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As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: just charge me a fee to host my videos. I'd pay $100/mon

by movedx 2y ago

As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: just charge me a fee to host my videos. I'd pay $100/month, possibly more, to run a YouTube channel without. Why is running ads the _only_ choice? Why can't a creator opt to pay to host videos on their channel with limitations? $10/month? That's 30 videos in HD max. $100? 300 videos in 4K... etc. ... or whatever. As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: I use Freetube. Please use it until abusive adverts and practices aren't a thing anymore.

rafaelmn 2y ago
If you're just using YouTube for hosting - there's other ways to pay for that, Vimeo comes to mind.
- stavros 2y ago
  What about if you're using YouTube as a hosting platform and viewer acquisition channel, but not as a monetization channel?
  - rafaelmn 2y ago
    Then you'd have to pay for viewer acquisition part and no way in hell you're getting that kind of a platform with creators paying for development/hosting without advertising.
ozr 2y ago
There are plenty of third-party video hosts out there that let you do this. Wistia, Vimeo, etc.
- movedx 2y ago
  I know, and neither of them are the second biggest search engine in the world and have _all_ the traffic and viewers.
graeme 2y ago
You'd need to pay based on traffic too not just video total. And have a system in place to add payment if your videos became hits. Would really curtail amateur uploads. Conceivably an option for professionals with business models but hard to see it being a default for a service that wants traction.
Panzer04 2y ago
In fairness to Google, costs to host video would scale with viewers. Unless creators are willing to pay increasingly excessive costs as their viewerbass grows (which I doubt) some kind of per-viewer cost (like ads) needs to be charged. There's no guarantee creators can collect as much income without Google either. Google has proven they can get way more income from ads than pretty much everyone else, and even bug channels with sponsorships still derive a very large income portion from Google ads (based on what I've heard from LinusTechTips videos)
- movedx 2y ago
  Then how are Vimeo doing it? They're fixed price.
  - simfree 2y ago
    The cost to serve the video file is much lower than what Google says it costs. Moving a terabyte of data is quite cheap to do, yet GCP, AWS and ilk continue to have eye-wateringly high data usage pricing.
  - throw0101d 2y ago
    > Then how are Vimeo doing it? They're fixed price. They limit you to 2TB per month of bandwidth: * https://vimeo.com/upgrade-plan https://vimeo.com/upgrade-plan If a video goes viral and you shoot past that you'll probably get a call from them. You also have a finite amount of storage space available with them, which depends on the account tier you're at: no infinite storage like with Youtube. (And with 4K video nowadays, that can be burned through quickly.)
samldev 2y ago
In this scenario you’d also have to pay for bandwidth since that’s the variable cost here. The more views you get, the more you pay. And obviously you wouldn’t get any money from YouTube for views since they aren’t making money from your videos. Genuinely curious, would you still go for it?
- movedx 2y ago
  > In this scenario you’d also have to pay for bandwidth since that’s the variable cost here. For Google? You think Google get a monthly bill for their bandwidth?
  - simfree 2y ago
    Most of Google, AWS and ilks traffic is moved over settlement free peering and fixed cost infrastructure: https://www.lightreading.com/cable-technology/level-3-seals-bit-mile-peering-deal-with-google https://www.lightreading.com/cable-technology/level-3-seals-... Whether 100TB or 1500TB of data are delivered to one ISP at one peering point in a given month has minimal effect, that 10Gbps, 100Gbps or larger port is a fixed cost that will exist regardless of traffic.
    - movedx 2y ago
      Precisely. I used to rent dedicated servers in the early 2000s that gave me such options.
rob8c 2y ago
I noticed my very old Youtube videos have degraded in quality. I'd rather pay monthly then be surprised to find out important videos I trusted to Google have been effectively destroyed.
- bragr 2y ago
  Do you have any evidence for that claim? Do you have the original sources to compare to? Can you provide examples? Genuinely curious.
cozzyd 2y ago
What do you think of something like nebula?
- DavideNL 2y ago
  Yea, i also wonder how people feel about Nebula [1] as an alternative; It seems the problem is, with YouTubes monopoly, other services have almost no chance to succeed because of the "Network Effect"... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_(streaming_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_(streaming_service)
- movedx 2y ago
  It's not the second biggest search engine in the world :(
elviejo 2y ago
As a youtube premium subscriber... since I'm already paying let me set my home screen only to my subscriptions. Also let me opt-out of the algoritm.
- PixelForg 2y ago
  You can opt out of the algorithm by choosing to pause and clear your watch history, you won't have a feed, can only view your subscriptions
  - senkora 2y ago
    +1. I have done this. It works well. I watch videos from my subscriptions in reverse chronological order and that’s it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ffsm8 2y ago
> hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: just charge me a fee to host my videos. I'd pay $100/month $100 wouldn't even cover the storage mate. Let's say you've got 2 thousand hours of content (smallest amount that qualifies for "thousands") At 2k resolution, that'd be around 30TB And you'll want to preprocess it to 1080p, 720p, 480p, so add another 15tb for the other resolutions. And YouTube supports 4k, so if you're shooting at that resolution, you can add another 50tb on top. Purely storage you're already looking at a ~$2500 monthly bill. And then you're gonna have to host and serve it to hundreds of thousands of viewers, the bandwidth cost is gonna be astronomical. Every 100 hours of streamed content is gonna be another ~$100 on top. With a 15 minute video, that'd be 400 views. And I significantly rounded down on every calculation as this is napkin math. If you'd use AWS S3 pricing for storage and egress you can safely double my dollar numbers.
- gizajob 2y ago
  I’m sure you’re right but how does Google afford to do it then? Do they have methods to drastically lower those costs? $2500 per month for each creator seems like it wouldn’t be a business worth running.
  - ffsm8 2y ago
    There are very, very few YouTube creators that actually have thousands of hours of video. Even if it's a vtuber/live streamer they'd still have to publish ~6 hours every day for a full year to get to 2 thousand hours It's pretty much the peak of the iceberg
- 2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
  I think your pricing is quite a little bloated. Having said that, nobody can even in a lifetime produce thousands of hours of valuable content. But the fact that it's free to do so has content creators dump all their crap on youtube instead of being forced to cut it down to actually valuable 1% of it.
- roenxi 2y ago
  That seems like someone has some extremely comfortable margins, $2,500/month could buy me ~50TB of hard disk space at consumer prices. I'm sure that sort of estimate is undercalling the complexity of a storage operation, but nonetheless - there'd have to be some discounts to be found. If nothing else, Backblaze claims to be able to store that much for $300/month. $100/month for 50TB probably isn't feasible but start compromising on resolution and something could be made to work.

by movedx 2y ago

rafaelmn 2y ago

If you're just using YouTube for hosting - there's other ways to pay for that, Vimeo comes to mind.

stavros 2y ago
What about if you're using YouTube as a hosting platform and viewer acquisition channel, but not as a monetization channel?
- rafaelmn 2y ago
  Then you'd have to pay for viewer acquisition part and no way in hell you're getting that kind of a platform with creators paying for development/hosting without advertising.

ozr 2y ago

There are plenty of third-party video hosts out there that let you do this. Wistia, Vimeo, etc.

movedx 2y ago
I know, and neither of them are the second biggest search engine in the world and have _all_ the traffic and viewers.

graeme 2y ago

You'd need to pay based on traffic too not just video total. And have a system in place to add payment if your videos became hits. Would really curtail amateur uploads. Conceivably an option for professionals with business models but hard to see it being a default for a service that wants traction.

Panzer04 2y ago

In fairness to Google, costs to host video would scale with viewers. Unless creators are willing to pay increasingly excessive costs as their viewerbass grows (which I doubt) some kind of per-viewer cost (like ads) needs to be charged. There's no guarantee creators can collect as much income without Google either. Google has proven they can get way more income from ads than pretty much everyone else, and even bug channels with sponsorships still derive a very large income portion from Google ads (based on what I've heard from LinusTechTips videos)

movedx 2y ago
Then how are Vimeo doing it? They're fixed price.
- simfree 2y ago
  The cost to serve the video file is much lower than what Google says it costs. Moving a terabyte of data is quite cheap to do, yet GCP, AWS and ilk continue to have eye-wateringly high data usage pricing.
- throw0101d 2y ago
  > Then how are Vimeo doing it? They're fixed price. They limit you to 2TB per month of bandwidth: * https://vimeo.com/upgrade-plan https://vimeo.com/upgrade-plan If a video goes viral and you shoot past that you'll probably get a call from them. You also have a finite amount of storage space available with them, which depends on the account tier you're at: no infinite storage like with Youtube. (And with 4K video nowadays, that can be burned through quickly.)

samldev 2y ago

In this scenario you’d also have to pay for bandwidth since that’s the variable cost here. The more views you get, the more you pay. And obviously you wouldn’t get any money from YouTube for views since they aren’t making money from your videos. Genuinely curious, would you still go for it?

movedx 2y ago
> In this scenario you’d also have to pay for bandwidth since that’s the variable cost here. For Google? You think Google get a monthly bill for their bandwidth?
- simfree 2y ago
  Most of Google, AWS and ilks traffic is moved over settlement free peering and fixed cost infrastructure: https://www.lightreading.com/cable-technology/level-3-seals-bit-mile-peering-deal-with-google https://www.lightreading.com/cable-technology/level-3-seals-... Whether 100TB or 1500TB of data are delivered to one ISP at one peering point in a given month has minimal effect, that 10Gbps, 100Gbps or larger port is a fixed cost that will exist regardless of traffic.
  - movedx 2y ago
    Precisely. I used to rent dedicated servers in the early 2000s that gave me such options.

rob8c 2y ago

I noticed my very old Youtube videos have degraded in quality. I'd rather pay monthly then be surprised to find out important videos I trusted to Google have been effectively destroyed.

bragr 2y ago
Do you have any evidence for that claim? Do you have the original sources to compare to? Can you provide examples? Genuinely curious.

cozzyd 2y ago

What do you think of something like nebula?

DavideNL 2y ago
Yea, i also wonder how people feel about Nebula [1] as an alternative; It seems the problem is, with YouTubes monopoly, other services have almost no chance to succeed because of the "Network Effect"... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_(streaming_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_(streaming_service)
movedx 2y ago
It's not the second biggest search engine in the world :(

elviejo 2y ago

As a youtube premium subscriber... since I'm already paying let me set my home screen only to my subscriptions. Also let me opt-out of the algoritm.

PixelForg 2y ago
You can opt out of the algorithm by choosing to pause and clear your watch history, you won't have a feed, can only view your subscriptions
- senkora 2y ago
  +1. I have done this. It works well. I watch videos from my subscriptions in reverse chronological order and that’s it.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ffsm8 2y ago

> hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: just charge me a fee to host my videos. I'd pay $100/month $100 wouldn't even cover the storage mate. Let's say you've got 2 thousand hours of content (smallest amount that qualifies for "thousands") At 2k resolution, that'd be around 30TB And you'll want to preprocess it to 1080p, 720p, 480p, so add another 15tb for the other resolutions. And YouTube supports 4k, so if you're shooting at that resolution, you can add another 50tb on top. Purely storage you're already looking at a ~$2500 monthly bill. And then you're gonna have to host and serve it to hundreds of thousands of viewers, the bandwidth cost is gonna be astronomical. Every 100 hours of streamed content is gonna be another ~$100 on top. With a 15 minute video, that'd be 400 views. And I significantly rounded down on every calculation as this is napkin math. If you'd use AWS S3 pricing for storage and egress you can safely double my dollar numbers.

gizajob 2y ago
I’m sure you’re right but how does Google afford to do it then? Do they have methods to drastically lower those costs? $2500 per month for each creator seems like it wouldn’t be a business worth running.
- ffsm8 2y ago
  There are very, very few YouTube creators that actually have thousands of hours of video. Even if it's a vtuber/live streamer they'd still have to publish ~6 hours every day for a full year to get to 2 thousand hours It's pretty much the peak of the iceberg
2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
I think your pricing is quite a little bloated. Having said that, nobody can even in a lifetime produce thousands of hours of valuable content. But the fact that it's free to do so has content creators dump all their crap on youtube instead of being forced to cut it down to actually valuable 1% of it.
roenxi 2y ago
That seems like someone has some extremely comfortable margins, $2,500/month could buy me ~50TB of hard disk space at consumer prices. I'm sure that sort of estimate is undercalling the complexity of a storage operation, but nonetheless - there'd have to be some discounts to be found. If nothing else, Backblaze claims to be able to store that much for $300/month. $100/month for 50TB probably isn't feasible but start compromising on resolution and something could be made to work.