Honestly youtube barely has it currently. The vast majority of creators make very little on the platform and rely largely on supporter donations, merch and sponsorships, which could work on any platform.

By squeezing creators out of every penny they can, youtube has forced people to find other options abd made themselves less and less relevant. I guess that's enshittification for you.

You can also gate access to certain videos on peertube, so a nebula-like model might also work eventually.

[–] bruhsoulz@lemmy.ml 6 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

I'm genuinely confused. Is YouTube even profitable ATP? Hard to imagine it not being so but they've been doubling down on squeezing out every coin they can, trying to fight adblock is one example, pushing out more ads too. Wtf even is going on over there.

[–] roguetrick@lemmy.world 5 points 19 hours ago

Different metrics on profitability. Are you judging their hosting costs on how much it actually costs Google to add more in their already existing data centers for YouTube like a good vertically integrated monopoly or are you judging their hosting costs on how much their google cloud bill would be. You'll get wildly different numbers depending on the method.

[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 1 points 20 hours ago

I don't know that they've ever been profitable. They might be a loss-leader in some way, feeding into google's ad ecosystem somehow, or maybe it was always just theoretically profitable in the future in some ill-defined way that allowed the money to keep flowing. Who knows.

All I know is, if they follow the pattern the rest of them have, they aren't going to be sustainable long-term.