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.
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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They have. Nebula is biggest im aware of, floatplane is another.
Sauce plus and dropout as well. Basically run by youtubers to make content without relying on YouTube. A lot of this is running on pre-existing tech for running a streaming service and I assume it's dependent on AWS (Amazon) hosting but yeah lots of smaller paid streaming services run by youtubers because YouTube sucks. I believe sauce plus is essentially the same as Floatplane on the backend, they mentioned working with LTT to make it.
hosting their videos on their own website
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.
There are open source alternatives that already exist.
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.
I'm worried about Nebula's business model being profitable enough to be sustainable in the long term but given their business model includes making every creator on the platform a part-owner of the platform that does limit how bad things can get
From everything I've heard, they're already profitable, and are explicitly choosing only to grow in a sustainable way, without taking on outside investment which could force them into enshittifying down the line. With a relative lack of need to show extreme growth, and a lack of reliance on outside factors like advertising (being subscription-based), the only major risk that I can see for them long-term is user churn. Which is definitely a risk, but with the ever-creeping growth of the range of content they have and (at least for now) an attitude of being customer-friendly, churn seems a relatively low risk.
As far as I can see, at worst, the platform dies if the YouTube channels of the people on the platform die because of the YouTube algorithm, and they get bad churn (with fewer new subscribers because of the aforementioned dead YouTube channels at the top of the funnel), and they don't get new more successful channels on before that happens. A scenario that's far from unlikely, but which I would describe as "catastrophic, whether or not Nebula exists today", so its existence for now as a hedge against more likely bad scenarios is still worthwhile.
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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.
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Love this, although I think he will realise pretty quickly that hosting on his >!Steam deck!< might have some drawback haha (I'm thinking storage here)
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Cartman brah
That's very cool indeed – although I dread the moment he starts talking to his followers about Lemmy.
It would be a larger influx of bullshit than even Reddit was able to pull off.
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