@solarboi @shadowsonawall @mainframed767 YouTubes audience gives them more potential reach, and the algorithm serves up viewers. Those are two different issues that an alternative will have to solve. They need the potential audience (ppl just looking for something to watch) and then a way to surface content that audience is likely to watch.

The problem I see with a lot of alternatives in this space is that they straight up lack the audience, which is a problem but could be resolved, but more importantly they lack good way of surfacing content that people will want to watch.

YouTube isn’t great at this, but it isn’t the worst either. For example, a chronological feed is actually terrible for content. It gives everything equal weight and makes discovering high quality content a deep dive search. Twitter used to be very good at this, but… lol. Mastodon doesn’t even try, and it is very frustrating.

YouTube alternatives, like Nebula are doing ok because they are parasitic on YouTube’s audience. The top creators pull their audiences with them, that they built on YouTube. The discovery and surfacing of content is terrible though. But the number of videos is low enough that it is manageable.

YouTube is very hostile to creators and a lot of content is impossible there, plus all the copyright infringement scammers etc. If it were viable to be on another platform, people would jump at the chance. But so far I haven’t seen that work for anyone. Nebula being the exception, which is basically a sort of “subscription service to support creators you like,” rather than a true competitor.

@thegrugq @shadowsonawall @mainframed767 It will be very interesting to see how people approach the algorithm issue as we move to more open standards of social media. It doesn't seem terribly necessary for smaller industries (aka podcasts), but if we want an open media empire to rival YouTube, it does seem like we might need algorithmic feeds to get there.

@thegrugq @shadowsonawall @mainframed767 Or, maybe Meta does a Threads-but-for-YouTube and making, in essence, a giant PeerTube host that has its own algorithm.

@solarboi @mainframed767 those "sponsored by" videos are a lot cheaper to buy than you might expect. They bring in about 2x what the video makes in views (about $0.02/view). If a creator could negotiate 1.5x the going rate, get a sponsorship for literally every video that they create, and handle all of "inflated views" complaints/chargebacks (google provides more of a service here than you might think), then yes - for those creators there is a viable alternative model.

@shadowsonawall @mainframed767 I look at the podcast industry and see that alternative model already established there. The problem is gonna be whether you can get advertisers to switch back to that model or not, since advertisers have been pushing podcasters to move toward a more YouTube-y analytics and ad insertion model.

@solarboi @mainframed767 that push makes a lot of sense from an advertiser's perspective. You pay less per impression and are able to target a significantly more diverse population with the insertion model. Imagine I've got $2k I want to spend on advertising. If I want to target multiple audiences with my money the sponsorship model forces me to go and find say 10 different creators and hope that any intersection in their audiences is super high value. Or, I can lean into analytics and target active viewers watching "anyone's" content (not quite that simple but way, way, way easier than trying to divide out my money manually). The latter is cheaper, provides more unique/higher quality individual coverage, and is way easier.

@shadowsonawall @mainframed767 Oh, I 100% understand why advertisers are pushing for that, but it's a terrible experience for listeners, makes podcasts much worse, and relies on practices that don't care about privacy. But I fully admit that my preference on that may just be old man me, yelling at the clouds

@solarboi @mainframed767 I'm right there with you. Hate me some ads and the privacy invasion is so much worse than most people think (spend a few bucks buying ad space on several of the major social media platforms - those targeting options are both quite accurate and beyond invasive).

Unfortunately, cool technologies aren't going to offer a competitive path without being grounded in the brutal reality of economics. Right now that's the biggest thing the fediverse is lacking: large scale economic sense. It doesn't need to have that to be valuable, obviously, but before it can be a real alternative to <xyz> someone(s) are going to have to innovate in economics. Here's hoping!