Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I was actually kinda wondering the other day why super large content creators with good cash flow from what they already do, don't ditch Google and Patreon or anything else that takes a cut to be nothing more than a middleman to accessing the content? They don't need to host on the same level as YouTube; they could probably make more money hosting their videos on their own website, where they can control what is free or paid for, and can work directly with advertisers themselves.
I love that entrepreneurial attitude. If an online service is unsatisfactory, just develop your own software from the ground up and provision the infrastructure from your pocket. Car industry sucks? Just build your own car! GPU prices high? Grab a soldering iron and a handful of sand, how hard could it be?
Things are always more complex than they appear. The whole point of services like Youtube and Patreon is to offload that complexity onto the provider in exchange for a fee (or some other form of compensation) from the user. Just look at how many early Lemmy instances have gone offline because of the overwhelming financial or administrative burden. Hate the companies all you like, and by all means look for independent solutions, but don't pretend they offer no value whatsoever.
They have. Nebula is biggest im aware of, floatplane is another.
And how do they get big? How do they get discovered? SEO ?
They're getting huge because of the platform.
I'm not saying google is not evil but it literally gives them their audience.
I watch YT more than anything else by a mile, and if my top subscription moved to their website, and I had to jump through hoops to watch them on my TV device, by installing a browser or something I probably would stop watching them or watch them way less. Another TV friendly app sure that wouldn't be a problem, but I don't see many doing that.
I'm talking about those who have already gotten big, like PewDiePie or Good Mythical Morning (the latter of which started on their own website before youtube even existed, btw). Not the dude who just started a channel last week and has nothing to do shit with.
If they somehow even got 10% of their audience to go to another platform that would be a miracle
The lift of running your own platform is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to creating your own video hosting platform.
It’s not that challenging with a partner to help manage infrastructure which even at his scale is not going to cost an obscene amount of money.
Edit: there’s a very massive difference between a single content creator hosting their content and a site hosting everyone’s content like YouTube as well in terms of cost, infrastructure, security and management.
Websites work very well and are scalable af. A plugged in person with a track record like that could go Web 2.0 and probably net more.
You are correct. Websites, the stack to supply video encoding, even scalability is a solved problem.
The hard work isn't technical, it's getting people onto your platform in the first place (marketing), getting people to continue using your platform (retention) and the perennial problems of SaaS evolving with other SaaS platforms (how many dev hours are you willing to eat trying to keep up with the Joneses?).
SaaS, and in this case, SaaS offering content, is a losing game. You will either lose your shirt, sell your business, or become entrenched in a position whose inertia is difficult to break. How much of any of those you are willing to take a firehose of is the question.
It's not easy, but you're not guaranteed to end up
It depends on the personalities involved and the business model they go with.
Nebula has done really well with consistent growth as a premium offering where people pay one subscription fee to get ad-free videos from exclusively high-quality creators across a quote broad range of niches, in addition to bonus extras and Nebula Originals.
Dropout seems to have a lot of success with a range of mostly unscripted comedy, centred around a core cast of trusted comedic actors with a larger range of guests.
Floatplane, on the other hand, seems much less successful, probably owing to its business model being basically Patreon's, but only for video. Instead of the wide range of content you get for surprisingly reasonable amounts of Nebula and Dropout, Floatplane ends up looking very expensive if you want to support more than one or two creators. Plus the creators on it haven't got the same degree of trust; it ends up reeking of the sort of techbro vibes that people are explicitly trying to get away from.
YouTube still offers them a service in directing them new viewers. The big creators all lose viewers but YouTube funnels replacement views faster than they lose. They could host their own videos but they are gonna see very little growth without Google either in search or with YouTube as they start to lose the base that followed them.
They also won’t be able to negotiate as good as rates for pre-rolls or in video sponsorships as if they were on YouTube.
The only real alternative would be to band together like the creators that are a part of nebula are doing. Hosting on peertube really isn’t an option unless you are independently supported and you are doing it as a passion project and don’t care about audience growth or retention.
Still think building their own site with apps I can throw on my devices is pretty involved.
Streaming video is expensive. LTT did it with Floatplane, even going so far as to develop their own backend. Watcher and some other YouTubers did it with Vimeo as their backend, but Vimeo still takes a large cut.
At the end of the day, people are doing this, but YouTube still offers a compelling value compared to other platforms. It’s hard to beat their scale, sophistication, and the discoverability of their platform.
Well, there is Nebula, which is kinda like that. But most of them also put their videos on YouTube, using Nebula as the premium ad-free option with a little bonus content.
Putting a video file somewhere and letting 10,000 people watch it at the same time is no small feat.
You could probably get away with doing it on peer tube but it has no facilities to lock people out or make them pay.
Even if you don't use patreon for payments payments aren't free.
It's harder then you think.