Comment on PewDiePie: I'm DONE with Google

• non_burglar@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  You are correct. Websites, the stack to supply video encoding, even scalability is a solved problem.

  The hard work isn’t technical, it’s getting people onto your platform in the first place (marketing), getting people to continue using your platform (retention) and the perennial problems of SaaS evolving with other SaaS platforms (how many dev hours are you willing to eat trying to keep up with the Joneses?).

  SaaS, and in this case, SaaS offering content, is a losing game. You will either lose your shirt, sell your business, or become entrenched in a position whose inertia is difficult to break. How much of any of those you are willing to take a firehose of is the question.

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  • Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s not easy, but you’re not guaranteed to end up

    either lose your shirt, sell your business, or become entrenched in a position whose inertia is difficult to break

    It depends on the personalities involved and the business model they go with.

    Nebula has done really well with consistent growth as a premium offering where people pay one subscription fee to get ad-free videos from exclusively high-quality creators across a quote broad range of niches, in addition to bonus extras and Nebula Originals.

    Dropout seems to have a lot of success with a range of mostly unscripted comedy, centred around a core cast of trusted comedic actors with a larger range of guests.

    Floatplane, on the other hand, seems much less successful, probably owing to its business model being basically Patreon’s, but only for video. Instead of the wide range of content you get for surprisingly reasonable amounts of Nebula and Dropout, Floatplane ends up looking very expensive if you want to support more than one or two creators. Plus the creators on it haven’t got the same degree of trust; it ends up reeking of the sort of techbro vibes that people are explicitly trying to get away from.

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    • non_burglar@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’m sure these are accurate statements, but the fact remains that I’ve never heard of dropout or nebula. At all.

      And the only reason I’ve heard of floatplane is via LTT and Jeff Geerling, and I don’t actually use the platform itself.

      That’s what I mean about inertia, google has it now and can coast for years on people just being lazy and staying with YouTube. That alone will be a loooong hill to climb for any other platforms.

      LTT seems to have enough clout and has worked out a survivable business model, but notice that they remain on YouTube to capture and keep new views.

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      • Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I’ve never heard of dropout or nebula. At all

        I must admit, I find that astonishing. Not that the average person on the street wouldn’t have heard of them, but that someone online enough to be having these sorts of conversations wouldn’t have.

        Are you familiar with CollegeHumor, perhaps? After their corporate owners got screwed around by Facebook’s pivot to video (and the fraudulent data involved), they were going to shut down CH entirely until the head of the creative group reached an agreement to buy it out, and under his ownership he created the private streaming service Dropout. Today it’s mostly entirely private, with promotional content like the occasional episode or clips uploaded as Shorts put onto YouTube.

        Nebula got its start as a sort of multi-channel network owned by and for YouTube creators, to avoid many of the big pitfalls that MCNs became known for. Its earliest more well-known members are Sam from Wendover/Half As Interesting, Brian from Real Engineering, Colin from CGP Grey, and Philip from Kursgesagt. The latter two later left over “creative differences” (leaks have seemed to imply, basically, that they wanted to keep it a small elite group at the core which could profit from increased growth while adding more creators, while the rest of the people then involved wanted a more equitable arrangement). It’s since grown to way too many channels to name, but if you’re interested you can see the full list here. A few choice selections might include tech reporter TechAltar (whose recent “1 month without US tech giants” and the Nebula Plus follow-up “Which alternatives am I sticking with?” video are reminiscent of the one this thread is about), astrophysicist Angela Collier, Canadian cultural commentator J.J. McCullough, history & video game design analysis channels Extra History & Extra Credits, TLDR News, human geography (with a focus on conflicts) from RealLifeLore. Linus from LTT has talked about Nebula once or twice, though his commentary on it gets wildly wrong, claiming it was a sort of pump & dump scheme where the main goal was to sell to private equity or something, seemingly because he’s projecting his own techbro capitalist attitude onto them. As I sort of mentioned above, Nebula basically serves as an uber-patreon. You pay a single subscription fee (when I signed up it was $30 per year, but it may have changed) to get mostly content that could be gotten for free (but with ads) on YouTube, plus some bonus content, some stuff a bit earlier, and a few Nebula Originals. Lindsay Ellis might be the most notable one there. Since getting harassed off the Internet by Twitter, all her videos have been Nebula Originals apart from 2 promoting her new book.

        Neither of these are really meant to be a complete YouTube replacement, but rather a way for them to create more control over their stuff and get the stability of knowing they aren’t relying on the fickle YouTube algorithm (and the whims of YouTube censorship).

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