@mainframed767 for sure, 100% of the increase is because of the ads - exceptionally few people pay for things when they don't have to. Which means, in its current form, content creators could only ever expect exceptionally little when pushing content to peertube. Until peertube includes a "you only get to watch this if I make some money for my efforts" capability, being open source won't impact things in any way.
Any ideas how you might add something like that to the protocol? So far as I can tell, federation itself makes that impossible.
@shadowsonawall @mainframed767 A large way that many YouTubers make most of their money is by selling ads that are in the video itself. "This video is sponsored by NordVPN", etc. So the business model 100% already exists. At this point it's just about social inertia, and the fact that YouTube's algorithm gives them more reach.
@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.
@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!
@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