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Comment on YouTube's new ad strategy is bound to upset users: YouTube Peak Points utilise Gemini to identify moments where users will be most engaged, so advertisers can place ads at the point.

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Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

The core problem is that hosting and streaming videos costs money, and that money must come from somewhere. Unless there is someone with really deep pockets just paying for everything, such a platform must use subscriptions or ads to make some money. Netflix & others use subscriptions, YouTube uses ads, and both even offer combo models.

How would a free variant of YouTube work on the long run? Setting up a small model on a server in your home office, maybe with donations to cover initial hardware costs is not the issue at first, but once you need a computer center and employees you’ll need some serious, regular money coming in.

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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
How would a free variant of YouTube work on the long run?

Some options:

charge channels for hosting costs - most channels make more from sponsorships, patreon, and merch than ads; could even be free for smaller channels

charge customers for premium features - like Discord Nitro; they already have this in the form of super chats or whatever
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rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
We’ve had bittorrent for many years.

The issue is creating a global index and dedicating some storage to the less popular (at the moment) data.

One can have paid storage provided over such a network, available only to subscribers. So you want to fetch a video from the global index, there are no peers having it online for free or their upload speed it atrocious, but there are some offering it not for free. You choose them and download, or maybe you have something like trade and auctions automation in MMORPGs - setting for auto-purchase and auto-sale with caps for what you would pay.

That requires a payment system, though, one can seamlessly connect to identities in such a network.

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- Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  But even running an indexer on a YT-like scale would need serious money, even if you spread the hosting and streaming load around. And for most users, this would not be attractive, as you probably would have to torrent the data first and view it later.
  
  Then there is the issue with responsibility. If someone throws e.g. CSAM into the system, who could be held responsible? Who would have to deal with DMCA notices? Who would deal with issues like “Dictator X demands all videos showing him in a bad light to be removed immediately!”
  
  And: Opening a payment system is a serious can of worms, especially if you need it to work internationally.
  
  Honestly, I’m not against a YT alternative, but I don’t want it to die after three weeks because the person behind is was too optimistic to consider to potential problems.
  
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  - rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Yes, I agree.
    
    It appears GNU Taler is seeing some initial deployments. That’s for payment system.
    
    An index can have centralized control, while being itself decentralized. Like for checking certificates you don’t contact some CA website every time, you have a certificate chain, cryptographically verified. That’s for CSAM and DMCA notices. That center can deal with them, sending deletion notices signed with their certificate or whatever, or recalling index entries. Those would have to propagate over the network fast enough, of course.
    
    That system just has to allow plugging in paid services in a uniform way. Then the serious money part will not be as important.
    
    With torrents one can have sequential downloads, and again, with paid services one could have those having new publications faster and with better download speeds.
    
    The word “uniform” is the only thing differentiating this from the Internet we already have.
    
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    Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    With Taler I wait for it to work the kinks out. And, of course, for it to be available somewhere reasonable.
    
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  - gian@lemmy.grys.it ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    But even running an indexer on a YT-like scale would need serious money, even if you spread the hosting and streaming load around.
    
    True but probably doable since it would be way smaller.
    
    And for most users, this would not be attractive, as you probably would have to torrent the data first and view it later.
    
    That’s a good observation.
    
    Then there is the issue with responsibility. If someone throws e.g. CSAM into the system, who could be held responsible?
    
    The uploader. But I get that could be difficult.
    
    Who would have to deal with DMCA notices?
    
    Only the ones where the DMCA is valid. Which means US.
    
    Who would deal with issues like “Dictator X demands all videos showing him in a bad light to be removed immediately!”
    
    Do you realize that in many place such a request could be simply ignored until the dictator X does not get and order by a judge ?
    Not to say that these are not real problems, but a distributed system is much more resilient to them, with the good and bad implications associated.
    
    And: Opening a payment system is a serious can of worms, especially if you need it to work internationally.
    
    That’s a point that is more problematic since such system could|should not use something like paypal or similar services.
    
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  - Sarmyth@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    All this also doesn’t take into account how creators gets paid.
    
    It’s a big system, with enough moving parts that I understand the ad/pay model existing. I just wish they weren’t such prices about how they choose to operate it sometimes.
    
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    Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    You’re right, cost of content creation comes on top of the running costs, too.
    
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    gian@lemmy.grys.it ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    All this also doesn’t take into account how creators gets paid.
    
    If they want to make money in such system, they can simply host their node and use something like patreon to get paid.
    
    (yes, there should be the option for a node to not be able to share a video and to stream it only to subscribed users, but that does not seems to be a big problem)
    
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