13 ms·

A better business model for video folks

284 points by messo 5y ago

deregulateMed 5y ago
We need to stop using marketing speak. Walled garden really means walled prison.
jeffbee 5y ago
The author of this headline has no idea what “walled garden” means. YouTube has none of the aspects of a walled garden, because it is and exists within an open platform.
- kennywinker 5y ago
  Tell that to anyone who's had their channel suspended by google for inexplicable reasons (the most common being copyright strikes I believe), and has now lost access to their audience and their income stream. But hey, the web is an open platform, so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
armchairhacker 5y ago
We really need an alternative to YouTube. But > When you publish with Streambus, you create a website, on your own domain name. Reach your audience over RSS on the podcast apps they already have on their phone. This is the problem with most other current alternatives: no discoverability. YouTube has no serious competitors because it has significantly more viewers and creators. If I use Streambus, how will I get others to see my content? If I want to find new stuff on Streambus, where do I see others' streams? IMO any serious contender for YouTube would need: - People using it - Decent recommendation algorithm - for all the hate YouTube gets, I've seen worse - Decent moderation. YouTube is too severe, yes, but you really don't want hate speech and shady stuff on your site, and especially recommended. It will scare everyone away. And copyrighted stuff will get you into legal trouble
- LdSGSgvupDV 5y ago
  What we need might be the decentralized search engine.
- hawthornio 5y ago
  Surely some enterprising folks can create video RSS crawlers and put together a video podcast app, right?
- flaque 5y ago
  (maker of this thing) > If I use Streambus, how will I get others to see my content? If I want to find new stuff on Streambus, where do I see others' streams? There's two answers to this. The first is that the discoverability works through all the same channels as podcasts. You can put your feed on podcast listings, rank in the search and discoverability of the many different apps. The second is that subscriptions don't need as large of an audience. If you're doing an ad model, you get a million people to watch your video and make maybe $5k in ads. But you could instead get 500 people to pay you $10/month and you make the same with a far smaller audience. New platforms are a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Podcasts is our plan to solve it. If you publish a video podcast, you get to piggyback on the already large audience of podcast-listeners. Then subscriptions lower the audience size you actually need for the platform to be viable and drive more video-creators to RSS, which drives more viewers in a virtuous cycle. That's the plan anyway. Hopefully it will work! Youtube ads and their enormous % cuts really suck. If you find this as interesting as we do, or you'd like help launching your own show, send me an email at evan @ streambus . com. Or if you're in the bay area and vaccinated, let's get a coffee or go for a bike ride!
  - hedora 5y ago
    It would be nice if your service automatically handled submitting the RSS feeds to duck duck go. Their video search has started including a wider range of sources; I imagine they’d welcome your content (especially since you’re likely to have a better privacy policy than YouTube).
    - flaque 5y ago
      This is cool, we'll look into this
  - ajuc 5y ago
    Have you heard of twitch? Cause it sound a lot like twitch, and they already exist and have huge userbase.
    - throwaway316943 5y ago
- ff7c11 5y ago
  Probably just publish a few videos to Youtube and ask future subscribers to follow your non-Youtube channel instead.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    I imagine that's against T&Cs? And if it becomes popular then YouTube are going after anyone successful for lost revenue?
    - sofixa 5y ago
      I don't think it is, there are literally tons of YouTubers that advertise alternative platforms such as Nebula/CuriosityStream.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  Which that last part is hilarious because it's exactly what helped propel YouTube to what it is today. IIRC the Janet Jackson Superbowl fiasco and some specific copyrighted song were what helped them out the most.
- Seirdy 5y ago
  > how will I get others to see my content? This service gives you a website, so I'd imagine you'd get an audience the same way you normally should on a typical blog: - Make good content - Judiciously share that content and collect feedback - Let members of the circles you shared with continue the cycle as they re-share, adapt, cite, and respond to your content. - Notice other people hosting websites of their own that mention you; advise them to follow the same steps. - Sit back as the recursion triggers logistical growth. This strategy has worked out quite well for multiple online identities of mine. Truly good content doesn't need a silo or advertising to be recognized.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    Could of observations: Many people are making good content. If you skip all of what you said and just upload to YouTube chances are you expose your content to X-hundred million people and you can then promote it just like you said.
    - Seirdy 5y ago
      You are correct. My point was that you can still build an audience without being locked into a silo or megacorp the exact same way you would for a normal blog. My point was not that doing so is easier. If your content is good, it should succeed without a megacorp's help.
    - rchaud 5y ago
      Incorrect. Uploading a video from a brand-new account on Youtube doesn't expose it to anyone. When someone searches "[your video topic]", what are the chances that yours come up, assuming it's a common enough topic? The algorithm doesn't surface videos unless you've created a fairly substantial library that tells YT that you intend to post up for the long term.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    This is a good description of Content Strategy. Nothing becomes popular on its own. You have to do the work of getting it in front of people's eyeballs, and improving the work after receiving feedback.
- macinjosh 5y ago
  Linking from social media is the discoverability mode here. And the decentralized nature will make it impossible for them to censor it unless they completely block 3rd party sites like AOL back in the day.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  Why can’t we just add video to existing podcast aggregators? The only stuff I watch on YouTube come out episodically and don’t have shitty clickbait titles. Some of them already have sponsor ads similar to what podcasts do.
  - deleted 5y ago
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- beebmam 5y ago
  I'd like to point out that one of the main reasons people publish content to YouTube in 2021 is because that content will be monetized (or, they want to be big enough to monetize their content). I see zero competitors that offer anywhere near the revenue that YouTube offers. Until you have another platform that can offer anywhere near this level of revenue for content producers, there will only be YouTube. (Twitch is a different market and doesn't compete with non-streamed YouTube content, which I think we'd both agree on) For that matter, perhaps it's a good opportunity to regulate YouTube's monetization policies, so that other companies can compete for content producers more evenly.
  - flaque 5y ago
    Streambus already offers a higher revenue model than Youtube. A Youtuber with a million subscribers that can convert 1% of their audience to paid subscribers at $5 a month makes $540k a year on Streambus. And they'd do it on their own domain name, with the full ability to leave at any time without losing their subscriptions or audience. They don't need to leave Youtube, or turn off their existing monetization models either. Meanwhile, their audience can use an app they already have on their phone, and don't have to watch ads from a middleman.
    - _drimzy 5y ago
      That's an insane price ($5 a month). HBO subscription costs $14.99 a month. Expecting indi artists to get that level of revenue is insane.
      - zeta0134 5y ago
        I currently pay this price for several of the Patreons I support, I'm not sure what makes this any different. I'd certainly rather throw money at a small handful of good content creators; quality over quantity, and my time is limited anyway.
      - larsiusprime 5y ago
        And yet people do it already just for a bunch of emails on substack. It’s worth it for somebody, that’s all that matters.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  I don't know, Substack and Locals and the other content creators that are starting their own subscription based websites are doing very well, although they build their audience with YouTube.
- tester847 5y ago
  The main problem with the current alternatives is that you can't even upload a video. For example, that is the problem with this website Streambus. You can't upload a video. It's some kind of "beta signup" manual approval thing. On Youtube, you make an account, you click the "create" button, you select the video file you want, and it uploads. It works. Another example: have you ever tried to upload a video to peertube? Typically you make an account and then you click "create" and it says "uploads are not allowed on this instance" or something like that. As if the person making videos has any idea what that means. This is trying to use a printer and it keeps saying "PC LOAD LETTER", of course some nerd knows what that means but 99.9% of people are never going to care. If you want an audience, allow people to upload videos to the website. This website doesn't solve that problem. Peertube doesn't solve that problem except if you somehow manage to find the https://peervideo.club https://peervideo.club instance, which is apparently the biggest english-speaking instance, but if you go to the "about this instance page", apparently "video quota" is 20GB, and "User registration allowed" has a red X next to it. What the hell does that even mean? Why is it so hard for people to make a website that makes sense to the average person? It is astonishing to me the lack of urgency there is for creating an alternative to youtube. Isn't Peertube maintained by like 4 people? Isn't this a massive global problem? Why is no one taking this seriously? Do people not understand how powerful it is to be able to see videos of things? For example, footage of war crimes or atrocities or things happening around the world? All the proposed solutions look like cutesy little hobby projects. For example, I'm sure they are great people, but honestly I don't care about "Evan" and "Kevin" or their little cartoon portraits, which is the first thing you show me when I try to create an account on Steambus. It doesn't strike me as headed in the direction of being a genuine solution to this global problem. What's going on with youtube is a nightmare and to put it bluntly, lots of people across the world are suffering and dying because of it.
  - st1ck 5y ago
    I didn't even realize you can potentially upload videos on Peertube instance which is not hosted by yourself. I'm totally not surprised this feature is not allowed on most instances.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    Peertube's UX could be better, but it doesn't present itself as a Youtube competitor, does it? It's the cult of decentralization people that bring it up everytime somebody gets kicked off Youtube. But it's not Youtube and never will be. Pretending that it can be defeats the purpose. As does an overly simplified UX that hides the system capacity underpinning the technology (20GB limit). It will feel like a bait and switch when a newly converted user runs up against the limits of decentralized solutions, because they were not educated about that before.
- devetec 5y ago
  How bout Odysee? - People using it (not that many, but there's a sizable community) - Decent recommendation algorithm (okay ) - Decent moderation (part of the whole appeal is "free speech", but it's pretty toned down compared to some others) It's pretty okay on all fronts, but not the best. Still something to check out though!
  - Seirdy 5y ago
    Unfortunately it uses cryptocurrency/blockchain nonsense. A better alternative is PeerTube, which is part of the Fediverse; people can share videos, comment, and post across Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, and others seamlessly. Plus, you can pick (or host!) an instance that agrees with your moderation preferences, and block instances that don't (e.g. alt-right and troll havens). The distributed/federated approach to moderation and hosting scales well with a limited budget.
    - kilodeca 5y ago
      It would be nice if Peertube wasn't developed using Nodejs.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        Why does it matter (unless you think about contributing to the codebase). I'm a vocal opponent of unnecessary Javascript (TypeScript is fine) but I never care what other people use for their backend.
    - devetec 5y ago
      It's not nonsense, it works. But yeah, PeerTube is a good alternative too!
      - devetec 5y ago
        However, discoverability and ease of use are always factors. With Odysee, you just use it like YouTube, not much is different.
- ldiracdelta 5y ago
  The discoverability can come through community at some level. I have a large blog roll on my self-hosted TTRSS reader that I have curated over the years. I find new blogs when people mention them on a blog I follow or a friend sends me an article.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  > YouTube is too severe, yes, but you really don't want hate speech and shady stuff on your site, and especially recommended. It’s not clear to me why you’re advocating for censorship. Why do you care if someone else shares content that you’re offended by? Just don’t click or watch it. Vague policies like “hate speech” are always just ways to suppress political opinions, and end up reflecting the biases of the provider or loud vocal activists. There’s almost no point to seeking out an alternative platform if it cannot differentiate itself by upholding basic free speech principles. Moderation should just stop at explicitly illegal content.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Because when you want to go watch cat videos, having a "HOW THE JEWS ARE CONTROLLING THE WORLD WITH 5G" video next to it is: * buzkilling and revolting * makes you associate the platform with nonsense * scares people of association with the platform.
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- psandersen 5y ago
  Agree with everything you said, especially on the challenge of recommendations and feel this is where those designing the recommendation engines have at least the same moral responsibility as a bio-engineer doing gain of function research on viruses. IMHO the core problem is the recommendation engines are optimizing the wrong metrics and this leads to destabilizing feedback loops. The problem is likely AI complete, but it should be possible to tune recommendations so they don't create self strengthening conspiracy theories. I suspect a reinforcement learning environment that mimics users interacting with a recommender system would be the best way of tuning the larger system behavior so the longer term properties aren't catastrophic for society. OTOH if the platform was setup so "good faith" arguments were somehow incentivized, there might not be any need to optimize for any other metric than engagement.
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Kye 5y ago
There was a brief time before the rise of YouTube when all the independently-hosted web shows published RSS feeds. I had a player program that would download them for me during the day with RSS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software)
- sp332 5y ago
  I didn't think anyone else remembered Miro! Do you remember when Revision3 hosted their own torrent tracker for their shows? And MediaDefender hacked it, then DDoS'd them over Memorial Day weekend 2008? https://web.archive.org/web/20130721014755/http://revision3.com/blog/2008/05/29/inside-the-attack-that-crippled-revision3/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130721014755/http://revision3....
tacostakohashi 5y ago
Yep, "vodcast" used to be a word in regular use, referring to RSS feeds of videos/eposides often provided by TV channels for episodes of their content. Now that RSS has been effectively killed, this word/concept has disappeared without trace.
- Gormo 5y ago
  > Now that RSS has been effectively killed Does that mean that my hundreds of still-functioning RSS subscriptions are undead?
- Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
  RSS is not dead, it is still alive. Websites are still using them. Yes, Google Reader and browsers (well, most of them) ended support for RSS. The readers and community are still around. RSS is increasing popularly again. I have over 400 RSS feeds subscribed in QuiteRSS and FreshRSS.
  - stereoradonc 5y ago
    I prefer inoreader.
  - rablackburn 5y ago
    > RSS is increasing popularly again. Is this true? Every time RSS comes up we have this same discussion A: “RSS is dead” B: “well, I’m still using it and it’s great. Clearly it’s not dead!” But A and B are having two different conversations. For broad public consumption the only success RSS had was podcasts, and Spotify is actively trying to capture that open ecosystem and make it their cash cow. Kids aren’t sitting around sharing the RSS feeds they like, it’s YouTube, TikTok, Discord; all proprietary walled gardens of content. So yes, the technology isn’t dead, and the world is big enough there’s even a self-sustaining (probably) community of RSS users, but it still hasn’t quite lived up to it’s promise. Streambus is exciting because the cost of hosting content keeps dropping, maybe we can reproduce the podcast model with video now. But as always the network effect and discoverability are big hurdles to overcome. Podcasts succeeded not just because of RSS, they succeeded because Apple supported them in the iTunes Store (which is _still_ the most important place to get reviewed as a podcast) solving the discoverability problem.
rememberlenny 5y ago
Feels like Substack, but for video. In the "creator economy" realm, this looks like the missing part of YouTube - where creators can actually make money without being forced to make content optimizing for clickbait advertisement catered content.
- deleted 5y ago
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Jaxkr 5y ago
I remember watching video podcasts on my iPod Nano in 2010…
- throwawayswede 5y ago
  I still remember watching podgrunt episodes [1] and feeling very happy! 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPyoJisyO2o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPyoJisyO2o
banana_giraffe 5y ago
I'm not sure how well known it is, but YouTube itself has an RSS feed for each channel (well, Atom feed, most feed readers treat them interchangeably). https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=XX https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=XX Where XX is the channel ID (the last component in the URL when you go to a channel). It's actually how I consume YouTube these days. It's a slightly orthogonal problem to the solution posted here, since it doesn't follow the RSS "enclosure" spec. Though my feedreader knows enough to call youtube-dl on these URLs, which is fragile at best, but works for me.
- dugite-code 5y ago
  I only subscribe to youtube channels with RSS. It's the only practical way to always see new videos on a channel. I find it honestly baffling me to see the hoops creators I subscribe to have to beg people to jump through to maaaybeee get notified when there is a new video up. They used to have an OPML export, but it looks like it was removed
  - tantalor 5y ago
    > the only practical way to always see new videos What's wrong with the "subscriptions" tab/page on yt?
    - dugite-code 5y ago
      It will sometimes just not show a video from a creator for unknown reasons or it will disappear between sessions. It's been an issue that's popped up regularly over the years on the youtube support forums so it looks like even that is not a pure feed of content and is subject to the whims of the "algorithm". Not to mention the notifications list for new videos on mobile is also wildly inconsistent and unpredictable
      - tantalor 5y ago
        > an issue that's popped up regularly over the years... looks like even that is not a pure feed of content Sounds more like a bug affecting some small % of users a long time ago, and was fixed. > notifications list for new videos on mobile is also wildly inconsistent and unpredictable What does that even mean? It works fine for me. I see the exact same videos on mobile and desktop (65 subs).
dangoor 5y ago
Aren't the economics of this off? I have a free newsletter on Substack and I can see how Substack can potentially make enough money on all of the paid newsletters for the whole thing to work out. But video hosting is a lot more expensive than sending email newsletters, I suspect. Edit to add: I actually really like this idea. I haven't tried a video podcast before, but if players start adapting to this format it could be great.
- flaque 5y ago
  This is something that we're keeping an eye on. Our current bet is that it's got better economics than Youtube (lots of video plays, but little revenue flowing through per video), but probably worse economics than Substack.
  - dangoor 5y ago
    Perhaps the free plan shouldn't be free? Vimeo has a $7/month plan, and that's actually a better deal than what a lot of podcast hosting companies charge today.
    - flaque 5y ago
      we might consider this if the video cost economics force it (though we'd grandfather free folks in). but early on, I'd like to try and make the initial business model define the mission and incentive structure of the company. "We only make money when you do" creates a very strong incentive for the organization to make you money. And I think a strong business model provides a strong foundation for an open ecosystem. Though it may be the case that $X/time_unit plans are better for the ecosystem/video-makers as a whole; so it's definitely something we'd consider in that case as well.
      - dangoor 5y ago
        > "We only make money when you do" creates a very strong incentive for the organization to make you money. While I agree with this in principle, I look at all of the people who happily put content up for free on YouTube with no intention or desire to monetize. In fact, there was just someone on HN's frontpage today[1] that moved from YouTube to PeerTube because of the fact that YouTube was going to start putting ads on their free videos. "We make money when you do, but we'll charge you rather than going down the ads route" :) [1]: https://solvespace.com/forum.pl?action=viewthread&parent=3756&tt=1625649760 https://solvespace.com/forum.pl?action=viewthread&parent=375...
stereoradonc 5y ago
Seems like a substack model but for videos. I'd stay clear off this.
- handmodel 5y ago
  I have no idea if any people I like will end up on this but it seems very reasonable. I subscribe to some podcasts that I pay for. I imagine some people really would like this for video.
deleted 5y ago
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Daegalus 5y ago
I think this is a neat idea. I wonder if an old school webring style discoverability system could work. or something that can be added to the end of randomly selected podcasts on the service it ones the creator adds.
victorbstan 5y ago
How is YouTube a walled garden? There’s no review process for posting videos and your can post and go live as soon as the content is uploaded.
- messo 5y ago
  Title is changed now, but a walled garden is keeping your content and subscribers captive. If you want to leave (or get kicked out for wathever reason), you loose everything. Youtube offers a lot for "free" and has good discoverability if you play the clikck-bate game — a beautifull garden, and at the same time a prison.
pyromaker 5y ago
Tangent, but perhaps related, we've also released something related to a video platform tool called Pyro https://www.pyro.app https://www.pyro.app Pyro lets you... - Create a site with your own domain name - Find, curate and display videos on your site from multiple sources (YouTube, Vimeo etc) based on keywords that you are interested in (e.g. AI, ML, startup) - Allow users to sign up and login as a member, submit videos, upload videos (admins can review + approve). - Build a community based around those videos and scale, members can comment, like, create watch list etc.
hboon 5y ago
Title reminds me of Odeo. https://web.archive.org/web/20051125043621/http://www.odeo.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20051125043621/http://www.odeo.c.... They supported video at some point.
jyriand 5y ago
Do you have an example channel?
throwawayswede 5y ago
This is great. One thing I'd recommend is submission and integration with podcastindex.org.
stevenicr 5y ago
Interesting - I finally popped over to look - and I don't see a terms / acceptable use page... I always do those peeks and ctr-f -? porn, adult then look for what I call the anchor.fm/cancel culture language.. and if I see that then I move on. So now I wonder if playboy porn is okay like vimeo, or if it's choose-your-own bouncer like peertube, or what. popped over again for more info - clicked on pricing - saw something about "stripe" - so the content is to be beholden to the visa/mc/stripe censors? I think paypal is less prude at this point. sadly I think a thing like that that uses alt-coins is more needed - if you have to play within the terms/censors of youtube anyway, why bother doing something alternative? It's just gonna cost more time and money. Love the idea - prefer a version that can cater to non-cancel culture / adult or whatnot would have more staying power.
meetromb 5y ago
> We only make money when you do Many of content creators are not getting revenue from donations/subscriptions. For example, influencers have a personal contracts with companies. Some of them deliberately ignore turning off YouTube monetization for their videos, against, because they have different revenue source. But there is also a case that confirms a part of the hypothesis: maybe you know guys who have a YouTube channel “Corridor Digital”. They have created their own mini-platform for their subscribers and are using youtube as a traffic source. I think you will be interested to know about their motivation and relevance of the idea. P.S where can I follow the development of your idea and product?

284 points by messo 5y ago

We need to stop using marketing speak. Walled garden really means walled prison.

The author of this headline has no idea what “walled garden” means. YouTube has none of the aspects of a walled garden, because it is and exists within an open platform.

kennywinker 5y ago
Tell that to anyone who's had their channel suspended by google for inexplicable reasons (the most common being copyright strikes I believe), and has now lost access to their audience and their income stream. But hey, the web is an open platform, so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

armchairhacker 5y ago

We really need an alternative to YouTube. But > When you publish with Streambus, you create a website, on your own domain name. Reach your audience over RSS on the podcast apps they already have on their phone. This is the problem with most other current alternatives: no discoverability. YouTube has no serious competitors because it has significantly more viewers and creators. If I use Streambus, how will I get others to see my content? If I want to find new stuff on Streambus, where do I see others' streams? IMO any serious contender for YouTube would need: - People using it - Decent recommendation algorithm - for all the hate YouTube gets, I've seen worse - Decent moderation. YouTube is too severe, yes, but you really don't want hate speech and shady stuff on your site, and especially recommended. It will scare everyone away. And copyrighted stuff will get you into legal trouble

LdSGSgvupDV 5y ago
What we need might be the decentralized search engine.
hawthornio 5y ago
Surely some enterprising folks can create video RSS crawlers and put together a video podcast app, right?
flaque 5y ago
(maker of this thing) > If I use Streambus, how will I get others to see my content? If I want to find new stuff on Streambus, where do I see others' streams? There's two answers to this. The first is that the discoverability works through all the same channels as podcasts. You can put your feed on podcast listings, rank in the search and discoverability of the many different apps. The second is that subscriptions don't need as large of an audience. If you're doing an ad model, you get a million people to watch your video and make maybe $5k in ads. But you could instead get 500 people to pay you $10/month and you make the same with a far smaller audience. New platforms are a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Podcasts is our plan to solve it. If you publish a video podcast, you get to piggyback on the already large audience of podcast-listeners. Then subscriptions lower the audience size you actually need for the platform to be viable and drive more video-creators to RSS, which drives more viewers in a virtuous cycle. That's the plan anyway. Hopefully it will work! Youtube ads and their enormous % cuts really suck. If you find this as interesting as we do, or you'd like help launching your own show, send me an email at evan @ streambus . com. Or if you're in the bay area and vaccinated, let's get a coffee or go for a bike ride!
- hedora 5y ago
  It would be nice if your service automatically handled submitting the RSS feeds to duck duck go. Their video search has started including a wider range of sources; I imagine they’d welcome your content (especially since you’re likely to have a better privacy policy than YouTube).
  - flaque 5y ago
    This is cool, we'll look into this
- ajuc 5y ago
  Have you heard of twitch? Cause it sound a lot like twitch, and they already exist and have huge userbase.
  - throwaway316943 5y ago
ff7c11 5y ago
Probably just publish a few videos to Youtube and ask future subscribers to follow your non-Youtube channel instead.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  I imagine that's against T&Cs? And if it becomes popular then YouTube are going after anyone successful for lost revenue?
  - sofixa 5y ago
    I don't think it is, there are literally tons of YouTubers that advertise alternative platforms such as Nebula/CuriosityStream.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
Which that last part is hilarious because it's exactly what helped propel YouTube to what it is today. IIRC the Janet Jackson Superbowl fiasco and some specific copyrighted song were what helped them out the most.
Seirdy 5y ago
> how will I get others to see my content? This service gives you a website, so I'd imagine you'd get an audience the same way you normally should on a typical blog: - Make good content - Judiciously share that content and collect feedback - Let members of the circles you shared with continue the cycle as they re-share, adapt, cite, and respond to your content. - Notice other people hosting websites of their own that mention you; advise them to follow the same steps. - Sit back as the recursion triggers logistical growth. This strategy has worked out quite well for multiple online identities of mine. Truly good content doesn't need a silo or advertising to be recognized.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  Could of observations: Many people are making good content. If you skip all of what you said and just upload to YouTube chances are you expose your content to X-hundred million people and you can then promote it just like you said.
  - Seirdy 5y ago
    You are correct. My point was that you can still build an audience without being locked into a silo or megacorp the exact same way you would for a normal blog. My point was not that doing so is easier. If your content is good, it should succeed without a megacorp's help.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    Incorrect. Uploading a video from a brand-new account on Youtube doesn't expose it to anyone. When someone searches "[your video topic]", what are the chances that yours come up, assuming it's a common enough topic? The algorithm doesn't surface videos unless you've created a fairly substantial library that tells YT that you intend to post up for the long term.
- rchaud 5y ago
  This is a good description of Content Strategy. Nothing becomes popular on its own. You have to do the work of getting it in front of people's eyeballs, and improving the work after receiving feedback.
macinjosh 5y ago
Linking from social media is the discoverability mode here. And the decentralized nature will make it impossible for them to censor it unless they completely block 3rd party sites like AOL back in the day.
2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
Why can’t we just add video to existing podcast aggregators? The only stuff I watch on YouTube come out episodically and don’t have shitty clickbait titles. Some of them already have sponsor ads similar to what podcasts do.
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beebmam 5y ago
I'd like to point out that one of the main reasons people publish content to YouTube in 2021 is because that content will be monetized (or, they want to be big enough to monetize their content). I see zero competitors that offer anywhere near the revenue that YouTube offers. Until you have another platform that can offer anywhere near this level of revenue for content producers, there will only be YouTube. (Twitch is a different market and doesn't compete with non-streamed YouTube content, which I think we'd both agree on) For that matter, perhaps it's a good opportunity to regulate YouTube's monetization policies, so that other companies can compete for content producers more evenly.
- flaque 5y ago
  Streambus already offers a higher revenue model than Youtube. A Youtuber with a million subscribers that can convert 1% of their audience to paid subscribers at $5 a month makes $540k a year on Streambus. And they'd do it on their own domain name, with the full ability to leave at any time without losing their subscriptions or audience. They don't need to leave Youtube, or turn off their existing monetization models either. Meanwhile, their audience can use an app they already have on their phone, and don't have to watch ads from a middleman.
  - _drimzy 5y ago
    That's an insane price ($5 a month). HBO subscription costs $14.99 a month. Expecting indi artists to get that level of revenue is insane.
    - zeta0134 5y ago
      I currently pay this price for several of the Patreons I support, I'm not sure what makes this any different. I'd certainly rather throw money at a small handful of good content creators; quality over quantity, and my time is limited anyway.
    - larsiusprime 5y ago
      And yet people do it already just for a bunch of emails on substack. It’s worth it for somebody, that’s all that matters.
TeeMassive 5y ago
I don't know, Substack and Locals and the other content creators that are starting their own subscription based websites are doing very well, although they build their audience with YouTube.
tester847 5y ago
The main problem with the current alternatives is that you can't even upload a video. For example, that is the problem with this website Streambus. You can't upload a video. It's some kind of "beta signup" manual approval thing. On Youtube, you make an account, you click the "create" button, you select the video file you want, and it uploads. It works. Another example: have you ever tried to upload a video to peertube? Typically you make an account and then you click "create" and it says "uploads are not allowed on this instance" or something like that. As if the person making videos has any idea what that means. This is trying to use a printer and it keeps saying "PC LOAD LETTER", of course some nerd knows what that means but 99.9% of people are never going to care. If you want an audience, allow people to upload videos to the website. This website doesn't solve that problem. Peertube doesn't solve that problem except if you somehow manage to find the https://peervideo.club https://peervideo.club instance, which is apparently the biggest english-speaking instance, but if you go to the "about this instance page", apparently "video quota" is 20GB, and "User registration allowed" has a red X next to it. What the hell does that even mean? Why is it so hard for people to make a website that makes sense to the average person? It is astonishing to me the lack of urgency there is for creating an alternative to youtube. Isn't Peertube maintained by like 4 people? Isn't this a massive global problem? Why is no one taking this seriously? Do people not understand how powerful it is to be able to see videos of things? For example, footage of war crimes or atrocities or things happening around the world? All the proposed solutions look like cutesy little hobby projects. For example, I'm sure they are great people, but honestly I don't care about "Evan" and "Kevin" or their little cartoon portraits, which is the first thing you show me when I try to create an account on Steambus. It doesn't strike me as headed in the direction of being a genuine solution to this global problem. What's going on with youtube is a nightmare and to put it bluntly, lots of people across the world are suffering and dying because of it.
- st1ck 5y ago
  I didn't even realize you can potentially upload videos on Peertube instance which is not hosted by yourself. I'm totally not surprised this feature is not allowed on most instances.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Peertube's UX could be better, but it doesn't present itself as a Youtube competitor, does it? It's the cult of decentralization people that bring it up everytime somebody gets kicked off Youtube. But it's not Youtube and never will be. Pretending that it can be defeats the purpose. As does an overly simplified UX that hides the system capacity underpinning the technology (20GB limit). It will feel like a bait and switch when a newly converted user runs up against the limits of decentralized solutions, because they were not educated about that before.
devetec 5y ago
How bout Odysee? - People using it (not that many, but there's a sizable community) - Decent recommendation algorithm (okay ) - Decent moderation (part of the whole appeal is "free speech", but it's pretty toned down compared to some others) It's pretty okay on all fronts, but not the best. Still something to check out though!
- Seirdy 5y ago
  Unfortunately it uses cryptocurrency/blockchain nonsense. A better alternative is PeerTube, which is part of the Fediverse; people can share videos, comment, and post across Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, and others seamlessly. Plus, you can pick (or host!) an instance that agrees with your moderation preferences, and block instances that don't (e.g. alt-right and troll havens). The distributed/federated approach to moderation and hosting scales well with a limited budget.
  - kilodeca 5y ago
    It would be nice if Peertube wasn't developed using Nodejs.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      Why does it matter (unless you think about contributing to the codebase). I'm a vocal opponent of unnecessary Javascript (TypeScript is fine) but I never care what other people use for their backend.
  - devetec 5y ago
    It's not nonsense, it works. But yeah, PeerTube is a good alternative too!
    - devetec 5y ago
      However, discoverability and ease of use are always factors. With Odysee, you just use it like YouTube, not much is different.
ldiracdelta 5y ago
The discoverability can come through community at some level. I have a large blog roll on my self-hosted TTRSS reader that I have curated over the years. I find new blogs when people mention them on a blog I follow or a friend sends me an article.
throwawaysea 5y ago
> YouTube is too severe, yes, but you really don't want hate speech and shady stuff on your site, and especially recommended. It’s not clear to me why you’re advocating for censorship. Why do you care if someone else shares content that you’re offended by? Just don’t click or watch it. Vague policies like “hate speech” are always just ways to suppress political opinions, and end up reflecting the biases of the provider or loud vocal activists. There’s almost no point to seeking out an alternative platform if it cannot differentiate itself by upholding basic free speech principles. Moderation should just stop at explicitly illegal content.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Because when you want to go watch cat videos, having a "HOW THE JEWS ARE CONTROLLING THE WORLD WITH 5G" video next to it is: * buzkilling and revolting * makes you associate the platform with nonsense * scares people of association with the platform.
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psandersen 5y ago
Agree with everything you said, especially on the challenge of recommendations and feel this is where those designing the recommendation engines have at least the same moral responsibility as a bio-engineer doing gain of function research on viruses. IMHO the core problem is the recommendation engines are optimizing the wrong metrics and this leads to destabilizing feedback loops. The problem is likely AI complete, but it should be possible to tune recommendations so they don't create self strengthening conspiracy theories. I suspect a reinforcement learning environment that mimics users interacting with a recommender system would be the best way of tuning the larger system behavior so the longer term properties aren't catastrophic for society. OTOH if the platform was setup so "good faith" arguments were somehow incentivized, there might not be any need to optimize for any other metric than engagement.
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Kye 5y ago

There was a brief time before the rise of YouTube when all the independently-hosted web shows published RSS feeds. I had a player program that would download them for me during the day with RSS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software)

sp332 5y ago
I didn't think anyone else remembered Miro! Do you remember when Revision3 hosted their own torrent tracker for their shows? And MediaDefender hacked it, then DDoS'd them over Memorial Day weekend 2008? https://web.archive.org/web/20130721014755/http://revision3.com/blog/2008/05/29/inside-the-attack-that-crippled-revision3/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130721014755/http://revision3....

tacostakohashi 5y ago

Yep, "vodcast" used to be a word in regular use, referring to RSS feeds of videos/eposides often provided by TV channels for episodes of their content. Now that RSS has been effectively killed, this word/concept has disappeared without trace.

Gormo 5y ago
> Now that RSS has been effectively killed Does that mean that my hundreds of still-functioning RSS subscriptions are undead?
Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
RSS is not dead, it is still alive. Websites are still using them. Yes, Google Reader and browsers (well, most of them) ended support for RSS. The readers and community are still around. RSS is increasing popularly again. I have over 400 RSS feeds subscribed in QuiteRSS and FreshRSS.
- stereoradonc 5y ago
  I prefer inoreader.
- rablackburn 5y ago
  > RSS is increasing popularly again. Is this true? Every time RSS comes up we have this same discussion A: “RSS is dead” B: “well, I’m still using it and it’s great. Clearly it’s not dead!” But A and B are having two different conversations. For broad public consumption the only success RSS had was podcasts, and Spotify is actively trying to capture that open ecosystem and make it their cash cow. Kids aren’t sitting around sharing the RSS feeds they like, it’s YouTube, TikTok, Discord; all proprietary walled gardens of content. So yes, the technology isn’t dead, and the world is big enough there’s even a self-sustaining (probably) community of RSS users, but it still hasn’t quite lived up to it’s promise. Streambus is exciting because the cost of hosting content keeps dropping, maybe we can reproduce the podcast model with video now. But as always the network effect and discoverability are big hurdles to overcome. Podcasts succeeded not just because of RSS, they succeeded because Apple supported them in the iTunes Store (which is _still_ the most important place to get reviewed as a podcast) solving the discoverability problem.

rememberlenny 5y ago

Feels like Substack, but for video. In the "creator economy" realm, this looks like the missing part of YouTube - where creators can actually make money without being forced to make content optimizing for clickbait advertisement catered content.

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Jaxkr 5y ago

I remember watching video podcasts on my iPod Nano in 2010…

throwawayswede 5y ago
I still remember watching podgrunt episodes [1] and feeling very happy! 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPyoJisyO2o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPyoJisyO2o

banana_giraffe 5y ago

I'm not sure how well known it is, but YouTube itself has an RSS feed for each channel (well, Atom feed, most feed readers treat them interchangeably). https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=XX https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=XX Where XX is the channel ID (the last component in the URL when you go to a channel). It's actually how I consume YouTube these days. It's a slightly orthogonal problem to the solution posted here, since it doesn't follow the RSS "enclosure" spec. Though my feedreader knows enough to call youtube-dl on these URLs, which is fragile at best, but works for me.

dugite-code 5y ago
I only subscribe to youtube channels with RSS. It's the only practical way to always see new videos on a channel. I find it honestly baffling me to see the hoops creators I subscribe to have to beg people to jump through to maaaybeee get notified when there is a new video up. They used to have an OPML export, but it looks like it was removed
- tantalor 5y ago
  > the only practical way to always see new videos What's wrong with the "subscriptions" tab/page on yt?
  - dugite-code 5y ago
    It will sometimes just not show a video from a creator for unknown reasons or it will disappear between sessions. It's been an issue that's popped up regularly over the years on the youtube support forums so it looks like even that is not a pure feed of content and is subject to the whims of the "algorithm". Not to mention the notifications list for new videos on mobile is also wildly inconsistent and unpredictable
    - tantalor 5y ago
      > an issue that's popped up regularly over the years... looks like even that is not a pure feed of content Sounds more like a bug affecting some small % of users a long time ago, and was fixed. > notifications list for new videos on mobile is also wildly inconsistent and unpredictable What does that even mean? It works fine for me. I see the exact same videos on mobile and desktop (65 subs).

dangoor 5y ago

Aren't the economics of this off? I have a free newsletter on Substack and I can see how Substack can potentially make enough money on all of the paid newsletters for the whole thing to work out. But video hosting is a lot more expensive than sending email newsletters, I suspect. Edit to add: I actually really like this idea. I haven't tried a video podcast before, but if players start adapting to this format it could be great.

flaque 5y ago
This is something that we're keeping an eye on. Our current bet is that it's got better economics than Youtube (lots of video plays, but little revenue flowing through per video), but probably worse economics than Substack.
- dangoor 5y ago
  Perhaps the free plan shouldn't be free? Vimeo has a $7/month plan, and that's actually a better deal than what a lot of podcast hosting companies charge today.
  - flaque 5y ago
    we might consider this if the video cost economics force it (though we'd grandfather free folks in). but early on, I'd like to try and make the initial business model define the mission and incentive structure of the company. "We only make money when you do" creates a very strong incentive for the organization to make you money. And I think a strong business model provides a strong foundation for an open ecosystem. Though it may be the case that $X/time_unit plans are better for the ecosystem/video-makers as a whole; so it's definitely something we'd consider in that case as well.
    - dangoor 5y ago
      > "We only make money when you do" creates a very strong incentive for the organization to make you money. While I agree with this in principle, I look at all of the people who happily put content up for free on YouTube with no intention or desire to monetize. In fact, there was just someone on HN's frontpage today[1] that moved from YouTube to PeerTube because of the fact that YouTube was going to start putting ads on their free videos. "We make money when you do, but we'll charge you rather than going down the ads route" :) [1]: https://solvespace.com/forum.pl?action=viewthread&parent=3756&tt=1625649760 https://solvespace.com/forum.pl?action=viewthread&parent=375...

stereoradonc 5y ago

Seems like a substack model but for videos. I'd stay clear off this.

handmodel 5y ago
I have no idea if any people I like will end up on this but it seems very reasonable. I subscribe to some podcasts that I pay for. I imagine some people really would like this for video.

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Daegalus 5y ago

I think this is a neat idea. I wonder if an old school webring style discoverability system could work. or something that can be added to the end of randomly selected podcasts on the service it ones the creator adds.

victorbstan 5y ago

How is YouTube a walled garden? There’s no review process for posting videos and your can post and go live as soon as the content is uploaded.

messo 5y ago
Title is changed now, but a walled garden is keeping your content and subscribers captive. If you want to leave (or get kicked out for wathever reason), you loose everything. Youtube offers a lot for "free" and has good discoverability if you play the clikck-bate game — a beautifull garden, and at the same time a prison.

pyromaker 5y ago

Tangent, but perhaps related, we've also released something related to a video platform tool called Pyro https://www.pyro.app https://www.pyro.app Pyro lets you... - Create a site with your own domain name - Find, curate and display videos on your site from multiple sources (YouTube, Vimeo etc) based on keywords that you are interested in (e.g. AI, ML, startup) - Allow users to sign up and login as a member, submit videos, upload videos (admins can review + approve). - Build a community based around those videos and scale, members can comment, like, create watch list etc.

hboon 5y ago

Title reminds me of Odeo. https://web.archive.org/web/20051125043621/http://www.odeo.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20051125043621/http://www.odeo.c.... They supported video at some point.

jyriand 5y ago

Do you have an example channel?

throwawayswede 5y ago

This is great. One thing I'd recommend is submission and integration with podcastindex.org.

stevenicr 5y ago

Interesting - I finally popped over to look - and I don't see a terms / acceptable use page... I always do those peeks and ctr-f -? porn, adult then look for what I call the anchor.fm/cancel culture language.. and if I see that then I move on. So now I wonder if playboy porn is okay like vimeo, or if it's choose-your-own bouncer like peertube, or what. popped over again for more info - clicked on pricing - saw something about "stripe" - so the content is to be beholden to the visa/mc/stripe censors? I think paypal is less prude at this point. sadly I think a thing like that that uses alt-coins is more needed - if you have to play within the terms/censors of youtube anyway, why bother doing something alternative? It's just gonna cost more time and money. Love the idea - prefer a version that can cater to non-cancel culture / adult or whatnot would have more staying power.

meetromb 5y ago

> We only make money when you do Many of content creators are not getting revenue from donations/subscriptions. For example, influencers have a personal contracts with companies. Some of them deliberately ignore turning off YouTube monetization for their videos, against, because they have different revenue source. But there is also a case that confirms a part of the hypothesis: maybe you know guys who have a YouTube channel “Corridor Digital”. They have created their own mini-platform for their subscribers and are using youtube as a traffic source. I think you will be interested to know about their motivation and relevance of the idea. P.S where can I follow the development of your idea and product?