When I tried it in the past, I kinda didn't take it seriously because everything was confined to its instance, but now, there's full-featured global search and proper federation everywhere? Wow, I thought I heard there were some technical obstacles making it very unlikely, but now it's just there and works great! I asked ChatGPT and it says this feature was added 5 years ago! Really? I'm not sure how I didn't notice this sooner. Was it really there for so long? With flairs showing original instance where video comes from and everything?

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[–] chromodynamic@piefed.social 5 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Got me thinking about how YouTubers get money. According to a quick web search, YT pays $0.01 to $0.03 per view. So if you release 10 videos a month, you made $0.10 per viewer. But Patreon memberships are typically around $5.00 a month, equivalent to $0.50 per view in the same scenario. Of course Patreon will take a cut, but it is still a lot more money.

So, if a lot of your viewers think your channel is good enough to donate to, ad money basically becomes an afterthought. In this case, the only advantage of YT over PT is discovery, i.e. the number of viewers likely to find your videos in the first place (but there's also more competition on YT, so...)

[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Creators upload videos twice, once for patrons who watch them ad-free and once for people who don't want to pay. That way, people who don't have money to spend on YouTube can still enjoy their videos and they get a little kickback. Youtubers don't need Peertube to release videos ad-free, so it doesn't really change much if Patreon is more than enough.

Furthermore, the inherent privacy issues with peer to peer video consumption (I can easily track what videos you've been watching by simply connecting to the swarm) and the huge hosting costs a moderate sized Youtuber would inflict make the premise rather silly.

I think Peertube is great for small channels and maybe for corporate videos within an intranet, but Peertube can't afford a moderately popular Youtuber.

[–] chromodynamic@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

Some good points I hadn't considered!

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

So, if a lot of your viewers think your channel is good enough to donate to, ad money basically becomes an afterthought.

I don't think this is realistic, most people will not open their wallets, especially since they can't just go around paying a monthly subscription to everyone they watch. Even if their Patreon earnings were higher, I doubt their YouTube earnings would be insignificant.

Dead Meat starts at $1 per month not $5, they have 23,300 paid members. But their YouTube looks like it gets millions of views per month (you don't only get views on new videos like you suggested, but old videos can get lots of views too as you build up a back catalog). And this is a channel that I found by doing a Google search for most successful YouTube Patreons.

Wow their YouTube has 2.97 billion views

[–] AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago

I think 1 cent per view is on the high end for YouTube