In YouTube’s case, I don’t think peertube can beat YouTube.
The vast majority of content is content made by people who do it for a living. The monetization scheme is exactly why YouTube got so big - they make videos and the ad revenue pays them for running ads on those videos.
Even if creators have sponsorships and patreons, there’s no way they’d choose a platform that they have to pay to keep running over one that pays them to upload their content. It doesn’t make any business sense. - video is exponentially more expensive to store and process than pictures and text.
On top of that, peertube only has discoverability through word of mouth. There’s no central recommendations page or anything to even give creators a chance at growing. The only discoverability they’ll have is word of mouth and xposting/boosting on mastodon Lemmy and other webisites.
The only way it would become remotely viable is either
some kind of advertising scheme (which isn’t really in the spirit of fedi, as it gives big advertising companies power over peertube instances that decide to do it)
some form of global patreon with a revenue split - essentially the server owner takes the money required to keep it running and then the creators fight over the rest. And most likely, if the instance gets popular, the costs of serving that video could possibly leave next to nothing for the creator - it might be mitigated by inter-instance video caching, but it’s still not ideal - especially considering a large amount of traffic would go to mastodon and lemmy instances which won’t or can’t cache the video.
I like the idea of peertube, but I think it’s only really viable for short clips that are uploaded specifically for Lemmy and mastodon use - in other words, users who aren’t planning to make money off of the videos.
I only use peertube for one specific streamer since his vods get deleted on twitch eventually and he makes his money streaming and from patreon anyway. I think it’s doable if the content creators agree to do this as backups for their streams, but they definitely need to have an alternate source of income, it’s not a yt replacement.
In YouTube’s case, I don’t think peertube can beat YouTube.
The vast majority of content is content made by people who do it for a living. The monetization scheme is exactly why YouTube got so big - they make videos and the ad revenue pays them for running ads on those videos.
Even if creators have sponsorships and patreons, there’s no way they’d choose a platform that they have to pay to keep running over one that pays them to upload their content. It doesn’t make any business sense. - video is exponentially more expensive to store and process than pictures and text.
On top of that, peertube only has discoverability through word of mouth. There’s no central recommendations page or anything to even give creators a chance at growing. The only discoverability they’ll have is word of mouth and xposting/boosting on mastodon Lemmy and other webisites.
The only way it would become remotely viable is either
some kind of advertising scheme (which isn’t really in the spirit of fedi, as it gives big advertising companies power over peertube instances that decide to do it)
some form of global patreon with a revenue split - essentially the server owner takes the money required to keep it running and then the creators fight over the rest. And most likely, if the instance gets popular, the costs of serving that video could possibly leave next to nothing for the creator - it might be mitigated by inter-instance video caching, but it’s still not ideal - especially considering a large amount of traffic would go to mastodon and lemmy instances which won’t or can’t cache the video.
I like the idea of peertube, but I think it’s only really viable for short clips that are uploaded specifically for Lemmy and mastodon use - in other words, users who aren’t planning to make money off of the videos.
I only use peertube for one specific streamer since his vods get deleted on twitch eventually and he makes his money streaming and from patreon anyway. I think it’s doable if the content creators agree to do this as backups for their streams, but they definitely need to have an alternate source of income, it’s not a yt replacement.