Why haven't we figured out monetisation for peertube? : fediverse

[–] [email protected] 58 points 4 months ago (2 children)

A few reasons:

The userbase on the Fediverse is not big enough to support a donation-based economy.
The userbase on the Fediverse is not big enough to support an ad-based economy. Even if by some magical powers we got an ethical ad network working here (which didn't track users and focused solely on paying people by the opportunity of broadcasting their inventory) there wouldn't be enough eyeballs to attract advertisers.
The userbase is still anti-business.
For all its faults, Youtube is hands-down is the platform that pay the most to content creators.
Content creators are not willing to spend their time building out audiences on new platforms. Principles be damned, they will just go where the money is.

I've added support for crowdfunding to Communick earlier this year, and even people who are active on the Fediverse and have a vested interest in having monetization alternatives turned it down. This is why all we see are these completely fringe ideas that can only appeal for the get-rich-quick crowd.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (3 children)

The userbase is still anti-business.

And a significant part will remain so. This should be a haven from capitalist/corporate platforms, not a parallel market.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Community is not enough

I'm still doggedly working on Communick and on AP-based projects because I believe in open standards and because it is our best shot at us collectively take back the web. But if we continue on this idea that the Fediverse is somehow "better" because it discriminates against small business owners, or professionals who want an online presence to promote their work, or anything that resembles "profit-motive", then this whole thing will forever remain a wasted opportunity, and we will be (once again) be giving it all away for Zuckerberg.

What we have now is just a Tyranny of the Minority. We need to grow the open web. That includes getting normies here. That includes getting people who are not part of your tribe. This includes getting people that you are able to ignore.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

That's Western fediverse.

Fediverse instance in Asia often run ads or other kind of monetisation. Like the second biggest instance.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Unpopular opinion: people who think federated platforms shouldn't deal with money are just people who want someone else to pay for them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

The userbase on the Fediverse is not big enough to support a donation-based economy.

Could you expand on that? Why do you believe such is the case?

The userbase is still anti-business.

I'm starting to get the impression that this is the biggest hindrance. That and the common misconception that "ads = monetisation", which IMO big tech has hammered into users very well.

For all its faults, Youtube is hands-down is the platform that pay the most to content creators.

True, but it doesn't have to stay that way.

Content creators are not willing to spend their time building out audiences on new platforms. Principles be damned, they will just go where the money is.

Probably better tools could contribute to that. Something opensource that allows engaging with all major platforms + peertube and others could swing things in another direction. Imagine if peertube, mastodon, and so forth were just a toggle or a "sign up" form in the app. It could increase adoption by its simplicity: "Never heard of this platform, but I'll just enable it and see what happens" could very well be possible.

I’ve added support for crowdfunding to Communick earlier this year

Wait a minute... I think I recognise that! Didn't you make a post that was massively downvoted (or received negatively), because people didn't understand what you were trying to do? "If it's not steady income I won't use it" is something I recall...

Edit: Lemmy is missing the feature to favorite other users :/

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Could you expand on that?

Go take a look at all Mastodon instances that ask for donations to keep running: you will see that all of them get at most 2% of their user base to donate. No donation-based instance is big enough that it can afford to pay FTE salaries for moderation and/or administration. And this is for something that affects people directly when they don't contribute.

Go take a look at some youtubers in the "1M-10M" subscriber range that have a Patreon. You will see that the most of them manage to convert 0.5% to 0.8% of their subscribers into direct contributors.

The open web (ActivityPub sans Facebook) is now at ~1 million active users. Even if we got 2% of these users to contribute $5/month to different creators, we are talking about a "Total Addressable Market" of $100k/month. Even with "best case" numbers, it is just too low to be attractive to a substantial number of creators. Compare with Youtube: it's estimated that they paid out around 7 billion USD to all its creators in 2023.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

I'm not sure what you're talking about.

None of the major Fediverse projects have real monetization.
Why single out PeerTube?

Why would you expect monetization at this point?

Do you think it should be monetized, or are you just surprised it hasn't been?

What form of monetization are you imagining?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I think monetisation is more important on Peertube than other federated platforms I can think of.

We want people to post high quality videos on PeerTube. The production of high quality video content requires a lot of work and often also a decent chunk of money to produce. It's not like a toot or a post on Pixelfed, which is often not labour intensive at all. A photographer or an artist might very well showcase their work on Pixelfed, or an author their writing on Mastodon, but it would not compete with their business idea as people who are interested would still need to buy prints/high resolution versions/ebooks/subscriptions/whatever.

On PeerTube, it's very different. We want content creators to not only put money and time into creating quality content, but ideally we want them to host the content themselves in order to maintain full control over it. Without monetisation there's just no reason why they would be interested in doing that.

The question of how is of course much more difficult than the why.

Sponsorships is one obvious candidate. In theory this wouldn't require anything extra from Peertube - the producers of videos could easily add their own ads within the videos. However, sponsors are only interested in sponsoring content that has an audience, and the audience is on YouTube. Sponsored content is also potentially bad for obvious reasons.

Donations might make more sense, as they scale better to smaller but dedicated audiences. It is difficult to get people to cross the threshold for making them, but it's not exactly easy to make a profit on YouTube either. Donations good because they encourage quality, rather than ads which tend to favour views over substance.

So finally, traditional ads. We all hate them. They suck, and if they're incorporated they'll probably be blocked anyway. But I'm sure there's a case to be made in their favour - if it's implemented on the instance level, I certainly wouldn't be in a position to criticize. It could be necessary in order to host content on free instances, where people could build a following and then move on to self-hosting or join more restrictive ad-free instances should they get the opportunity to.

Personally I wouldn't be opposed to having a sort of virtual tip jar functionality. I could imagine myself paying $25 into a virtual wallet maintained by Liberapay, and to press a button underneath PeerTube videos to donate $1 to the creator whenever I found something was worthy of kudos. Maybe users with non-empty wallets could be rewarded with extra filters in Sepia search or something like that.

The best answer to why monetisation hasn't been figured out on PeerTube yet is, however, that it hasn't been figured out on the Internet in general. It's just really difficult, and every push towards monetisation tends to be the first step towards any service becoming completely shit. It's a really difficult problem. The Fediverse and PeerTube might solve some problems by being less dependant on monetisation in the first place, but that doesn't automatically make it an easy fix. More than anything we probably need an attitude change.

A good start would be to challenge the culture that makes monetisation so difficult, for example by making a donation to FramaSoft. Or simply make active use of the "support" button that already exists under many PeerTube videos. :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

None of the major Fediverse projects have real monetization.
Why single out PeerTube?

To me, Peertube is the most obvious. Lots of work goes into creating videos. I don't use funkwhale, so I didn't consider it. Monetisation for comments and tweets just seems questionable to me. Reddit introduced reddit gold, and I guess that could be one way of doing it 🤔 It would allow instance operators to keep the instance alive and users happy at the same time. IMO reddit gold was a genius move which could be implemented in lemmy or elsewhere. Same as Discords paid emojis and stuff.

Why would you expect monetization at this point?

At which point should I be considering monetisation? It's always disappointing to me to have to go back to Youtube and pick the right, alternative client that currently works. And I do like some of the content I subscribe to, but I can't be arsed to create 10 different accounts in order to donate indiscriminately, regardless of how many videos I watched of a content creator.

Do you think it should be monetized, or are you just surprised it hasn’t been?

I think it should be monetised.

What form of monetization are you imagining?

Tips for one off micro-donations, manual entry of tip amounts (this was so good I think it deserves a euro), "donated subscriptions", and automatic donations based on how much is in my wallet at the time. I think there was a micro-transaction plugin for browsers that did that? The more you stayed on a website the greater the percentage of money was donated to it from your wallet.

But I haven't seen it implemented and dunno if it's the lack of interest, lack of skill, lack of possibility (maybe no payment provider makes that possible?), a combination, or all of the aforementioned.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Peertube has a solution built in. Creators can put in links to their Patreon, Liberapay, Ko-Fi or other donation platforms, and it'll show a "Support" button underneath every video.

They don't do crypto or ads in the core Peertube project. However, you can install add-ons as an instance administrator.

I don't see any better solution as of today.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

In-built monetisation that doesn't require opening third party websites for every person you want to donate to. Maybe even a tip button or "donate subscription". That's what would be better.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

With "better solution as of today" I meant more a viable solution as of today. And I don't see any.

I completely agree that some in-built, more convenient monetization would be great. But... That'd immediately make them a whole different business. Now they need to handle money for people and become a payment provider. That'd probably require them to change their legal form. They need to hire people to manage that money. They get liable for it. And where money is involved there are disagreements and lawsuits. So they need an additional customer service. Probably also a proper legal team. All those people want a salary, so they have to make profit to pay them.

I think it's a nice idea, but it would turn Peertube from a nice project that's made by some programmers for us, the people, into a business halfway alike YouTube. And we already have YouTube. The nice thing about Peertube is that it's about freedom and the content and less annoying business things involved.

And that's often the case with smaller projects. Now the programmers do the thing they're good at: program the software. If we make them do something else, that's gonna be at the cost of the project. They'll become managers and can't attend to the thing they're good at and what we'd like them to do.

Feel free to come up with a solution. I'd like to hear it. Because I'd also like to see some bigger Youtubers on Peertube. And they won't come if they have to spend money on servers, instead of earning money.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Because anyone with a computer can host a peertube instance. Therefore is you want your videos on peertube it will cost you nothing more than what you already have : a computer running and an internet access.

The only real barrier is having the time and the knowledge to set it up.

Peertube is tech solution to host video, not a way to make money with videos. Monetisation can be done with peertube, but it's up to creators to set it up.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's true that peer tube is the ugly duck of the fediverse right now. But I don't think is about monetization.

On its core it's true that is the most complex project as videos are resource heavy, and producing videos is time consuming.

I don't think people does not make videos because lack of monetization but because lack of users. And there are little users because there are little content.

IMHO the UI and UX should be the smoothest of all fediverse because it need to put it as easy as it can to everyone to attract as many users or creators as possible.

Because, let's be true, monetization (even you can already monetize if you want) is useless is there's nobody watching anyway.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

IMHO the UI and UX should be the smoothest of all fediverse because it need to put it as easy as it can to everyone to attract as many users or creators as possible.

Thats true of ALL platforms. Fediverse or not. Biggest reason Linux fails where Windows 11 sucseeds is because the vast VAST majority cannot figure out linux's user experience.

In windows, you install a program by downloading a file, and double clicking it. To change settings you go into the control panel. To update a program, you download another file, just like installing it.

I could literally never have a keyboard hooked up to a windows pc, assuming all my web browser bookmarks are already saved, and I don't want to reply to any messages online.

With Linux, you can't do that. You can't just uninstall terminal, and expect to get help online if something is new and confusing to you. First thing they say in Linux is "ok, to help with this problem, open up terminal". It's baked into the Linux culture, just the same as a mouse is baked into the Windows culture since the 80s.

Now I use Linux as a standin for peertube, or any other platform since I haven't used peertube. But the lack of Linux users, despite having the technical superior OS just shows how a bad user experience can cripple a platform.

The way Linux sucseeds is by having a distro that embeds into its own culture the lack of terminal. A distro that not only DOESN'T come with terminal, but uses it as a "selling" point. Heavy airquotes there since I'm not suggesting that this distro cost money.

As for peertube, I've been meaning to try it for a while. All it needs is good content, good user experience, and it should be the EASIEST of the fediverse platforms to sucseed. Look at youtube. Find me one creator who says "I enjoy dealing with youtubes overarching control and restrictions".

I'll wait.....actually no I won't. I got things to do.

Point is, if you normalize a federated video platform where the content creator can control their own hosting? Youtube would die, and content creators could negotiate their own prices to serve ads individually on their videos.

And they don't HAVE TO host their own videos. Just that they can.

If I host a peertube instance, and 5 of my friends want to create videos, but not host them, then I can host them. But if I get greedy and say they must obide by my rules, then they can say fuck off and host it themselves. It takes overarching power away from the hoster, and that would be VERY appealing to a lot of content creators.

Then once you have the good user interface, and good content, you gain the followers, and with the followers comes the monetization.

And yes, it will be ads. Because if there were a better model, don't you think tv, and streaming services, and youtube, and the internet would have already been doing so by now?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

Biggest reason Linux fails where Windows 11 sucseeds is because the vast VAST majority cannot figure out linux’s user experience.

Nope, the bigest reason why windows is more popular than linux is the same as youtube is more popular than peertube - its the default and most people dont look past that. Honestly default Gnome UX is better than win11 these days unless you already have thousands of hours of windows muscle memory, which a very large chunk of people do.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Nostr has. Over the last two months alone, their users have "zapped" (tipped/donated) other users around 950K (nearly 1 mil!) USD worth via lightning and that number continues to grow. And it doesn't just make it easy to pay content creators, but to also put a portion of your "zaps" towards the relay you use or development of the software if you want. If you have a nostr account, you can easily tie it to a lightning address to send/receive tips, nostr doesn't take a fee. Relays can also portion out a bit of their zaps for the people who publish the most engaging content on their relay. The possibilities are quite extensive. And because it's over lightning, zaps happen instantly and for pennies or less in fees. Though, you can use nostr without zaps at all.

For those unfamiliar with nostr, it's a decentralized social media software much like ActivityPub/mastodon, the main use right now is as a twitter/instagram clone but there's also a reddit-style section being built up as well. Moderation abilities from the perspective of the instance/relay are identical. But one bonus if that if your relay goes down, you don't lose your identity, since your identity and relay are separate. And if you change apps or relays (you are typically connected to multiple relays), all your content moves with you seamlessly. And the payment/zap infrastructure is all decentralized, relays don't ever custody or manage the payments. If you tip a content creator, it goes directly from you to them. The lightning network has basically limitless transaction capacity. If you have cash app, it supports lightning, so you can already send zaps (you will need different apps to receive zaps though because cash app doesn't support the LNURL standard). Strike natively supports it. And because it's lightning, it works in every country automatically.

Long-term, if I am a content creator, which "fedi"-type system is going to be attractive to me? One where users can send me tips and mircopayments or one where they can't? This is why I think nostr is going to win out long-term over AP/Mastodon. Mastodon could add this kind of functionality but I don't get the impression they're open to it. People may not want to commit to yet another $5/month subscription to a YouTuber's patreon or nebula or whatever, but they are happy to tip 1-10c after watching a video. So there's a psychological beauty to micropayments as well. As some random person I have made like 7c on tips this month, but I've also given out plenty to other people.

Source about nostr fees: https://lemmy.ml/post/17824358

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Dam thats really cool.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Very interesting, thanks

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

What's wrong with donations? Also how doesn't monetisation imply ads? What way is there to make money relabile while watching something besides ads?

Merch? That a secondary revenue stream not tied to the consumption of that product (video).

Paid subs aka recurring donations? Yeah just set up a KoFi or patreon.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Donations are one form, but the flow thereof isn't optimal in peertube. Viewers can't donate just by having an account on peertube. It's not "a click a way" like a "donated subscription" or something. I can't create an account on peertube, connect it to my bank directly or some payment processor, go to a creator and click "donated subscription", then expect money to end up with the content creator.

Youtube doesn't require setting up KoFi or patreon or something. At the base level, if your video gets popular and you have subscribers, you'll get paid (or that is my understanding). Peertube has a higher barrier.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yup YouTube makes it very easy to receive money from adds and people that have YouTube premium. Having a YouTube premium subscription means that you are at least supporting the creator of every video that you watch a little bit (from what I can find 55% of what you pay is going to the creators). Yes YouTube takes quite a large cut, but video hosting in high quality costs a lot of money.

I think it will be very hard to do this on a decentralised platform. People don't trust just anyone with their money, so it could lead to people abandoning smaller servers and you can be sure that bad actors would pop up and try to abuse the system. And even if you do this the right way, you would have to build this system entirely before you can convince creators to move to this platform.

It will also be really hard to offer the same quality and reliability that YouTube offers, without taking a larger cut than the 45% that YouTube takes. Hosting a large video platform is expensive, and many of the Fediverse users are anti-adds and will run an add-blocker and maybe even sponsor-blocker.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

And what's youtubes cut of the Membership/Super Thanks/View Impression?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (6 children)

Also it's worth mentioning the "how to distribute content among peers" problem has mostly been solved and has for over a decade, just that nobody has built out the UX for it for a YouTube clone. Torrents exist, #freenet and #hyphanet exist, #ipfs exists, these are all excellent platforms for storing and distributing content without relying on expensive, centralized hosting. Instead, users share the burden of hosting. There's a whole category of software that solves this problem in different ways (P2P). Unfortunately, every new generation of developers seems to want to re-invent the wheel instead of using time-tested tech that already exists but just needs a UX refresh or maybe some protocol improvements.

If you have a tube site and it says "to skip ads, install IPFS", everybody would be using IPFS.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (3 children)

There's an important element to monetization in the Fediverse that people are not tackling:

Money movement is tracked. And we are here mostly to avoid tracking.

I have this account tied to my more-or-less-real persona, but I have 12 more accounts in the Fediverse not tied to it. If setting up something like a subscription service would mean Fediverse has to implement eg.: KYC laws, or attach accounts to real person banking info, then I'm barred from participating in this real money economy in 11/12ths of the Fediverse even if I liked the content.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Why does it need monetisation? Why can't we have a place online where we aren't bombarded with adverts or having our data vacuumed to sell to advertisers?

I have no issues with sponsorship in videos or creators plugging their stores/Pateron/Kofi in content. What I mind is pre roll and shoehorned ads partway through content that have no respect for my audio settings or the flow of the content.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Why does it need monetisation?

Because the number of people who are willing to put in the work and create quality content without any potential reward is too low to be relevant. Without a credible model for monetisation, content creators will always prefer to stay in the closed platforms. If we want the open web to be a real alternative for everyone and not just a fringe thing, we need to be able to attract everyone.

data vacuumed to sell to advertisers?

Maybe I am getting old, but I do remember the time where "ads" did not automatically imply "Surveillance Capitalism". The problem is not the former, but the latter.

I have no issues with sponsorship in videos or creators plugging their stores/Pateron/Kofi in content.

Easy for you to say, but how many creators do you know that can make a living exclusively off their Patreon? And of those that do, how many managed to get known without putting their content on a closed platform?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Why does it need monetisation?

Hosting costs money. "Monetization" doesn't mean disruptive ads.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Hosting cost money, so an host can setup a patreon to make money to host his peertube instance.

Monetisation like YouTube-monetisation means ads everywhere because, monetisation on YouTube comes from publicity.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Hosting cost money, so an host can setup a patreon to make money to host his peertube instance.

That's a type of monetization.

Monetisation like YouTube-monetisation means ads everywhere because, monetisation on YouTube comes from publicity.

OP didn's ask about "YouTube-like monetization".

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I wouldn’t mind paying a monthly subscription to the creators I enjoy in Peertube.

I’m already doing it through Patreon, but doing through Peertube would be better as these creators would see that the money is coming from a Peertube user.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Do you mean monetization so that instance hosts can recoup costs?
Or do you mean monetization so that content creation gets paid?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Why not both?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

There liberapay (patreon alternative) and mitra (patreon paywall alternative). there is also a peertube plugin.

Other then that having something that can show ads on videos but with an option to disable ads with pay (something like youtube premium), could be useful,

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

We need to figure out good content for peertube first.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

That's creating a chicken and egg problem. Many people who make good content do it because they can live off of it. In order to do so, they need to get paid. If you don't pay people, most people won't have an incentive nor opportunity to make their stuff better.

Requiring good content to introduce an option for monetisation, would be limiting it to the lucky people who already have the time and money to invest in making good stuff aka the smallest minority. Growth is made much harder without it - if not impossible on peertube, leaving only youtube as an option. I don't think that's a good solution.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

WHY DON’T WE MAKE THIS SHITTIER???????????

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (8 children)

Funny, I said "monetisation", you heard "ads". Do you think that's the only way to monetise something?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Great idea, im wondering myself, since it was a core goal of framasofts peertube to have donation integration or something similar, but it never happened. Hope someone is still working on it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The problem isn't making monetization available, it's having sufficient pull in the market to make it viable.

And then the next problem is being able to scale the network big enough to handle the traffic and storage requirements for hosted video. When let me runs out of go juice The traffic can easily be handled by a few inexpensive servers. When we're talking about video storage those petabytes start getting really expensive.

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