9 ms·

I see more and more content creators realizing they aren't in charge of the channel on which create their content on - and then not knowing what to do about it.

by oidar 4y ago

I see more and more content creators realizing they aren't in charge of the channel on which create their content on - and then not knowing what to do about it. Medium, Youtube, Soundcloud, Reddit, Twitch, Tiktok - these companies are getting a hell of a deal with content creators giving things away for free. When things are going well with YouTube and the like it's fine - but what happens if you get unwarranted strikes - and then you lose your community. Content creators really need to build their community management side first and then start posting on the big sites mainly for promotion. Patreon has done a good job in this space. Ghost as well per this writer. What are some other services that allow you to keep your subscriber email list?

quickthrower2 4y ago
This has always been the way since the internet. Register your domain. Write on that domain (using CMS you control). And then use a range of social media / forums / creator platforms to get traffic to your site.
- usrn 4y ago
  You don't even have to pay for hosting or anything. Keep your stuff on github and use a CDN with free integration. It's fire and forget as long as you keep the domain registered. If github or your CDN misbehaves moving is pretty trivial and doesn't affect your site's content or address.
  - goindeep 4y ago
    Some people don't have those skills and don't want to learn them. They just want to write and produce good stuff. But I hear you.
    - usrn 4y ago
      Word can export html and there are GUIs for github that don't need skills. I guess you could say there's some small amount of learning involved but it's extremely minimal. Arguably not more than these social media sites.
    - noizejoy 4y ago
      > Some people don't have those skills and don't want to learn them. But isn’t that always the chasm of running your own business vs. being an employee or small subcontractor? The more control you want, the more broad your skill set and investment of your time needs to be.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > Write on that domain (using CMS you control). And then use a range of social media / forums / creator platforms to get traffic to your site. Or if you want to eat your cake and have it too, follow the POSSE strategy to get the discoverability benefits of services like Medium without betting the farm on it. https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
  - pstuart 4y ago
    Thanks! Nice to see a name for what's been rattling in my brain ;-)
  - goindeep 4y ago
    Thanks for that. I have been doing this but did not know there was so much more to it.
goindeep 4y ago
Yep. There is a term less used nowadays online and that is for good reason. User Generated Content. All the big sites operate based on this system. Build a good enough system for people to generate content on, give them a pat on the head when they do it, sit back and watch the dollery-doos come in. If you read the post you'll see I never planned to stay on Medium, without sounding like I think I know everything and I'm full of myself, I knew Medium wasn't going to be the place for my content to live, but it was easy to test it there.
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  Yeah I think the optimal strategy these days is to host your own content, then build a following on Twitter, Reddit, etc. and link to it there. Post summaries with the link, but the keep full source text at your own site. Maybe also use a blog comment system like Discourse or Disqus to help with vitality. https://meta.discourse.org/t/embedding-discourse-comments-via-javascript/31963 https://meta.discourse.org/t/embedding-discourse-comments-vi... https://disqus.com/ https://disqus.com/
nostromo 4y ago
> Patreon has done a good job in this space. Not really, they shut people down too, unfairly and without recourse. They shut down Sargon of Akkad for using bad words while arguing against racism, for example. And don’t forget - Visa and Mastercard have started to go after content they don’t like (mostly porn and hate speech - but you never know where they’ll draw the line a year or two from now.)
- echelon 4y ago
  > Visa and Mastercard have started to go after content they don’t like I'm an incredible crypto skeptic, but this has to be one of the better arguments for crypto to exist and be convenient for payment. No other argument resonates like this one.
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    The crypto exchanges could take the same position as the credit card companies. Then you are stuck using on-chain transactions and paying fees. Plus you have the inherent risks and instability of most crypto systems (the most popular of which murder the climate). No thanks.
    - echelon 4y ago
      > The crypto exchanges could take the same position as the credit card companies. Then you are stuck using on-chain transactions and paying fees. That seems incredibly unlikely. They didn't shut it down for ape pictures and Matt Damon. You lump libertarians in with sex positive people and you can't really tell them apart anymore. > Plus you have the inherent risks and instability of most crypto systems True. > (the most popular of which murder the climate). Everything we do murders the climate. We're not going to fix the problem without a total economic shutdown. Pointing fingers at crypto folks when Google is training ginormous ML models it won't release and while everyone else continues to fly, drive, enjoy indoor temperatures, eat meat, and buy plastic is a bit like throwing rocks in a glass house.
      - 4y ago
gamerDude 4y ago
Is the idea you have to run your own site first. If the idea is you can convert followers and engagement from a big platform to your own, then you should be able to do it after you have a large following on a platform as well. That way you can find a content market fit using a big platform then move people over and monetize. There are clearly a couple issues with this now. Is the main problem here not having a host your own version of all the mediums creators use to get an audience? Ghost solves this for blogging, but I don't know anything for tik tok or Instagram or twitch. Or is there a reason you couldn't move over a lot of audience late in the game? And if not, why not/would the reasons you can't stop you from building an audience in the first place?
- oidar 4y ago
  These are the main problems as I see it: 1) Content creators are busy creating content, they have little time to create an independent membership site. For streamers, beyond the streaming there isn't a whole lot that one could offer on a membership site. Twitch owns you. Maybe game coaching? IDK. For a recipe creator on Tiktok, a membership site makes sense. You can offer full recipes and full walkthroughs with engagement on recipes. 2) You don't own your followers list - it's hidden behind by the social media company. If the algo changes, if you get a violation of ToS, and so on. You have no idea when you might lose your audience access. Owning the list protects you.
- smaudet 4y ago
  "but I don't know anything for tik tok or Instagram or twitch." Remember, its worse than just a lack of software. Text is dirt cheap (not processing text mind), whereas images, videos, require several orders of magnitude larger data, and several orders of magnitude more processing power. CDNs are one bit of the puzzle, large specialized providers which will cache and store images around the globe for you, but those require obviously dedicated servers, associated hosting fees... The other portion, then obviously, is bandwidth. Even if you can get away without a CDN, you still need good up/down speeds, as do your users. The solution is/was partially to use bittorrent or other file-share protocols to offload your bandwidth. OFC, then come issues like defending your work from theft, etc, all of which are issues with the simple centralized system as well, not actually at odds with file sharing (you can implement DRM over bittorrent if you wanted to). No, here you can squarely point at RIAA, MPAA, US Congress (Interpol in the EU), and blame them for the current state affairs, bad policies having caused media monopolies. Until you strike down some of their more nonsensical decisions and bring the world back to file-sharing, alternatives to popular, performant, and widely available image/video sharing applications are not going to exist.
judge2020 4y ago
The value-add of these services is pretty substantial, though. Free hosting alone is pretty big, since even setting up two servers to host your videos (one EU, one US) won't be as good as Google's global peering and edge storage servers[0]. And the web in terms of discoverability is dead - even if everyone used RSS readers and creators hosted their own videos, how do they find new viewers that want to watch their content without resorting to traditional advertising, or hoping word-of-mouth (online forums, IRL, or otherwise) works? 0: https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure
- chii 4y ago
  this only applies to situations where your content is large in terms of byte count. For textual content, there's barely any real cost tbh. a caching layer solves most of your problems with edge node speed (so you pay cloudflare or akamai or some such). > The value-add of these services is pretty substantial, though. For videos (and music to a degree), it's unique in that the content size is huge, and people are increasingly impatient. I have no doubt that youtube infrastructure cannot be replicated by a private person. Therefore, their services are not "value-adds", but the primary value, and your video content is the "value add".
  - dna_polymerase 4y ago
    You don’t need the full scope of Google’s network. Using fastly or another CDN provider will be enough to host your video content.
  - gilrain 4y ago
    Without the content, there is literally nothing to inject advertising into and, thus, no business at all. Content is pretty important for just a “value add”!
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      I sell my own books on my blog. No advertising at all. It works fairly well, especially given that the Czech language community isn't very big.
lmm 4y ago
I think Substack is pushing that angle and that's part of their appeal, although whether you trust them to make it work is another question.
seydor 4y ago
It never ends. The goalposts will be moved from youtube to patreon, from patreon to visa (this has already been done), from visa to web hosts, from hosts to DNS registrars etc etc. The problem is the mob itself, not its means. The somewhat-bulletproof solutions would involve blockchain
npteljes 4y ago
I mean, it's always a tradeoff, whatever you do. Whenever anybody offers anything, they don't do it unlimited, for free and no strings attached, so over time, no matter what they offer, the limits, the price or the terms will become a liability. Often it changes over time: what didn't matter back then, matters now. Also, these companies are getting a hell of a deal now. Now that they are so successful that you know them by heart. And only maybe are they getting that deal, YouTube for one bled money like there's no tomorrow for a very long time, maybe even know. Creators, and people in general need to do realize that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. And assess and manage their risk.

by oidar 4y ago

quickthrower2 4y ago

This has always been the way since the internet. Register your domain. Write on that domain (using CMS you control). And then use a range of social media / forums / creator platforms to get traffic to your site.

usrn 4y ago
You don't even have to pay for hosting or anything. Keep your stuff on github and use a CDN with free integration. It's fire and forget as long as you keep the domain registered. If github or your CDN misbehaves moving is pretty trivial and doesn't affect your site's content or address.
- goindeep 4y ago
  Some people don't have those skills and don't want to learn them. They just want to write and produce good stuff. But I hear you.
  - usrn 4y ago
    Word can export html and there are GUIs for github that don't need skills. I guess you could say there's some small amount of learning involved but it's extremely minimal. Arguably not more than these social media sites.
  - noizejoy 4y ago
    > Some people don't have those skills and don't want to learn them. But isn’t that always the chasm of running your own business vs. being an employee or small subcontractor? The more control you want, the more broad your skill set and investment of your time needs to be.
CharlesW 4y ago
> Write on that domain (using CMS you control). And then use a range of social media / forums / creator platforms to get traffic to your site. Or if you want to eat your cake and have it too, follow the POSSE strategy to get the discoverability benefits of services like Medium without betting the farm on it. https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
- pstuart 4y ago
  Thanks! Nice to see a name for what's been rattling in my brain ;-)
- goindeep 4y ago
  Thanks for that. I have been doing this but did not know there was so much more to it.

goindeep 4y ago

Yep. There is a term less used nowadays online and that is for good reason. User Generated Content. All the big sites operate based on this system. Build a good enough system for people to generate content on, give them a pat on the head when they do it, sit back and watch the dollery-doos come in. If you read the post you'll see I never planned to stay on Medium, without sounding like I think I know everything and I'm full of myself, I knew Medium wasn't going to be the place for my content to live, but it was easy to test it there.

SkyMarshal 4y ago
Yeah I think the optimal strategy these days is to host your own content, then build a following on Twitter, Reddit, etc. and link to it there. Post summaries with the link, but the keep full source text at your own site. Maybe also use a blog comment system like Discourse or Disqus to help with vitality. https://meta.discourse.org/t/embedding-discourse-comments-via-javascript/31963 https://meta.discourse.org/t/embedding-discourse-comments-vi... https://disqus.com/ https://disqus.com/

nostromo 4y ago

> Patreon has done a good job in this space. Not really, they shut people down too, unfairly and without recourse. They shut down Sargon of Akkad for using bad words while arguing against racism, for example. And don’t forget - Visa and Mastercard have started to go after content they don’t like (mostly porn and hate speech - but you never know where they’ll draw the line a year or two from now.)

echelon 4y ago
> Visa and Mastercard have started to go after content they don’t like I'm an incredible crypto skeptic, but this has to be one of the better arguments for crypto to exist and be convenient for payment. No other argument resonates like this one.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  The crypto exchanges could take the same position as the credit card companies. Then you are stuck using on-chain transactions and paying fees. Plus you have the inherent risks and instability of most crypto systems (the most popular of which murder the climate). No thanks.
  - echelon 4y ago
    > The crypto exchanges could take the same position as the credit card companies. Then you are stuck using on-chain transactions and paying fees. That seems incredibly unlikely. They didn't shut it down for ape pictures and Matt Damon. You lump libertarians in with sex positive people and you can't really tell them apart anymore. > Plus you have the inherent risks and instability of most crypto systems True. > (the most popular of which murder the climate). Everything we do murders the climate. We're not going to fix the problem without a total economic shutdown. Pointing fingers at crypto folks when Google is training ginormous ML models it won't release and while everyone else continues to fly, drive, enjoy indoor temperatures, eat meat, and buy plastic is a bit like throwing rocks in a glass house.
    - 4y ago

gamerDude 4y ago

Is the idea you have to run your own site first. If the idea is you can convert followers and engagement from a big platform to your own, then you should be able to do it after you have a large following on a platform as well. That way you can find a content market fit using a big platform then move people over and monetize. There are clearly a couple issues with this now. Is the main problem here not having a host your own version of all the mediums creators use to get an audience? Ghost solves this for blogging, but I don't know anything for tik tok or Instagram or twitch. Or is there a reason you couldn't move over a lot of audience late in the game? And if not, why not/would the reasons you can't stop you from building an audience in the first place?

oidar 4y ago
These are the main problems as I see it: 1) Content creators are busy creating content, they have little time to create an independent membership site. For streamers, beyond the streaming there isn't a whole lot that one could offer on a membership site. Twitch owns you. Maybe game coaching? IDK. For a recipe creator on Tiktok, a membership site makes sense. You can offer full recipes and full walkthroughs with engagement on recipes. 2) You don't own your followers list - it's hidden behind by the social media company. If the algo changes, if you get a violation of ToS, and so on. You have no idea when you might lose your audience access. Owning the list protects you.
smaudet 4y ago
"but I don't know anything for tik tok or Instagram or twitch." Remember, its worse than just a lack of software. Text is dirt cheap (not processing text mind), whereas images, videos, require several orders of magnitude larger data, and several orders of magnitude more processing power. CDNs are one bit of the puzzle, large specialized providers which will cache and store images around the globe for you, but those require obviously dedicated servers, associated hosting fees... The other portion, then obviously, is bandwidth. Even if you can get away without a CDN, you still need good up/down speeds, as do your users. The solution is/was partially to use bittorrent or other file-share protocols to offload your bandwidth. OFC, then come issues like defending your work from theft, etc, all of which are issues with the simple centralized system as well, not actually at odds with file sharing (you can implement DRM over bittorrent if you wanted to). No, here you can squarely point at RIAA, MPAA, US Congress (Interpol in the EU), and blame them for the current state affairs, bad policies having caused media monopolies. Until you strike down some of their more nonsensical decisions and bring the world back to file-sharing, alternatives to popular, performant, and widely available image/video sharing applications are not going to exist.

judge2020 4y ago

The value-add of these services is pretty substantial, though. Free hosting alone is pretty big, since even setting up two servers to host your videos (one EU, one US) won't be as good as Google's global peering and edge storage servers[0]. And the web in terms of discoverability is dead - even if everyone used RSS readers and creators hosted their own videos, how do they find new viewers that want to watch their content without resorting to traditional advertising, or hoping word-of-mouth (online forums, IRL, or otherwise) works? 0: https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure

chii 4y ago
this only applies to situations where your content is large in terms of byte count. For textual content, there's barely any real cost tbh. a caching layer solves most of your problems with edge node speed (so you pay cloudflare or akamai or some such). > The value-add of these services is pretty substantial, though. For videos (and music to a degree), it's unique in that the content size is huge, and people are increasingly impatient. I have no doubt that youtube infrastructure cannot be replicated by a private person. Therefore, their services are not "value-adds", but the primary value, and your video content is the "value add".
- dna_polymerase 4y ago
  You don’t need the full scope of Google’s network. Using fastly or another CDN provider will be enough to host your video content.
- gilrain 4y ago
  Without the content, there is literally nothing to inject advertising into and, thus, no business at all. Content is pretty important for just a “value add”!
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    I sell my own books on my blog. No advertising at all. It works fairly well, especially given that the Czech language community isn't very big.

lmm 4y ago

I think Substack is pushing that angle and that's part of their appeal, although whether you trust them to make it work is another question.

seydor 4y ago

It never ends. The goalposts will be moved from youtube to patreon, from patreon to visa (this has already been done), from visa to web hosts, from hosts to DNS registrars etc etc. The problem is the mob itself, not its means. The somewhat-bulletproof solutions would involve blockchain

npteljes 4y ago

I mean, it's always a tradeoff, whatever you do. Whenever anybody offers anything, they don't do it unlimited, for free and no strings attached, so over time, no matter what they offer, the limits, the price or the terms will become a liability. Often it changes over time: what didn't matter back then, matters now. Also, these companies are getting a hell of a deal now. Now that they are so successful that you know them by heart. And only maybe are they getting that deal, YouTube for one bled money like there's no tomorrow for a very long time, maybe even know. Creators, and people in general need to do realize that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. And assess and manage their risk.