All: please let's try to avoid repeating the generic discussion about how being on someone else's platform leaves you vulnerable to someone else. It's not wrong, of course, but it's been repeated for many years and won't lead to fresh conversation.
The goal on HN is curious conversation. Curiosity likes diffs [1], not generics [2, 3]. Try to comment in a way that leads to a new place rather than an old place.
The easiest way to do this is to respond to the specific new information in an article. As a nudge in that direction, I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases).
You don't only have to react to the specific new information in an article. Whimsical tangents and reactions are also ok. Just ask yourself if it's expected or unexpected [4], and prefer the unexpected.
I appreciate all of your work but I think that you are wrong with this comment... I think that talking about leaving platforms that have monopolies can spur innovation.
For sure there are important and interesting questions there. I'm not asking people not to talk about those!—just to do it in a way that isn't just repeating what always gets said. Otherwise there's a power-law dropoff in information transfer...like telling the same joke or repeating the same word over and over.
There's nothing wrong with repetition per se. There is pleasure in it—it's just a different kind than the pleasure of curiosity. The problem is that we can't have both pleasures at the same time, and HN is a site for curiosity.
This is one of those moderation calls that seems arbitrary and obscure until you take literally that we're trying to optimize for just one thing, and then it follows rather straightforwardly.
(It's really a sweet spot to have only one thing to optimize for—one gets to have fun being radical about following it to all its counterintuitive consequences.)
I agree with your action. Letting more curious and fresh comments get buried under the more predictable and repetitive ones would be a disservice to the site visitors.
at any rate to me it doesn't look that they are leaving youtube to get out from under google's oppressive thumb, but rather that they are trying to get more of the money by having their own distribution channel that serves their committed fans, and then release to youtube later for the less engaged user.
although I guess it is also a smart thing to still have something open if youtube suddenly decides to screw you over by algorithm.
(This is a stub reply so I can collapse the various comments responding to this, so as not to distract too much from the rest of the thread. Sorry, non-JS users.)
> It's not wrong, of course, but it's been repeated for many years and won't lead to fresh conversation.
Assumes there are no new readers on HN and that everyone reads almost everything and nothing needs repeating. Also it's very 'no noobies' as if anyone who is anyone should know the ropes already. And that is not the case.
And I've mentioned this before a few times so I will repeat. Why don't you have in your profile that you are a moderator? How would someone new to HN know why you are saying what you are saying and why you have the right to pin what you say at the top?
I've seen a lot of otherwise reasonable threads get bogged down by "lowest common denominator" replies, especially ones that don't require reading the article and could really be posted in any thread matching the right keywords. Such comments are *really* easy to make and frequently do "well" in that they attract votes and comments, drowning out the rest of the discussion. Do you have ideas on how to combat this? Obviously moderator intervention would help, but it's not possible to be everywhere, especially in the first couple minutes of a post when the temptation to leave a lazy comment and the cost to the overall direction of discussion from such a comment is the greatest.
"I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases)."
that feels super gross, I love mostly passively reading HN, but manipulation like that because basically it sounds like you don't want to see stuff you've seen before ...
>Curiosity likes diffs [1], not generics [2, 3]. Try to comment in a way that leads to a new place rather than an old place.
How downvotes encourage that? I mean it can be abused and is abused for bullying opinions that some people do not want to hear.
There are some interesting opinions reflecting exactly this "Curiosity likes diffs" that get downvoted and how it encourages to write something interesting if it will be invisible and become deleted anyway just because it's not in the trend or too different.
Or if I get downvoted for stating the facts I observe. In theory it should sparkle curiosity! Not shutting up the facts using downvotes. Once I've experienced getting downvoted for stating the facts it's not really encouraging to say what I think is really there.
Can we remove downvotes and leave only upvotes? Or can we limit downvotes to some degree so at least somewhere in the end of the threat you can still read them. I mean
at leat let me read those downvoted opinions, it's not too comfortable to read almost white on white and it's annoying.
May be we can put a red line in the end of the thread and put some comments beyond that line to let know those have been downvoted a lot. But let me read those, at least we can learn why they have been downvoted.
I appreciate your work. Indeed HN is a unique place and supports curiosity to some good degree. I just wish it to encourage it more and I think people need some more safety for this.
I observe that if people want to say what they really think they just create temporary account just to express that specific opinion because new accounts are protected from downvotes as I understand. This observation should be worrying I think if we wish to encourage "diffs" and "unexpected".
For now I've learned that saying something really different here would get downvotes and this is not what I wish to learn here.
I wish to explore concepts that I am not sure are correct and I wish get answers helping me to explore them. Not downvotes that tell me mostly nothing about the concept.
Lolll. Dang is literally cringe. Signed up to reply to him, the message has been moved or deleted loll, so nevermind. Also not sure he realizes that nowadays half the "hn'ers" are just simple redditor; he keeps implying hners are somehow elite lol. Dog we are redditors, you live in your own world dang.
"As a nudge in that direction, I've...downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases)." - dang, master of HN
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
Honestly it's sad how people on this website are okay with this Maoist nonsense, considering how brutally they attack trends like censorship and political correctness.
I follow CGP Grey’s stuff and it’s been interesting and instructive to see how he diversified.
* His Youtube channel is his main platform
* However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there
* He also earns income from a podcast, Cortex
* The Podcast has its own brand of sellable things, currently journals and Tshirts
* He had a second podcast, hello internet, currently on hiatus. If ever something went catastrophically wrong with youtube this could be reactivated via the feed
* He has a large email list which he uses to reach people directly and drive traffic to videos if people request these updates
* He is also prominent on twitter etc and maintains secondary youtube channels, useful if main one taken down
* He runs a large subreddit for his following
So it is layers and layers of redundancy, built on a mix of other platforms and also two he controls directly (email and rss)
Still faces a youtube risk but it would take a an earthquake across platforms to truly wreck his income streams.
As someone who runs an online business and follows him it’s been impressive to watch how diversified he has made his comms channels.
CGP Grey is strange, so to say. He effectively abandoned Hello Internet. They once mentioned that they have 900K subs. Grey fully controlled HI, and it was way more popular than Cortex. If he wants to diversify so much abandoning project like this just doesn’t make sense.
Also he has no basic decency to announce cancelation and left Tims hanging, for many of whom it was the podcast.
HI ending was kinda expected. CGP Grey seems to be a guy who is trying to minimize his personal public presence and the show was going from general internet culture discussions between two creators to Brady the Interviewing Genius trying to get Grey the Reclusive Weirdo to say something interesting. That dynamic is obviously not sustainable.
Compare that with Cortex where Gray can talk productivity systems and his unanswered love for Apple all day long. Endless content there, as you can never overthink it too much.
I've watched both Grey's and Haran's videos since their early years on YouTube, and I'd be curious to know what the story is behind the disappearance of their podcast. It seemed like an odd development to me in view of how engaged they both appeared to be with their audience.
I know that Haran eventually posted a brief comment on Reddit acknowledging the hiatus, but it struck me as a strangely subdued way to announce the end of a regular series that had been very successful for several years.
I liked Hello Internet as much as anyone, but I don't think creators really owe fans anything. Also, you shouldn't be too surprised. Brady and Gray talked about if they ever ended HI, Gray probably wouldn't announce that it was over to anyone.
Slight tangent but podcasting is an interesting counterpoint. Right now the business is pretty distributed. There's no youtube for podcasts although Apple is easily number one. There is now an absolute street fight between Apple and Spotify with Google, Amazon and some other wannabes fighting to own the walled garden. And crazy consolidation for creator tools and monetization. It'll be interesting to see if a "winner" emerges or if the space stays open.
I dunno, it’s his and Brady’s to do with as they wish. There’s a financial penalty to letting it lay fallow, but that’s their choice to make.
They stopped it right when the pandemic hit. That messed up podcast advertising for a while, and also the usual stuff they talked about.
Meanwhile they both have other projects and may have decided their time or energy was better spent elsewhere. Who knows?
A little unusual not to say anything but hey, they end episodes without goodbye so not a giant surprise. And Brady has said they’re on a break and on good terms so it isn’t totally secret either.
I enjoyed it while it was around and wish them well, but I don’t think they owe us anything. I subbed to Goodbye Internet to give a small incentive to them restarting, and that’s it.
But to my larger point, it is still an asset. If the community atrophies 40% while they’re gone...it’s still 60% of a great asset.
Brady put out a short blog post on the status of Hello Internet about 5 months ago. I felt a bit betrayed as an avid listener that they so suddenly and without any notice for several months stopped putting out episodes, but at least this blog seems to indicate that they simply have their focuses elsewhere for now.
He's probably quite wealthy and established already. It doesn't strike me as strange that he might burn out on some projects and not feel as motivated to continue as someone with no online profile.
> However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there
Did he break that down publicly or do you get your info from elsewhere? I've always been curious to know what a typical high profile youtuber income flow looks like, and how much they're really tied to Youtube.
The thing I've heard is "1,000 views = $1". I don't know how true that is anymore but it's my metric.
Mark Brown, of Game Maker's Toolkit, puts out vids on Youtube that get a couple hundred thousand views (1 or 2 vids a month). So he could theoretically get a couple hundred from those. But his Patreon following nets him a couple thousand a month ($11k!)
When you have niche content you can end up getting way more per subscriber if people feel your content is worth it.
Just a guess knowing how low Youtube ad rates are and how Grey has mentioned he switched over his income from ad sponsorships to patreon. And Patreon income is public.
> So it is layers and layers of redundancy, built on a mix of other platforms and also two he controls directly (email and rss)
Not really.
There is some kind of "channel" redundancy but no "revenue streams" diversification outside ads and patreon.
Without actually paying for content, one can usually find:
- google ads, low effort low reward
- brand sponsorships, high effort, fixed reward
- patreon subscriptions, high effort high reward
- tips and super chats and twitch
- sometimes brave BAT rewards
Something to understand, for those who might have just seen some youtube videos of him being goofy, is that he's an actor. The guy on camera doing stupid stuff is a stage persona. It's an intentionally cultivated image and media persona to get as many video views as possible.
I sort of see him as one possible aspect of the low/medium budget TV production stuff which is common in his home city, Vancouver BC. People who've met and worked with him in person report that he's a much more normal, calm, rational individual off screen.
I won't judge him for being goofy on camera because it's hard to make a living as a working actor. For every person who gets a job in a vancouver-produced TV drama that might last 2 or 3 seasons, there's dozens more people who are working as restaurant servers while trying to get their big break.
I wonder how many potential views he loses due to his gurning? I've never watched any of his videos despite YT constantly recommending them to me because I've got a personal rule about never clicking on a thumbnail that has a picture of someone pulling a face or which has a clickbait title.
TIL the word "gurn". Never once heard it before and even just now autocorrect tried to insist it was "turn". The description is indeed apt for what I see in a lot of thumbnails.
Linus learned all of this over the years, and optimized it over time. He's great at it now, but was pretty rough at first -- but he was never an actor, he was a geek that loved technology. He worked for a large computer reseller that gave him lots of resources when he was starting.
He actually built this in spite of all the production resources that Vancouver has to offer, and is more a "growth hacker" than actor I'd say.
I think comedian might be a more accurate way to describe him. "Actor" somewhat implies deception which I'm sure is not what is intended by the GP. Interestingly, in French comédien means "actor", while they have a different word for the newer English definition of comedian: humoriste. In any case, the point is who he is on screen is a character that he has developed. There's nothing at all wrong with that. In fact, such characters are usually celebrated!
Linus Tech Tips is essentially the "Top Gear of Tech" - it's over the top, hammed up, but eminently watchable and there are plenty of nuggets of useful information.
I was an avid reader of tech magazines, LTT has replaced them for me. Partly because those magazines' budgets have kept on being reduced year after year, and the quality has dipped, but also because of the quality of those "nuggets" that you mention.
In French we say "veille technologique" which seems to coincide with "technology intelligence" in English, but it's a lot less intense: I just like knowing what's out there, keep informed, and LTT's format is just that: highly digestible updates on storage technology, network infrastructure, hardware and everything tech.
It's more watchable than Top Gear for me. Maybe LTT employs better actors but in any case I believe in its candid elements more. On Top Gear it's completely obvious it's all scripted but we're expected to believe it's not. I find it very annoying and quite uncomfortable to watch.
People watch videos largely for entertainment, even when the subject matter is a review of computer hardware or advice concerning technology. For pure informational value, a written format with occasional short illustrative video clips is usually more useful.
I think every successful youtuber has a cultivated stage persona because that's more entertaining than just watching an everyday person talk about a mechanical keyboard for 15 minutes.
You can in fact watch a professional chemist talk about a mechanical keyboard for 15 minutes on a pretty successful YouTube channel, but he's definitely going to be using his larger-than-life stage persona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui_wOiUDPvM .
Do you mean that he's an actor in the sense that he's acting while on camera, or that he's an actor in the sense that his aspirations from the start have been the actual profession and art of acting, but he just failed to get into it and this stuff is his backup? I get the impression that you mean the latter, but it seems far more likely that it's the former. Not that it's unlikely he didn't at some point try and get into film, but he's been in tech sales and reviews from before he ever would have had a real go at failing to get into acting gigs.
I didn't mean so much that he's a person who tried and didn't get a part on a Vancouver-produced TV show, but that his video production efforts are part of the whole general Vancouver and Toronto "hollywood north" industry scene of people who act, do camera work, set decoration, costume, cinematography, sound, rigging, grips, etc.
This article is a little on the surface level, but it's true.
People were screaming about where platforms and digital sharecropping was headed all along... and we're here now. Youtube, which is basically digital free-to-air is even more centralised than old free to air.
Youtube really is an extreme situation. They really dominate a whole medium single handedly and youtubers have shockingly little power in the whole thing. There either needs to be some neutrality, competition or youtubers need to organize somehow... unionize even. Trying to have a relationship with audiences that doesn't run through youtube won't work for most channels... even ones with millions of views.
I always expected a porn company to come in and compete with youtube at some point. They have the infrastructure. I've also been surprised at how restricted youtube manage to be, and still succeed... just the skin censorship if nothing else.
It's just incredibly hard to compete with Youtube. In a way that's Google's greatest achievement: they convinced everybody that they're entitled to host and stream 4K videos forever not only for free, but the creators get a share of the ad revenue despite fronting none of the hosting costs. It's an incredibly good deal. The amount of infrastructure and human resources required to merely keep a system like Youtube running is mind boggling.
That makes people reasonably annoyed when Youtube decides to semi-arbitrarily pull the plug on a channel, but it also means that competition is very hard. If a competitor decides to start charging for hosting or streaming, they're doomed to be niche.
Please everyone don’t forget google search positioning too. This is massive. Google have pushed YouTube into their search for a long time, basically building YouTube doing it. That brought insane traffic to YouTube videos and makes YouTube the place for videos.
THIS is the antitrust of google, and where authorities should strike them. They built a video platform and destroyed others using their 90% market power in another market.
The thing with the resource sharing is that it's peanuts compared to what youtubers earn off of other sources of income; sponsorship and product placement deals (which I'm sure is a thorn in Youtube's eye, unless they get a slice of that cake), Patreon is a really big one, and merchandise sales. I'm sure that Youtube ad revenue is in 4th place with regards to income for youtubes, especially since the 'adpocalypse' wherein advertisers pulled out of youtube and stronghanded them into a strict demonetization practice.
Anyway that said, there's enough competition for youtube to ensure that these channels don't have to die; it's just discoverability that is the issue. Youtube does not have exclusive rights to any video uploaded (although I'm sure they have negotiated exclusivity contracts with some), so anyone is free to mirror their uploads elsewhere, just in case. I'm sure there's software out there that makes cross-posting videos easy.
This is also the reason why every potential 5 minute read time blog post is turned into a 30 minute monotonous video.
Monetising. Youtube does it automatically, with a blog you need to manage the ads yourself and the audience is a lot smaller.
There is also a generational gap at some point. To me, it seems that 20-somethings turn to Youtube for every issue (phone setup, toilet clogged whatever) instead of looking for a text resource.
That content protocol is called HTTP and the service discovery protocol is called DNS. I know that it's a bit cliche to say that these days, but acquiring a domain name (either directly from a TLD registrar or indirectly through e.g. a DynDNS provider) and pointing it at a webhost is what allows content publishers to "mint" their very own globally unique URLs. Any consumers that are equipped with a suitable user agent can then plug that URL into their browser and view that publisher's content.
Now let's be serious, there are numerous barriers that stand in the way of "normal" users that want to escape the evil platforms. Why not direct our ire at the real problem: Why Johnny Still Can't Host a Website!
And if we fix that, perhaps we can move on to Why Johnny Can't Get Any Visitors (Because Google Won't Index It) and Why Johnny's Visitors Don't Receive His Updates (Because Google and Mozilla Killed RSS).
You are basically describing IPFS. Content-based addressing instead of location-based addressing. Allowing content to be decoupled from any single hosting platform
a good story about floatplane: i signed up pretty much as soon as it was announced, then i forgot about it and also forgot my password.
i was billed -very little- for a while then i opened a support ticket to have my account restored, since i had been billed for a while i at least wanted to watch some content.
but apparently something in the backend had changed and they plainly refunded me from the time i had my last login (iirc) and then they allowed me to re-signup.
it's been nice because i had then been able to re-signup and also recover some money that were pretty much lost, and i wasn't expecting that nor asking for it.
The problem with Floatplane is that new creators who have ideas and skills but aren’t publishing elsewhere online (e.g., because they dislike the ad-driven model and don’t want their videos to appear alongside junk content) have nothing in terms of online optics that they could put into the application form—so they’d have to either support the likes of YouTube first by publishing there, or be capable of running their own site. I wish Floatplane charged a moderate fee upfront rather than having the vetting/review flow (which could still be an option for those who can’t afford the fee).
I think that's a great decision. Many people like to complain about Youtube and its policies and its algorithms but it's simply very hard to compete with it. Its offering is really unparalleled.
Hopefully these creators will manage to carve enough of a niche to create healthy competition, especially with a business model that doesn't rely entirely on ad revenue. It's going to be very hard though, making money from video hosting is a very difficult thing to do.
>It’s the same as the old Apple saying: if you’re serious about software, you have to make hardware.
The actual quote, "people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware," is from Alan Kay, when he was speaking at a seminar in 1982 called Creative Think. Andy Hertzfeld was in attendance and took notes. When Hertzfeld got back to his office at Apple, he summarized the notes on one page and handed out to his team members. Kay was later hired as an Apple Fellow in 1984.
This is my view too. I'm hopeful that eventually some combination of technologies that already exist (peer-to-peer sharing, tor, blockchain, homomorphic encryption, maybe even wireless mesh networking) will evolve into a decentralised hosting and delivery system that everyone will use.
I'm woefully uninformed to speculate about how feasible this might be though, so it remains just a hope for me.
Peertube is an alternative. You usually host your own instance (or if someone is generous, they can five you some space) and it is fully decentralized. It uses ActivityPub and works with p2p. Recently they introsuced livestreaming and cross-instance search.
Readit News
The goal on HN is curious conversation. Curiosity likes diffs [1], not generics [2, 3]. Try to comment in a way that leads to a new place rather than an old place.
The easiest way to do this is to respond to the specific new information in an article. As a nudge in that direction, I've swapped a different interrogative pronoun into the title, and have downweighted the generic subthreads which were rising to the top like bloated balloons and crowding out more interesting discussion (as typically happens in these cases).
You don't only have to react to the specific new information in an article. Whimsical tangents and reactions are also ok. Just ask yourself if it's expected or unexpected [4], and prefer the unexpected.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
There's nothing wrong with repetition per se. There is pleasure in it—it's just a different kind than the pleasure of curiosity. The problem is that we can't have both pleasures at the same time, and HN is a site for curiosity. This is one of those moderation calls that seems arbitrary and obscure until you take literally that we're trying to optimize for just one thing, and then it follows rather straightforwardly.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280
(It's really a sweet spot to have only one thing to optimize for—one gets to have fun being radical about following it to all its counterintuitive consequences.)
although I guess it is also a smart thing to still have something open if youtube suddenly decides to screw you over by algorithm.
Assumes there are no new readers on HN and that everyone reads almost everything and nothing needs repeating. Also it's very 'no noobies' as if anyone who is anyone should know the ropes already. And that is not the case.
And I've mentioned this before a few times so I will repeat. Why don't you have in your profile that you are a moderator? How would someone new to HN know why you are saying what you are saying and why you have the right to pin what you say at the top?
that feels super gross, I love mostly passively reading HN, but manipulation like that because basically it sounds like you don't want to see stuff you've seen before ...
poor decision.
How downvotes encourage that? I mean it can be abused and is abused for bullying opinions that some people do not want to hear.
There are some interesting opinions reflecting exactly this "Curiosity likes diffs" that get downvoted and how it encourages to write something interesting if it will be invisible and become deleted anyway just because it's not in the trend or too different.
Or if I get downvoted for stating the facts I observe. In theory it should sparkle curiosity! Not shutting up the facts using downvotes. Once I've experienced getting downvoted for stating the facts it's not really encouraging to say what I think is really there.
Can we remove downvotes and leave only upvotes? Or can we limit downvotes to some degree so at least somewhere in the end of the threat you can still read them. I mean at leat let me read those downvoted opinions, it's not too comfortable to read almost white on white and it's annoying.
May be we can put a red line in the end of the thread and put some comments beyond that line to let know those have been downvoted a lot. But let me read those, at least we can learn why they have been downvoted.
I appreciate your work. Indeed HN is a unique place and supports curiosity to some good degree. I just wish it to encourage it more and I think people need some more safety for this.
I observe that if people want to say what they really think they just create temporary account just to express that specific opinion because new accounts are protected from downvotes as I understand. This observation should be worrying I think if we wish to encourage "diffs" and "unexpected".
For now I've learned that saying something really different here would get downvotes and this is not what I wish to learn here.
I wish to explore concepts that I am not sure are correct and I wish get answers helping me to explore them. Not downvotes that tell me mostly nothing about the concept.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
Honestly it's sad how people on this website are okay with this Maoist nonsense, considering how brutally they attack trends like censorship and political correctness.
* His Youtube channel is his main platform
* However, the money mostly comes from patreon subscribers, and you can also have videos delivered there
* He also earns income from a podcast, Cortex
* The Podcast has its own brand of sellable things, currently journals and Tshirts
* He had a second podcast, hello internet, currently on hiatus. If ever something went catastrophically wrong with youtube this could be reactivated via the feed
* He has a large email list which he uses to reach people directly and drive traffic to videos if people request these updates
* He is also prominent on twitter etc and maintains secondary youtube channels, useful if main one taken down
* He runs a large subreddit for his following
So it is layers and layers of redundancy, built on a mix of other platforms and also two he controls directly (email and rss)
Still faces a youtube risk but it would take a an earthquake across platforms to truly wreck his income streams.
As someone who runs an online business and follows him it’s been impressive to watch how diversified he has made his comms channels.
Also he has no basic decency to announce cancelation and left Tims hanging, for many of whom it was the podcast.
Compare that with Cortex where Gray can talk productivity systems and his unanswered love for Apple all day long. Endless content there, as you can never overthink it too much.
I know that Haran eventually posted a brief comment on Reddit acknowledging the hiatus, but it struck me as a strangely subdued way to announce the end of a regular series that had been very successful for several years.
They stopped it right when the pandemic hit. That messed up podcast advertising for a while, and also the usual stuff they talked about.
Meanwhile they both have other projects and may have decided their time or energy was better spent elsewhere. Who knows?
A little unusual not to say anything but hey, they end episodes without goodbye so not a giant surprise. And Brady has said they’re on a break and on good terms so it isn’t totally secret either.
I enjoyed it while it was around and wish them well, but I don’t think they owe us anything. I subbed to Goodbye Internet to give a small incentive to them restarting, and that’s it.
But to my larger point, it is still an asset. If the community atrophies 40% while they’re gone...it’s still 60% of a great asset.
https://www.bradyharanblog.com/hello-internet
He was one of the driving forces behind Nebula, but I believe he is no longer involved in running it.
Did he break that down publicly or do you get your info from elsewhere? I've always been curious to know what a typical high profile youtuber income flow looks like, and how much they're really tied to Youtube.
Mark Brown, of Game Maker's Toolkit, puts out vids on Youtube that get a couple hundred thousand views (1 or 2 vids a month). So he could theoretically get a couple hundred from those. But his Patreon following nets him a couple thousand a month ($11k!)
When you have niche content you can end up getting way more per subscriber if people feel your content is worth it.
Not really.
There is some kind of "channel" redundancy but no "revenue streams" diversification outside ads and patreon.
Without actually paying for content, one can usually find:
- google ads, low effort low reward - brand sponsorships, high effort, fixed reward - patreon subscriptions, high effort high reward - tips and super chats and twitch - sometimes brave BAT rewards
- podcast ads - podcast subscriptions - merch - sponsorships - YouTube ads - nebula subscriptions
That’s pretty diversified and it includes paying for content three times.
Something to understand, for those who might have just seen some youtube videos of him being goofy, is that he's an actor. The guy on camera doing stupid stuff is a stage persona. It's an intentionally cultivated image and media persona to get as many video views as possible.
I sort of see him as one possible aspect of the low/medium budget TV production stuff which is common in his home city, Vancouver BC. People who've met and worked with him in person report that he's a much more normal, calm, rational individual off screen.
I won't judge him for being goofy on camera because it's hard to make a living as a working actor. For every person who gets a job in a vancouver-produced TV drama that might last 2 or 3 seasons, there's dozens more people who are working as restaurant servers while trying to get their big break.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurn
He actually built this in spite of all the production resources that Vancouver has to offer, and is more a "growth hacker" than actor I'd say.
SOURCE: Linus is a friend...
In French we say "veille technologique" which seems to coincide with "technology intelligence" in English, but it's a lot less intense: I just like knowing what's out there, keep informed, and LTT's format is just that: highly digestible updates on storage technology, network infrastructure, hardware and everything tech.
I think every successful youtuber has a cultivated stage persona because that's more entertaining than just watching an everyday person talk about a mechanical keyboard for 15 minutes.
I didn't mean so much that he's a person who tried and didn't get a part on a Vancouver-produced TV show, but that his video production efforts are part of the whole general Vancouver and Toronto "hollywood north" industry scene of people who act, do camera work, set decoration, costume, cinematography, sound, rigging, grips, etc.
People were screaming about where platforms and digital sharecropping was headed all along... and we're here now. Youtube, which is basically digital free-to-air is even more centralised than old free to air.
Youtube really is an extreme situation. They really dominate a whole medium single handedly and youtubers have shockingly little power in the whole thing. There either needs to be some neutrality, competition or youtubers need to organize somehow... unionize even. Trying to have a relationship with audiences that doesn't run through youtube won't work for most channels... even ones with millions of views.
I always expected a porn company to come in and compete with youtube at some point. They have the infrastructure. I've also been surprised at how restricted youtube manage to be, and still succeed... just the skin censorship if nothing else.
That makes people reasonably annoyed when Youtube decides to semi-arbitrarily pull the plug on a channel, but it also means that competition is very hard. If a competitor decides to start charging for hosting or streaming, they're doomed to be niche.
Google uses profits from search to napalm everything remotely looking like a threat.
THIS is the antitrust of google, and where authorities should strike them. They built a video platform and destroyed others using their 90% market power in another market.
Anyway that said, there's enough competition for youtube to ensure that these channels don't have to die; it's just discoverability that is the issue. Youtube does not have exclusive rights to any video uploaded (although I'm sure they have negotiated exclusivity contracts with some), so anyone is free to mirror their uploads elsewhere, just in case. I'm sure there's software out there that makes cross-posting videos easy.
Monetising. Youtube does it automatically, with a blog you need to manage the ads yourself and the audience is a lot smaller.
There is also a generational gap at some point. To me, it seems that 20-somethings turn to Youtube for every issue (phone setup, toilet clogged whatever) instead of looking for a text resource.
If I don't like one email provider, I can always move to a different provider without losing access to all the user's that remain there.
If I could make a Facebook post and have it's content propagate to other providers, websites would act more like UI filters rather than gatekeepers.
Now let's be serious, there are numerous barriers that stand in the way of "normal" users that want to escape the evil platforms. Why not direct our ire at the real problem: Why Johnny Still Can't Host a Website!
And if we fix that, perhaps we can move on to Why Johnny Can't Get Any Visitors (Because Google Won't Index It) and Why Johnny's Visitors Don't Receive His Updates (Because Google and Mozilla Killed RSS).
i was billed -very little- for a while then i opened a support ticket to have my account restored, since i had been billed for a while i at least wanted to watch some content.
but apparently something in the backend had changed and they plainly refunded me from the time i had my last login (iirc) and then they allowed me to re-signup.
it's been nice because i had then been able to re-signup and also recover some money that were pretty much lost, and i wasn't expecting that nor asking for it.
i really hope to see floatplane grow!
This is why those services as so necessary.
Hopefully these creators will manage to carve enough of a niche to create healthy competition, especially with a business model that doesn't rely entirely on ad revenue. It's going to be very hard though, making money from video hosting is a very difficult thing to do.
You host the content, and you can pick from UIs/algorithms for the discovery.
It’s the same as the old Apple saying: if you’re serious about software, you have to make hardware.
The actual quote, "people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware," is from Alan Kay, when he was speaking at a seminar in 1982 called Creative Think. Andy Hertzfeld was in attendance and took notes. When Hertzfeld got back to his office at Apple, he summarized the notes on one page and handed out to his team members. Kay was later hired as an Apple Fellow in 1984.
I'm woefully uninformed to speculate about how feasible this might be though, so it remains just a hope for me.
https://joinpeertube.org/