this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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We should start our own video platform, with no rules other than hate speech prohibition and dark web-esque content removal. Never sell to Google. Never sell to Tencent. Never IPO. Just maintain the servers and hire enough technicians to maintain a content scanning algorithm. Keep it small and provide a cleaner experience by not fucking around with adblock users. Just have a platform that utilizes ads, don't punish adblockers, and with those metrics in hand, approach advertisers and charge less than youtube charges.
In theory, you can do something like that with Peertube, it's a federated alternative to YT.
In practice, serving video content requires fuckloads of bandwidth, which has huge costs. The first thing you'll want/need is to limit filesizes and/or video resolution. Depending on what you start with, how much initial money you have, even allowing people to watch everything in 720p might be a strain.
For paying the costs with ads, unless you can guarantee hundreds of thousands of daily views, the platforms won't be willing to pay much, "low exposition" or whatever. Though, if the only thing that won't be there is hate speech and dark web, you're letting normal porn in, which can drive significant traffic, but now you'll have to deal with puritanical companies not wanting to associate with your site, plus companies afraid of the possible backlash.
Ideally, you'd have to create your own ad server, so you'd have to reach out to companies directly and ask them if they'd like to advertise on your platform with no middlemen.
Yeah "just maintain the servers bro" isn't going to work. The bandwidth alone is insane. There's a reason why there are fewer and fewer Lemmy servers since June 2023, even as total users are growing.
Are you going to allow copyrighted content? You’ll get downranked in searches, and probably wrecked by the DMCA.
Advertising also isn’t as lucrative as it seems. YouTube was a money pit for years - that’s probably tied to the decision to push Premium so heavily. Videos are big.
Funny.