A significant portion of content creators do it as a full time job. Ads is a stable revenue stream for these content creators. You as a consumer are free to move to any decentralized video platform you like, but the main bottleneck for any significant shift in market share depends on content creators, and ultimately, on advertisers.
> Ads is a stable revenue stream for these content creators.
Ads are a revenue stream mostly for the platform e.g. YouTube itself. You can have a look at this[1] or any other "how my YouTube channel makes money" video to see that's the case.
In-video ads, on the other hand, are indeed a significant revenue stream for creators, but those have nothing to do with the platform and everything to do with the single creator.
According to the video you linked, AdSense and in-video ads are basically tied for income (26 and 27% respectively). Both of those are significant sources of income!
In the video I linked, "Sponsored projects" is a type of in-video ads, where they build a particular PC and the video is sponsored by a hardware company, so the total for all types of in-video ads is 41% vs 26% from AdSense.
For smaller Youtubers (LTT is a very large channel) the gap between AdSense and in-video tends to be wider. I don't have hard data on this but it's the result of talking to several youtubers in person. If someone has the data, it would be cool to share it here.
How much would I have to pay to replace the revenue that a content creater would get from my eyeball traffic on YouTube? From what I'm reading it's less than a penny per video. I send about $30/mo to Patreon, that's enough for what, 3000 videos? I watch YouTube way too much, but I don't watch it that much.
Realistically I should be aiming to replace Google's revenue for my eyeball traffic, because that covers all of the costs as well. Still seems very doable.
It would be nice if Patreon partnered up with them and handled the transactions.
Realistically, every PeerTube viewer would also need to pay for the thousands or more viewers any creator will lose by forcing viewers to pay money and by moving to a niche platform with worse UX and no serious discovery.
That really puts it into perspective. If we each chipped in one penny per video we could replace advertisements for everyone. At least in terms of supporting the content creators.
How many videos do you watch per day? If you're anything like me, i at least skim through 100 videos a day. Likely more, depending on my free time and interest.
That's like 1-2 dollars worth of 'penny' donations per day. I'm not sure i would be willing to pay that, esp. if for videos that i'm only mildly interested in, and would not have gone to watch if it weren't free.
it's not like the OG creators expected money from it. They did it as a part time hobby to show friends. They didn't expect to transform their lives. I get just as much enjoyment watching creators who only spend a few hours per week on their content as a hobby as those who have turned it into a giant company with employees and a studio. Actually, I get less enjoyment from those who have overly commercialized their channel.
Why does money have to touch everything? Why do I continue to make comments on HN? It's certainly not because I hope to monitize this. It's fun and you share your ideas.
Acting like removing the ability for creators to get money from ads is going to eliminate all creators is silly, so yes it's a hard sell for existing creators, and if forced upon it'll remove a lot of the profit driven creators, and I view that as a good thing.
Some of the best content on Youtube takes time and money to make - even for hobbyists and enthusiasts, and much of it would be impossible if creators were also forced to hold a second full-time job to cover their budget. I say "second" because content creation is a job whether it's compensated for or not. And not everyone who makes a living at it has a giant company with employees at a studio.
Yes it's true that not everybody who makes a living from it has multiple employees and a studio, PewDiePie is a good example of somebody who didn't ruin his channel by transforming the nature of it once he got more views.
Sure, content creation is a job whether they're compensated or not. I'm not saying that we deserve free content, I'm saying that there will always be people bored enough to create content they want to share.
Image macros are created daily but nobody is creating them with the expectation of compensation. (There are social media accounts who compile them so they can gain followers / post ads, but the original creators aren't)
People write blogs knowing they get 20 views per month. That's the voices I want to hear. Not from someone who reads a book about how to get $5k in passive income per month by churning blog posts and growing a mailing list!
The number #1 post on the front page about blogs has this comment
"As a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to."
Just replace blogs and newsletter with YouTube channels and that's my sentiment.
Not a youtuber, but I had a successful art/webcomic-related patreon once before deleting it precisely because of ideological reasons. (Or as I prefer to call them, ethics.)
I would much rather the old internet come back where "content creator" was never a word that existed, or could exist.
There is a reason why these Youtube channels don't just roll their own platform: their content is not worth money. Same reason why no one pays for your blog. It is just not worth any amount of money.
There are many Youtubers whose content I like, but if I had to pay monthly fee (or pay per view) for their videos I wouldn't watch them. I think this was pretty much confirmed with the Youtube Red experiment. Many of the channels I follow got picked up for the program, but I have no desire to pay for the shows they produced for Youtube.
And how the ads work on Youtube makes it completely unwatchable without AdBlocking and I am not paying for the Youtube Premium to remove ads because A) it won't remove the ads and sponsorships that are embedded in the videos and B) I don't want to give Youtube as a platform any cut.
I feel like you completely validate my point that people aren't willing to pay for content, the original sin making alternative monetization a requirement.
You're willing to watch the content, just not pay for it.
This is why concepts like PeerTube will never attract the majority of content, because it isn't free to make it, it isn't free to show it, it's only free to consume it.
It isn't poor quality stuff. Just because you don't like the content that Youtube creators make doesn't make it poor quality
Ironically, when I go to Peertube, all the content there is objectively low quality with extremely poor production value, little to no editing, and clearly done with the lowest of budgets.
The content airing on Youtube from the top ~1000+ creators is easily as good or better than the majority of cable TV.
It's often extremely high quality content, frankly.
Production quality with fancy cameras and editing doesn't make the content good. It makes it fancy.
And yes there are some Youtubers whose I have subscribed to and their content is often great. However it is not consistently great enough to pay for it just like cable TV. And that is just the top 1% of the top 1%. Rest is at best mediocre and often just grabage.
I mean, radio and TV were free OTA for decades. I don't know what you want to call the "start" of content, but ad-supported free models have been around for a very long time.