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As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is the lack of monetization.
I think people who don't make videos for a living severely underestimate how expensive it is to produce high-quality videos people want to watch. This isn't like writing a tweet or even posting a picture on Instagram. Even a decent 20-minute video can easily take 40 man-hours of high-skilled labor.
I have a pretty small channel (~100K subscribers) with no employees and relatively low upkeep costs (a few hundred dollars a month), and even I could not make this work if I didn't get at least $500-$1,000 per video on average, since it just takes so much time and money.
Most channels with more than a million subscribers are likely founders working 60-80 hour weeks with multiple full-time employees supporting them. You cannot do that in the hopes of viewers donating $5 here and there.
And yes, there are people who make content for free - most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video. And the difference between a million views and a hundred is 10,000x. You cannot create a platform without big users.
I think any real competitor to YouTube nowadays would have to be backed by a big corporation that can pay big creators million-dollar deals to make the switch. Otherwise it's just dead in the water.
You can publish to both and even better your own domain that simply points to your video hosting provider. Long term you want to own your distribution channel as much as possible, while using YouTube as your lead generation tool to drive true believers to your site and premium distribution channel not owned by YouTube. Otherwise, you will always be subject to platform risk via YouTube's whims which has destroyed many content creators. That's the long term winning play IMO and it doesn't preclude tools like FreeTube.
It doesn't have to be for your use-case. e.g. KDE has their own instance, as does Blender. It would perhaps be a good fit for MIT to host their OCW videos, or for Khan Academy to host their material, or people sharing conference talks, or governments, or quick home DIY videos, or vlogs and idle musings, or hobbyists showing/discussing their thing they like, etc. Videos that are meant to help people to better themselves or collaborate fit better on a platform that doesn't try to be a constant sales funnel.
Do you ever think about the fact that if you're making $500 - $1000 per video on average that means Google is making $5000 - $10,000 on each of your videos on average? I mean its working for you, and that's great. I am a student of information asymmetric markets and the whole 'Ad supported' business that Google runs on all of its properties is perhaps the largest one in the current time frame.
The point being that building a production company to produce videos is a known thing, Peertube is a distribution network, and historically this is a remarkable mirror of 'independent' theaters and 'studio owned' theaters. It was a characteristic of that time that the big studios would use their monoply power to force small studios to give them their work at a discount that allowed the studio to get most of the income. They made it just enough that the small studios didn't feel motivated to build a competitive system.
When I read your comment it struck me that perhaps "$500 - $1000 average per video" was the number Google has determined to be 'just enough'.
"As a professional YouTuber, the main issue I instantly see with this is lack of monetization."
As a computer user I see that as the main advantage
No third party intermediary
No advertising
Computer users need peer-to-peer options for sharing video with each other that do not use third party advertising companies, e.g., posing as "search engine" or "social media", to transfer the bits
Whether PeerTube works well, I do not know. I know that overlay networks I have tested work well enough
There are 100M+ channels uploading on YouTube regularly and only 2-3M of them are monetized. Not everyone wants to upload videos on the internet with the explicit goal of making money. Professional creators are a very tiny minority, and a platform like YouTube will always be better suited for them (your "small" channel with 100K subscribers is actually in the top 0.5-0.1% of YouTube). There is no reason for Peertube to go after this specific demographic.
I understand where you are coming from, and if monetization is your primary reason for being on a platform, it's likely that PeerTube is not for you, unless your videos help you move your own product or service.
That said, I'm also okay with there being platforms out there where monetization is difficult or impossible. I want there to be places where creators can get paid, but I am also nostalgic for a less commercial internet.
I heard that main source of income for some professional YouTubers are Patreon and sponsorships. Ad revenue is dead last and very unstable. Also, if you are building your business on single platform, which one day might decide that your content does not adhere to their rules - that's a high risk to take.
You say your target is $500-$1000 per video and let's assume you do videos weekly. That would mean your optimistic goal is $4500 a month. Let's say you create a voluntary donation subscription at $5 per month for people willing to support your work. That means you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them to hit your $4500 goal. That's a 0.9% conversion rate from subscribers to donators. Doesn't seem that impractical when looked at in those terms. This is often the default monetization model for small podcasts because RSS feeds don't have built in ad revenue the way YouTube does.
Here's my dilemma:
The Youtube experience has always sucked for me - right from the first year Youtube launched. I just don't like the interface, web site, layout, etc. It's why I didn't have a Youtube account until I needed to share a video with someone, and even then, I never log into it (so I don't follow[1], rate, etc).
And then over the last few years, the ad situation has gotten astronomically worse. I'm not exaggerating when I say that old school cable TV with its ads was a significantly better experience.
I do a search for something specific. I start clicking videos to see if it has the content I want. But very often, on my Roku or similar device, I won't be able to see anything of the video unless I watch 15-60s of ads.
Only to find out the video is not useful for me. Click next video. Repeat the pain.
I think this is what leads a lot of people to just plain hate Youtube. It's what leads me not to care if suddenly no one can make money on Youtube (even the folks I like). It's why I want Youtube to just die.
If they made the site much more pleasing, and found a way to allow 3rd party interfaces (while still serving ads), and weren't anywhere near as annoying with the ads, I'd like the platform.
Regarding monetization: For the folks who have well established viewers, and who make most of their money via embedded ads in the video, I don't think they'll lose anything by switching to Peertube - as long as the Peertube infrastructure can handle the load. The major fans will know where to find the content.[2]
The real problem with Peertube is discovery. How can a new content creator be noticed? And then how can they show accurate viewership numbers to get those sponsors?
[1] Well, I may follow via other means: Manually, or via RSS, etc.
[2] Incidentally, some of the "popular" content I watch on Youtube exclusively gets monetized via embedded ads. Youtube demonetized that whole category a while ago. So embedded ads is totally viable.
I miss old, grass-roots youtube. I used to be a 'youtuber' back in the very very early days where it was just a case of sharing yourself doing dumb things.
I completely get that it's your job now... But the fact it's become a job for people is probably why I don't like it so much anymore. With all the ads and such too, it's now just television. But worse.
> most of them fail to hit a hundred views per video.
I get your point, but many of them fail to hit some hundreds of views due in large part to all of the large, professional channels that are spending hundreds of man hours as week producing content.
If the production was less professional do you think total viewership hours would drop significantly, or would it be distributed across more channels?
It's a promising system, and I'd probably use it over a non-federated video hosting system if I wanted to run a video hosting site of some kind.
Yet it's currently hard to find a real usecase for it, since neither the content you want nor audience is there on PeerTube at the moment. If you're interested in open source software or data privacy you might find something here or there, but topics like gaming, music, sports or movies are very much underserved on the platform at the moment, and get almost no attention from viewers.
For example, I recently did a test search and found a let's play for the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The videos had something like 3-5 views on PeerTube, and about 10-15 times that on the creator's YouTube channel.
It's the same issue as on Mastodon and Lemmy to be honest, except exaggerated. If the majority of topics aren't well represented on these platforms, then the general public won't use them. And if the general public won't use them, then the creators that would bring the general public over won't use them either.
They need to figure out a way to encourage people outside of the 'hardcore tech nerd raised on Usenet' audience to use these platforms.
I am currently recording tutorial videos for an open source project. It's produced fully with Foss software (on Linux, obs, kdenlive) and about an open source project, so I wanted to host it with peertube (though YouTube might be used later on for its network effect, it was easier to publish with peertube as yt required an video of me and my ID).
It's going fine until now. I don't host peertube myself though, I use an existing instance, and embed the videos in the website.
It was a really good experience, so I'll continue that way.
If you want to check out the videos: https://www.asfaload.com/videos/
There are four functions here:
- Discovery (as in search)
- Monetization (as in ads)
- Hosting (as in storage)
- Playout (as in data distribution)
PeerTube only performs the fourth, and maybe the third. It's not a flooding distribution system like BitTorrent. It's just a way for a large number of people to play the same video without overloading a modest hosting server. Playout load is distributed amongst the watchers browsers.
I put videos in PeerTube, tech demos of various rendering tests. Works fine. No ad insertion, which is why I use PeerTube.
Peak view count is 2.3K.[1] Nobody is expected to discover them there. They're linked from various forums. Some are for a very tiny audience, such as "Second Life sim server EstablishAgentCommunication message bug", with 10 views, mostly from the devs who needed to see this.
Technically it works fine, but it's not going to displace YouTube. Unless, say, Taylor Swift decided to stream her wedding on it to avoid ad insertion.
PeerTube has some interesting technology with the P2P sharing between users who watch at the same time. But with these kind of projects I think there are unfortunately social factors that impact their success as well as technical factors.
It's one thing to put a <video> element on a HTML page (or implement video over webtorrent), it's quite another to make people actually watch it instead of their TikTok feed.
Youtube has been incredibly frustrating for many many reasons and is evidently evil in many axes now. We really need competition in video hosting.
I like the idea of all of these federated services but why does the UX always feel like an afterthought when it is the most important factor for adoption?
Does it have good content? I explored it a bit in the past, but was a bit underwhelmed with content I could find there.
Edit: in the past
Would be pretty incredible to see decentralized federated media individual accounts and aggregators implement the x402 payment protocol (https://x402.org) as a way for creators to get paid, and thus continue to create.
Im envisioning a spotify replacement. You could pay for your streams directly to artists or platform the artist hosts on. Allowing for a more free market of creators and consumers.
The 'Explore' part, would basically just be like Mastadon or Bluesky
The first thing I noticed is that clicking on "browse" does not allow browsing but requires search: https://joinpeertube.org/browse-content
Been running my instance for more than 5 years now, feel free to ask questions.
Stupid question: when people inevitably use this for pirate content, and the feds try to shut the service down ... what's the plan?
I spent 10 minutes figuring out how I could just follow a few instances without having to run a docker container on my machine or keeping N tabs open all the time.
Not a chance to figure that out (I am no mastodon user, so hard for me to guess).
These platforms are promising, but they need to remember that the average user will turn away immediately if there is no clear guidance on how to do the basic things.
For an example of a quite vibrant local PeerTube instance, there is https://vhsky.cz/ running in the Czech Republic.
(And no, it is not spelled "VH SKY" - it's a pun on the VHS video format - in Czech to say "multiple VHS casettes - you would say "vhsky", hence the name. :) )
I've been deeply invested in YT and YT Music for about 20 years now. This month I was forced to cancel my subscription. They recently jacked up the price and really ruined the apps. I can't even understand how to operate the apps anymore; nobody will document it; nobody will support them. So I'm unable to monetarily support an unsupported app ecosystem.
Sadly I cannot leave the platform. The network effect is far too strong. PeerTube, and Vimeo, and Spotify are all well and good, like any other, but the network effect means that YouTube is where the channels are. The official channels that I follow and watch every day, for news, for updates, for the most important things in my hobby and my daily life. I cannot simply stop watching those things.
Call me an addict or something; I don't know. I have no TV, no family; I need some kind of time-chewing entertainment that is mostly passive. I wish I could curl up with books and knitting or crafts or something, but my eyes are still glued to these screens.
Help?
Personally, I find the lack of videos to watch on PeerTube a huge plus. I tremendously reduced my weekly video watching time and I don't feel like missing out on something important. My favorite instance is makertube.net, but I visit few others too.
It is unfortunate that in french « peer » reads as « pire » which translates to « worse-tube »
Last time I tried it the federation was whitelist based, that is you could only follow people on instances added by the admin of your instance. This made content discovery difficult.
I used it a few months ago but there was lag and things not working.
I keep on saying we need to eliminate Google for real. I mean it too. But the services NEED TO BE FLAWLESS if you want to have a chance against Google. I don't understand why people don't seem to understand it. Software can often be better. PeerTube's software was disappointing and really poorly implemented compared to Google. There is no way to win here that way against Google. That's not realistic.
I wonder if peertube could be used as backend infra for a security camera system, the tech seems promising. Also with all these instances hosting their own content, what do they do to combat cgnat? do individuals need to upload to an instance that has a public ip at a bare minimum. And what about directory listings for content, users would expect to be able to browse available videos and then burrow down to instances that host them no?
Hasn't cared about PeerTube for a long time, but this software is getting really impressive. Maybe it's time to move towards the next step: getting publishers on board.
I could totally see myself hooked if I can watch news on it. Can someone from a proper news agency, such as BBC, DW, Reuters, NYT etc test the software and maybe make a pitch? If these agencies are hosting their own PeerTube instances, that would be a major win.
is it bulletproof ? I don't think peertube has fixed that massive legal liability to the "seeders"
same situation that bitorrent found itself in
Random idea…
1. Chunk one inside a YT video 2. Chunk two inside a TikTok video 3. Chunk three on an X thread
And then just post the manifest somewhere that can be read by a client, that then pulls the data in (video, doc, anything)
Obv, not meant for speed or good UX, but if we’re going down the route of decentralization, we can probably leverage social platforms to host chunks of data.
The biggest problem I see is that you need to search for videos. If this is going to work you need a YouTube like home page with videos on it and a different webpage talking about the tech. Using a search page to find videos instead of being presented with one is a non starter.
I'm giving this an honest try to post some music I made, cause Google randomly banned me yesterday for "bot activity" and wants an appeal. I'm not mad or anything, just thinking they won't let me use YouTube anymore.
User generated content: check, comment section: check.
How do people running an instance not fall foul of all the protect the children UK legislation? Will peers also be done by the UK regulator, or only hosts?
The main advantage of PeerTube and alike is that they keep the “professional content creators” and their crappy content away.
Because of their unique monetisation feature.
My recent experience with PeerTube was to click on the OpenMW released video and the video didn't load. Is that a regular occurrence on PeerTube?
PeerTube: we don't recommend cat videos. Also PeerTube: 10 cat videos on the front page
Is there any moderation? how long until it's filled to the top with nsfw stuff?
I've tried a few of these alternative sites, and it's just not a fun place to go find videos from interesting people working on projects, etc. A lot of unpleasant extremist videos, a lot of slop, with no good ability to filter out just what I want to see. Sure, YouTube has these too but I can manage to keep it at bay.
Does it allow streaming?