I believe your point was that non profits are superior. My counter was simply that, yes, they are superior to a public company, however they are not infallible to fact that people run them, and people are corruptable.
Forgive me but I’m not sure what to say about the second bit there. Nebula being created and owned by people that needed something like it in the first place is not ideal? Or not because of the people specifically, but because of its closed sourced design and profit sharing ratio? Maybe I’m misunderstanding you.
At the end of the day, I would prefer each creator host their own content on their own site, with it being sort of subscribable through an RSS feed or similar so people can use whatever front end they want. Like how podcasts work. Have a feed for sponsorships available for free, and a paid feed with no sponsorships and maybe bonus content.
I’d not heard of Ko-fi, but it looks interesting. On the face of it, it’s pretty close to what I described above without the creatives themselves having to fuss about with the technical details of hosting all their content. I’ll look into it more another day, thanks.
Not to be rude, but unless you’re an Alphabet executive, what do you know. Same as me - not much.
My guess is they aren’t losing money on YouTube these days, but feel free to look at the 2023 10-K and let me know if you find something in there that no one else has.
I understand it’s expensive to facilitate streaming, though between the 15 billion from Premium subscribers to the 30 billion in ad revenue, it’s not hard to imagine they make a few billion after costs. I’m not trying to say it’s half of Alphabet’s income or anything.
Unfortunately, it’s not something anyone outside of the executive suite can say with a single degree of certainty since Alphabet doesn’t make it known one way or the other.
Ultimately, people do have to be trusted. Even the best non profit in the land can find itself a board of directors that decide to convert the organisation to a for profit model, then in turn go public.
As far as supporting individual creators, Nebula was created by a group of YouTube creators. They got it off the ground by keeping the opportunity cost as low as they could, and by enticing people with the 50:50 split profit from the subscriptions.
What’s more than this though, is that everyone making content on Nebula has an ownership stake. This is discussed in this video at 11:00, but the highlight is this: if the platform is ever sold, the creators get half the money from the sale.
Non profit is one thing, but the platform being employee owned I think provides greater motivation to grow.
Absolutely. The content mountain YouTube is sitting on is their most valuable asset. In my view, Nebula is doing a fine job of beginning any potential transition away from the black hole of YouTube.
I think eventually the way to cripple YouTube would be for creators to, after years I imagine, transition to Nebula or similar, and then remove the videos from YouTube. Leave one up directing people to the new hosting site, but ultimately I do feel the old videos need to be pulled from YouTube, not just new content.
One thing’s for certain though, all the garbage YouTube tries to push alongside the videos are overbearing and only serve to drive engagement. Nothing they do is to benefit the viewers, let alone the creators.
I just wrote a rather long comment to that person and now I’ve realized they are being purposefully obtuse.
You playing the content on YouTube is entirely justified. Lots of people put the news on a television instead of a radio while doing things around the house, because occasionally something visual is referenced or something is said that seems interesting enough to look over at the screen.
Besides, it’s not like the person that went through the effort of putting together a ten hour long essay is going to publish just the audio as a podcast or something.
That person’s an egg head, you enjoy your essays.
I did read your comment a few times, looking for a different tone, to see a meaning perhaps I misunderstood, but I can’t find it.
For what it’s worth, Harry Potter isn’t relevant to any of this besides being used as the example. They could have said Star Wars, pottery, landscaping, or astrology. Their point was moreso, ‘I watch long form content that isn’t found anywhere but on YouTube, and Harry Potter is an example of this content.’
You go on to mention the content in every line of your initial comment, and mentioned the platform only once. They enjoy a thing, you don’t understand how they can enjoy that thing.
Whether intentional or not, I can’t see what you’ve written as anything but a critique.
For posterity, your comment:
OK…but why would you do that!? Your life surely would be no worse without that. I get being a fan and all that, I grew up with HP,. I’ve read the books several times and seen the movies several times. HP was a huge part of my upbringing and I bought the books at release. But I just don’t get watching a 10h video essay on it, much less while supporting YT.
My interpretation, if you care to see it:
Your first line comes off as yelling at the person for their choice of content.
The second line, by my reading, is saying their entertainment adds no value to their life.
The next two attempt to couch the first two by conflating your patronage of the same source material to an in depth analysis of it.
Then the first half of your conclusion line specifically states you don’t understand how they reap enjoyment of watching their chosen content, only to be reinforced by your use of “much less”, which means the first bit of the sentence is what you are primarily focused on.
I suppose you’re right but I’m not sure how effective that would be since the they’d have to convince the creators off however many platforms their pulling from and direct them either to Grayjay (which as far as I know doesn’t have hosting infrastructure) or to some other service like Peertube I suppose.
I think that transition would be difficult.
Open sourced and decentralized is what we should be striving for, but Nebula honestly seems to be a perfect bridge to get people away from YouTube.
The difficulty with decentralizing video is primarily hosting. Video is kinda big, and no one wants to wait even a few minutes to queue up what you want to watch. So streaming it has to be. Streaming, even when the bitrate is adjusted dynamically to your connection with the host server, still requires a significant amount of bandwidth.
Nebula covers all the costs of the infrastructure and development and what have you off the subscriptions. Then they can also afford to pay the creators more per view compared to the YouTube ad split. My understanding of YouTube is that for the first ten or so years it didn’t really make any money. At least not the billions in profit it does now. Hopefully Nebula can continue to leapfrog that hurdle.
They did make a video explaining, from their perspective of course, how they managed to build a nine figure YouTube competitor in a few years time. Probably to be taken with a grain of salt, but it seems like they’re doing things right as far as paying the creators and using their side of the split to make the service better goes.
Either way, it’s not something to purposefully avoid paying for out of the desire for it to be open sourced. Jumping from YouTube straight to a solution like what you’re describing isn’t a one step transition. We’d need Nebula or something like it to scrape away YouTube’s creator base until there’s enough people using an alternative platform to change the tides.
Even Peertube themselves says they aren’t in it to replace YouTube. It’s just another stepping stone.
Seems to me a bulk of your standpoint is not wanting greedy people to suck up profits from the people doing the actual work. I agree. Where we disagree, I think, is how this could be accomplished. A non profit makes sense. There is a method (pdf warning) for the board to convert to for profit while retaining assets, which would be a sad move. Not so sure it would turn scandalous, given everything else that goes on these days, but I’m sure the creators on the platform would have something to say about such a move. If it ever happened, I would hope they would abandon ship so to speak.
Though like you say, when the service turns that direction, subscriptions could be cancelled and we could subscribe to another one. This raises a question that I hadn’t considered until now. You mention this isn’t some idealistic option, that it’s something that’s already been done. So what’s it called? I’ve never heard of a registered non profit YouTube competitor that does what we’re talking about, let alone a few of these organizations to allow people the possibility of bouncing between them.
If I can’t go subscribe to these services right now, because they don’t exist, then surely we are talking about an idealistic scenario. If they do exist, I would love to subscribe to them instead of talking about them in the abstract. I’m sure it’s no surprise that I like Nebula, but I’ll check out alternatives.
You’ve made me realise something about Nebulas proportional cut. While it is based on watch time, I’d thought it was cut on a user to user basis. For example (let’s ignore the operating costs for ease), if you only watched one creator in a month, that creator would get the entire $2.50 share of your subscription. Or, if you watched an hour of video from two creators, each would get $1.25.
After looking at the info on their site again, I’m not sure why I thought this. They only say that it’s based on view time. Which could mean they look at site wide view times instead of per user, and divvy up the money that way. Off the top of my head, I’m not sure this would make much of a difference, but it feels like it would. I’ll do a bit of math later to see.