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"Creators" went for direct monetisation because de-monetisation can happen on youtube for almost any arbitrary reason and there is almost no way to contact a hu

"Creators" went for direct monetisation because de-monetisation can happen on youtube for almost any arbitrary reason and there is almost no way to contact a human (as far as I am aware) to remedy such a situation.

JakeTheAndroid 6y ago
Yeah, and I think this drives the point home even further. You really want a risk mitigation strategy for YouTube's hostile actions against creators. It's been a slow but steady creep. So, if your business is built off the back of something like Facebook, or YouTube, or Instagram, you probably want a backup plan. I've seen a few YouTubers have a centralized site for signups and support where they host all their content. While the YT revenue is important, they at least have a way to engage their consumers should something terrible happen. This is BCP in a nutshell.
- theturtletalks 6y ago
  Can creators self-host videos on their personal website and push that video to Youtube for their subscribers? That way, they can direct users who don't want ads to their website. Then they are not completely dependent on YT, FB, etc.
  - forest_dweller 6y ago
    If you even have a few thousand people regularly watching you (whcih is common these days). The bandwidth costs start to add up.
    - fxtentacle 6y ago
      Not really. Good dedicated servers come with multiple TB free = 1000x 1 GB stream. And usually it's only pennies afterwards.
      - forest_dweller 6y ago
        Where? Most place seem to get quite expensive once you add a Object Storage on top.
        SXX 6y ago
        Hetzner $50+ servers have 1gbps uplink with unmetered BW.
        forest_dweller 6y ago
        Thanks I will take a look.
        Aerroon 6y ago
        That means the link can support less than 100 viewers at once on a video with 10 Mbps bitrate. Often a large portion of views comes in the first few days of a video being posted. You could probably handle the spike of views from a video that receives a couple of thousand views total (maybe even 10k), but more than that seems difficult. Also, is Hetzner actually unmetered or do they claim they are with an asterisk?
        curryst 6y ago
        I think it's actually asterisked. Iirc you get flagged over a certain amount of traffic, but I can't remember if they cut you off or just force you to pay more. I think it was several TB last time I looked.
        SXX 6y ago
        There was limits before, but last two+ years it's unmetered without asterisk.
        brokenmachine 6y ago
        replying to Aerroon but it was too deep so replying here. Is there a way to do it with some p2p à la popcorntime? Then if there was a surge, the peers could absorb some of it. Does peertube do that?
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Bandwidth is the easy part for most cases. The software/operations requirements and the network effects are huge and crushing.
  - toast0 6y ago
    Self-hosting video content is either not very simple, or not very featureful. You can put an html video tag and call it a day, but you'll be missing out on using the best codec for each viewer and bandwidth adaptation and (last I looked, hopefully I'm wrong) usable UI. Bandwidth is an issue, although I've seen enough high bandwidth, unmetered server offers that I think it might work. Depending on where your viewers are and where you find cheap bandwidth, you might get poor performance just from distance, whereas YouTube and Facebook have CDNs with nodes everywhere.
    - 6510 6y ago
      Meanwhile there is nothing that matches the efficiency of torrents. I got some nice feedback from putting a magnet under the embed. People said: 1) I wanted to keep the video. 2) I seed it to support it as an upvote. 3) My computer is to shit to play embedded videos. 4) I bookmark your videos (and website) in my torrent client. A seriously crappy PC, poor bandwidth an some noisy old disks is enough to host 5 TB+
  - samoa42 6y ago
    excellent compromise! other replies mention the client compatibility, quality and bandwidth issues with self hosting but i think this can be reasonably adressed with just going for a common denominator on the self-hosting side (eg. 720p h264)
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  Linus of the Tech Tips variety has said that a major reason they kept paying for the forums, which are a pain to keep healthy & don't generate much revenue, is so that they could have a direct line of communication to their core fan base no matter what happens. Similarly there's a reason LTT launched Floatplane. Risk management is important regardless of how big your business is. Even if you're large enough for youtube to assign you an actual person for support.
  - TheKarateKid 6y ago
    Couldn’t they just use Twitter or some other platform like everyone else?
    - yarosv 6y ago
      On twitter communication only happens here in now. Nobody (almost) cares about tweets older than 3 days, and twitter UI "helps" with that.
      - TheKarateKid 6y ago
        > Linus of the Tech Tips variety has said that a major reason they kept paying for the forums ... is so that they could have a direct line of communication to their core fan base no matter what happens. Using it for announcements is precisely the primary reason they claimed to want to keep the forums. So in this case, having an archive of old posts really doesn't have much of a purpose.
    - kllrnohj 6y ago
      If they used Twitter or some other platform then they are still reliant on an externally funded system they have no control over. It's not really a backup plan at that point. Also I don't think you can build a community on Twitter anyway. It's just shouting into the void. They could use it for announcements (and do, LTT is on Twitter, too), but little else.
      - TheKarateKid 6y ago
yaur 6y ago
So how does this work for content that they decide to demonetize? Does Google just run ads and take the money now?
- forest_dweller 6y ago
  I don't know. They have already had "not advertiser friendly" caveat which is a way of just disqualifying anyone they like. There has been several moral panics incited by the conventional media (TV, newspapers etc) about adverts being displayed alongside edgy content a while back. Several rounds of this eventually brought about a TOS change where they could deem you "not advertiser friendly". This of course ignored that Google does targeted advertising. Some claim it is "political" however I believe it is simpler than that. It gave youtube an excuse to stop paying people without outright removing them from the platform which saves them a fair bit of money and doesn't quite bring the same outrage from the respective fanbases as outright removing people. In addition to that the people that have been demonetised have ranged from progressives, anarcho-communists, people doing ben-shapiro compilation videos and edgy boys and girls that tend to shitpost. So I don't see anything political about it. They've also made it harder to be monetised on the platform generally, IIRC you can't be monetised at all and cannot receive super chats if you have less than 1000 subscribers. You also can't put custom thumbnails on your videos which makes it harder for your content to get attention.

JakeTheAndroid 6y ago

Yeah, and I think this drives the point home even further. You really want a risk mitigation strategy for YouTube's hostile actions against creators. It's been a slow but steady creep. So, if your business is built off the back of something like Facebook, or YouTube, or Instagram, you probably want a backup plan. I've seen a few YouTubers have a centralized site for signups and support where they host all their content. While the YT revenue is important, they at least have a way to engage their consumers should something terrible happen. This is BCP in a nutshell.

theturtletalks 6y ago
Can creators self-host videos on their personal website and push that video to Youtube for their subscribers? That way, they can direct users who don't want ads to their website. Then they are not completely dependent on YT, FB, etc.
- forest_dweller 6y ago
  If you even have a few thousand people regularly watching you (whcih is common these days). The bandwidth costs start to add up.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    Not really. Good dedicated servers come with multiple TB free = 1000x 1 GB stream. And usually it's only pennies afterwards.
    - forest_dweller 6y ago
      Where? Most place seem to get quite expensive once you add a Object Storage on top.
      - SXX 6y ago
        Hetzner $50+ servers have 1gbps uplink with unmetered BW.
        forest_dweller 6y ago
        Thanks I will take a look.
        Aerroon 6y ago
        That means the link can support less than 100 viewers at once on a video with 10 Mbps bitrate. Often a large portion of views comes in the first few days of a video being posted. You could probably handle the spike of views from a video that receives a couple of thousand views total (maybe even 10k), but more than that seems difficult. Also, is Hetzner actually unmetered or do they claim they are with an asterisk?
        curryst 6y ago
        I think it's actually asterisked. Iirc you get flagged over a certain amount of traffic, but I can't remember if they cut you off or just force you to pay more. I think it was several TB last time I looked.
        SXX 6y ago
        There was limits before, but last two+ years it's unmetered without asterisk.
        brokenmachine 6y ago
        replying to Aerroon but it was too deep so replying here. Is there a way to do it with some p2p à la popcorntime? Then if there was a surge, the peers could absorb some of it. Does peertube do that?
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Bandwidth is the easy part for most cases. The software/operations requirements and the network effects are huge and crushing.
- toast0 6y ago
  Self-hosting video content is either not very simple, or not very featureful. You can put an html video tag and call it a day, but you'll be missing out on using the best codec for each viewer and bandwidth adaptation and (last I looked, hopefully I'm wrong) usable UI. Bandwidth is an issue, although I've seen enough high bandwidth, unmetered server offers that I think it might work. Depending on where your viewers are and where you find cheap bandwidth, you might get poor performance just from distance, whereas YouTube and Facebook have CDNs with nodes everywhere.
  - 6510 6y ago
    Meanwhile there is nothing that matches the efficiency of torrents. I got some nice feedback from putting a magnet under the embed. People said: 1) I wanted to keep the video. 2) I seed it to support it as an upvote. 3) My computer is to shit to play embedded videos. 4) I bookmark your videos (and website) in my torrent client. A seriously crappy PC, poor bandwidth an some noisy old disks is enough to host 5 TB+
- samoa42 6y ago
  excellent compromise! other replies mention the client compatibility, quality and bandwidth issues with self hosting but i think this can be reasonably adressed with just going for a common denominator on the self-hosting side (eg. 720p h264)
kllrnohj 6y ago
Linus of the Tech Tips variety has said that a major reason they kept paying for the forums, which are a pain to keep healthy & don't generate much revenue, is so that they could have a direct line of communication to their core fan base no matter what happens. Similarly there's a reason LTT launched Floatplane. Risk management is important regardless of how big your business is. Even if you're large enough for youtube to assign you an actual person for support.
- TheKarateKid 6y ago
  Couldn’t they just use Twitter or some other platform like everyone else?
  - yarosv 6y ago
    On twitter communication only happens here in now. Nobody (almost) cares about tweets older than 3 days, and twitter UI "helps" with that.
    - TheKarateKid 6y ago
      > Linus of the Tech Tips variety has said that a major reason they kept paying for the forums ... is so that they could have a direct line of communication to their core fan base no matter what happens. Using it for announcements is precisely the primary reason they claimed to want to keep the forums. So in this case, having an archive of old posts really doesn't have much of a purpose.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    If they used Twitter or some other platform then they are still reliant on an externally funded system they have no control over. It's not really a backup plan at that point. Also I don't think you can build a community on Twitter anyway. It's just shouting into the void. They could use it for announcements (and do, LTT is on Twitter, too), but little else.
    - TheKarateKid 6y ago

yaur 6y ago

So how does this work for content that they decide to demonetize? Does Google just run ads and take the money now?

forest_dweller 6y ago
I don't know. They have already had "not advertiser friendly" caveat which is a way of just disqualifying anyone they like. There has been several moral panics incited by the conventional media (TV, newspapers etc) about adverts being displayed alongside edgy content a while back. Several rounds of this eventually brought about a TOS change where they could deem you "not advertiser friendly". This of course ignored that Google does targeted advertising. Some claim it is "political" however I believe it is simpler than that. It gave youtube an excuse to stop paying people without outright removing them from the platform which saves them a fair bit of money and doesn't quite bring the same outrage from the respective fanbases as outright removing people. In addition to that the people that have been demonetised have ranged from progressives, anarcho-communists, people doing ben-shapiro compilation videos and edgy boys and girls that tend to shitpost. So I don't see anything political about it. They've also made it harder to be monetised on the platform generally, IIRC you can't be monetised at all and cannot receive super chats if you have less than 1000 subscribers. You also can't put custom thumbnails on your videos which makes it harder for your content to get attention.