply, basically, that they wanted to keep it a small elite group at the core which could profit from increased growth while adding more creators, while the rest of the people then involved wanted a more equitable arrangement). It’s since grown to way too many channels to name, but if you’re interested you can see the full list here. A few choice selections might include tech reporter TechAltar (whose recent “1 month without US tech giants” and the Nebula Plus follow-up “Which alternatives am I sticking with?” video are reminiscent of the one this thread is about), astrophysicist Angela Collier, Canadian cultural commentator J.J. McCullough, history & video game design analysis channels Extra History & Extra Credits, TLDR News, human geography (with a focus on conflicts) from RealLifeLore. Linus from LTT has talked about Nebula once or twice, though his commentary on it gets wildly wrong, claiming it was a sort of pump & dump scheme where the main goal was to sell to private equity or something, seemingly because he’s projecting his own techbro capitalist attitude onto them. As I sort of mentioned above, Nebula basically serves as an uber-patreon. You pay a single subscription fee (when I signed up it was $30 per year, but it may have changed) to get mostly content that could be gotten for free (but with ads) on YouTube, plus some bonus content, some stuff a bit earlier, and a few Nebula Originals. Lindsay Ellis might be the most notable one there. Since getting harassed off the Internet by Twitter, all her videos have been Nebula Originals apart from 2 promoting her new book.
Neither of these are really meant to be a complete YouTube replacement, but rather a way for them to create more control over their stuff and get the stability of knowing they aren’t relying on the fickle YouTube algorithm (and the whims of YouTube censorship).
YouTube still offers them a service in directing them new viewers. The big creators all lose viewers but YouTube funnels replacement views faster than they lose. They could host their own videos but they are gonna see very little growth without Google either in search or with YouTube as they start to lose the base that followed them.
They also won’t be able to negotiate as good as rates for pre-rolls or in video sponsorships as if they were on YouTube.
The only real alternative would be to band together like the creators that are a part of nebula are doing. Hosting on peertube really isn’t an option unless you are independently supported and you are doing it as a passion project and don’t care about audience growth or retention.
Still think building their own site with apps I can throw on my devices is pretty involved.
Streaming video is expensive. LTT did it with Floatplane, even going so far as to develop their own backend. Watcher and some other YouTubers did it with Vimeo as their backend, but Vimeo still takes a large cut.
At the end of the day, people are doing this, but YouTube still offers a compelling value compared to other platforms. It’s hard to beat their scale, sophistication, and the discoverability of their platform.
Well, there is Nebula, which is kinda like that. But most of them also put their videos on YouTube, using Nebula as the premium ad-free option with a little bonus content.
I’m worried about Nebula’s business model being profitable enough to be sustainable in the long term but given their business model includes making every creator on the platform a part-owner of the platform that does limit how bad things can get
From everything I’ve heard, they’re already profitable, and are explicitly choosing only to grow in a sustainable way, without taking on outside investment which could force them into enshittifying down the line. With a relative lack of need to show extreme growth, and a lack of reliance on outside factors like advertising (being subscription-based), the only major risk that I can see for them long-term is user churn. Which is definitely a risk, but with the ever-creeping growth of the range of content they have and (at least for now) an attitude of being customer-friendly, churn seems a relatively low risk.
As far as I can see, at worst, the platform dies if the YouTube channels of the people on the platform die because of the YouTube algorithm, and they get bad churn (with fewer new subscribers because of the aforementioned dead YouTube channels at the top of the funnel), and they don’t get new more successful channels on before that happens. A scenario that’s far from unlikely, but which I would describe as “catastrophic, whether or not Nebula exists today”, so its existence for now as a hedge against more likely bad scenarios is still worthwhile.
That’s super cool. I’d love to know more about Nebula’s business practices, do you know where I could find that information? I’ve seen some interviews with their leadership that didn’t go into anywhere near the depth that I’d like and that’s about it
Putting a video file somewhere and letting 10,000 people watch it at the same time is no small feat.
You could probably get away with doing it on peer tube but it has no facilities to lock people out or make them pay.
Even if you don’t use patreon for payments payments aren’t free.
It’s harder then you think.