I was happily using this for a year or so now. Feels fairer than using an ad blocker. But now they apparently want more money out of people. Feels like some sort of internet video apocalypse is happening, where the services become extremely fragmented and expensive, like YouTube, netflix, hbo, Hulu, Disney+ and whatnot. Each wants some 10-20€ out of your pocket.
I guess that means back to ad blockers and piracy…
I think we’re starting to see the beginning of YouTube’s end. The algorithm is actively choking the life out of the platform, they’re forcing viewers to pay fees that seem to keep getting bigger and bigger, and they’re making life miserable for creators while also paying them less and less.
Once another platform comes along that ticks enough boxes to satisfy people then YouTube will be absolutely screwed. The only reason we all use that wretched site is because there is no viable alternative. More and more creators are moving to premium platforms like Nebula that offer better deals for viewers and creators alike. I’m likely to jump ship myself once more people I watch also join up.
Youtube is still the biggest video website on the world and there just isnt a viable competitor to it and nor is there financial incentive for anyone to jump into something like it given the overhead and cost. Hell even early on when youtube was lower resolution and ran worse on hardware it still beat out competitors like vimeo, dailymotion, and the various early internet content creator sites that spun off of youtubes early copyright purge.
At the end of the day they serve a tiny amount of ads which honestly is more of a minor inconvenience(especially when you remember what TV was like) and the algorithm is pretty hit and miss(personally on my feed it’s not bad). Even worst case scenario if the adblockers stop working youtube will probably still not die.
It would take an antitrust hearing or something to really push youtube off of it’s top spot and it would be interesting to see what that would look like for the site(though I suspect a google dismembering would leave youtube intact and just remove it form other alphabet brands which wouldnt entirely fix the issue).
Hell look at what happened on reddit. That was a very visible very big protest and there was a huge amount of outrage and reddit skews nerdy enough that the userbase actually pays attention and cares about whats going on. Weeks later and not a lot has changed. Lemmy and some other alternatives became viable but even then it And thats essentially just a big message board which links to content on other sites, in terms of design it should be easier to replicate compared to an open video site that anyone can upload to.
User content deliver platform is a really bad business model cause:
there is always that free option, pirate, rip record and the share, or simply patreon that skips the platform’s fee taking once you are big enough.
if you try to charge for ad, then you need enough conversion rate(views->click through, views->query or views->sales), there is really not much options to do this, if you make another youtube clone, you pretty much can’t pay for the infrastructure nor bandwidth.
you still have to deal with all the other stuff, DMCA, content moderation, age restriction, reports, etc.(these are cost sink that does not generate revenue at all.)
I don’t know how Nebula do the revenue split, can a user even specify like I want to support this creator only? cause from what I see only 50% revenue is distributed, that means the bigger channel you are traffic wise, the more you get from sign ups. so smaller creators might not have a good time there compare to the patreon model.(where user pay directly to them and the end user just watch youtube or from other source direct stream/download).
Nebula is so cheap I have a subscription even though I almost never use it. I would use it more if they had a better recommendation system, as it is now you almost have to search for a specific video you want or dig through piles of random videos you don’t care about.
I would get a subscription but (at least last I checked) they don’t want European customers. Who the fuck has a credit card and why aren’t you accepting plain old bank transfers. I half-way expected them to list “mail us a cheque” under payment options.
Bank transfer is the standard option because everyone has a bank account and everyone can do it, also, there’s generally zero fees attached. There may be more convenient options, but it basically always is there as a fallback. As a company you have an account, anyway, only thing you need to do is have your payment system look through incoming transactions and scan the “intended use” field for a transaction id or account number or such you told people to put in there.
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