The only real attempt at monetisation that I’ve seen is https://beetoons.tv/, but they use their own crypto - making it like Odysee. Why is that?
Edit: Please, before you answer consider this monetisation doesn’t mean ads!
A few reasons:
- The userbase on the Fediverse is not big enough to support a donation-based economy.
- The userbase on the Fediverse is not big enough to support an ad-based economy. Even if by some magical powers we got an ethical ad network working here (which didn’t track users and focused solely on paying people by the opportunity of broadcasting their inventory) there wouldn’t be enough eyeballs to attract advertisers.
- The userbase is still anti-business.
- For all its faults, Youtube is hands-down is the platform that pay the most to content creators.
- Content creators are not willing to spend their time building out audiences on new platforms. Principles be damned, they will just go where the money is.
I’ve added support for crowdfunding to Communick earlier this year, and even people who are active on the Fediverse and have a vested interest in having monetization alternatives turned it down. This is why all we see are these completely fringe ideas that can only appeal for the get-rich-quick crowd.
The userbase is still anti-business.
And a significant part will remain so. This should be a haven from capitalist/corporate platforms, not a parallel market.
I’m still doggedly working on Communick and on AP-based projects because I believe in open standards and because it is our best shot at us collectively take back the web. But if we continue on this idea that the Fediverse is somehow “better” because it discriminates against small business owners, or professionals who want an online presence to promote their work, or anything that resembles “profit-motive”, then this whole thing will forever remain a wasted opportunity, and we will be (once again) be giving it all away for Zuckerberg.
What we have now is just a Tyranny of the Minority. We need to grow the open web. That includes getting normies here. That includes getting people who are not part of your tribe. This includes getting people that you are able to ignore.
That’s Western fediverse.
Fediverse instance in Asia often run ads or other kind of monetisation. Like the second biggest instance.
The userbase on the Fediverse is not big enough to support a donation-based economy.
Could you expand on that? Why do you believe such is the case?
The userbase is still anti-business.
I’m starting to get the impression that this is the biggest hindrance. That and the common misconception that “ads = monetisation”, which IMO big tech has hammered into users very well.
For all its faults, Youtube is hands-down is the platform that pay the most to content creators.
True, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Content creators are not willing to spend their time building out audiences on new platforms. Principles be damned, they will just go where the money is.
Probably better tools could contribute to that. Something opensource that allows engaging with all major platforms + peertube and others could swing things in another direction. Imagine if peertube, mastodon, and so forth were just a toggle or a “sign up” form in the app. It could increase adoption by its simplicity: “Never heard of this platform, but I’ll just enable it and see what happens” could very well be possible.
I’ve added support for crowdfunding to Communick earlier this year
Wait a minute… I think I recognise that! Didn’t you make a post that was massively downvoted (or received negatively), because people didn’t understand what you were trying to do? “If it’s not steady income I won’t use it” is something I recall…
Edit: Lemmy is missing the feature to favorite other users :/
Could you expand on that?
Go take a look at all Mastodon instances that ask for donations to keep running: you will see that all of them get at most 2% of their user base to donate. No donation-based instance is big enough that it can afford to pay FTE salaries for moderation and/or administration. And this is for something that affects people directly when they don’t contribute.
Go take a look at some youtubers in the “1M-10M” subscriber range that have a Patreon. You will see that the most of them manage to convert 0.5% to 0.8% of their subscribers into direct contributors.
The open web (ActivityPub sans Facebook) is now at ~1 million active users. Even if we got 2% of these users to contribute $5/month to different creators, we are talking about a “Total Addressable Market” of $100k/month. Even with “best case” numbers, it is just too low to be attractive to a substantial number of creators. Compare with Youtube: it’s estimated that they paid out around 7 billion USD to all its creators in 2023.
Thanks for doing the maths. Actually, it does show that there’s a small, but unexploited market here. $2-3K a month is a very good income for the most of the world. And this doesn’t have to be the only revenue stream.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
None of the major Fediverse projects have real monetization.
Why single out PeerTube?
Why would you expect monetization at this point?
Do you think it should be monetized, or are you just surprised it hasn’t been?
What form of monetization are you imagining?
I think monetisation is more important on Peertube than other federated platforms I can think of.
We want people to post high quality videos on PeerTube. The production of high quality video content requires a lot of work and often also a decent chunk of money to produce. It’s not like a toot or a post on Pixelfed, which is often not labour intensive at all. A photographer or an artist might very well showcase their work on Pixelfed, or an author their writing on Mastodon, but it would not compete with their business idea as people who are interested would still need to buy prints/high resolution versions/ebooks/subscriptions/whatever.
On PeerTube, it’s very different. We want content creators to not only put money and time into creating quality content, but ideally we want them to host the content themselves in order to maintain full control over it. Without monetisation there’s just no reason why they would be interested in doing that.
The question of how is of course much more difficult than the why.
Sponsorships is one obvious candidate. In theory this wouldn’t require anything extra from Peertube - the producers of videos could easily add their own ads within the videos. However, sponsors are only interested in sponsoring content that has an audience, and the audience is on YouTube. Sponsored content is also potentially bad for obvious reasons.
Donations might make more sense, as they scale better to smaller but dedicated audiences. It is difficult to get people to cross the threshold for making them, but it’s not exactly easy to make a profit on YouTube either. Donations good because they encourage quality, rather than ads which tend to favour views over substance.
So finally, traditional ads. We all hate them. They suck, and if they’re incorporated they’ll probably be blocked anyway. But I’m sure there’s a case to be made in their favour - if it’s implemented on the instance level, I certainly wouldn’t be in a position to criticize. It could be necessary in order to host content on free instances, where people could build a following and then move on to self-hosting or join more restrictive ad-free instances should they get the opportunity to.
Personally I wouldn’t be opposed to having a sort of virtual tip jar functionality. I could imagine myself paying $25 into a virtual wallet maintained by Liberapay, and to press a button underneath PeerTube videos to donate $1 to the creator whenever I found something was worthy of kudos. Maybe users with non-empty wallets could be rewarded with extra filters in Sepia search or something like that.
The best answer to why monetisation hasn’t been figured out on PeerTube yet is, however, that it hasn’t been figured out on the Internet in general. It’s just really difficult, and every push towards monetisation tends to be the first step towards any service becoming completely shit. It’s a really difficult problem. The Fediverse and PeerTube might solve some problems by being less dependant on monetisation in the first place, but that doesn’t automatically make it an easy fix. More than anything we probably need an attitude change.
A good start would be to challenge the culture that makes monetisation so difficult, for example by making a donation to FramaSoft. Or simply make active use of the “support” button that already exists under many PeerTube videos. :)
None of the major Fediverse projects have real monetization.
Why single out PeerTube?
To me, Peertube is the most obvious. Lots of work goes into creating videos. I don’t use funkwhale, so I didn’t consider it. Monetisation for comments and tweets just seems questionable to me. Reddit introduced reddit gold, and I guess that could be one way of doing it 🤔 It would allow instance operators to keep the instance alive and users happy at the same time. IMO reddit gold was a genius move which could be implemented in lemmy or elsewhere. Same as Discords paid emojis and stuff.
Why would you expect monetization at this point?
At which point should I be considering monetisation? It’s always disappointing to me to have to go back to Youtube and pick the right, alternative client that currently works. And I do like some of the content I subscribe to, but I can’t be arsed to create 10 different accounts in order to donate indiscriminately, regardless of how many videos I watched of a content creator.
Do you think it should be monetized, or are you just surprised it hasn’t been?
I think it should be monetised.
What form of monetization are you imagining?
Tips for one off micro-donations, manual entry of tip amounts (this was so good I think it deserves a euro), “donated subscriptions”, and automatic donations based on how much is in my wallet at the time. I think there was a micro-transaction plugin for browsers that did that? The more you stayed on a website the greater the percentage of money was donated to it from your wallet.
But I haven’t seen it implemented and dunno if it’s the lack of interest, lack of skill, lack of possibility (maybe no payment provider makes that possible?), a combination, or all of the aforementioned.
Peertube has a solution built in. Creators can put in links to their Patreon, Liberapay, Ko-Fi or other donation platforms, and it’ll show a “Support” button underneath every video.
They don’t do crypto or ads in the core Peertube project. However, you can install add-ons as an instance administrator.
I don’t see any better solution as of today.
In-built monetisation that doesn’t require opening third party websites for every person you want to donate to. Maybe even a tip button or “donate subscription”. That’s what would be better.
With “better solution as of today” I meant more a viable solution as of today. And I don’t see any.
I completely agree that some in-built, more convenient monetization would be great. But… That’d immediately make them a whole different business. Now they need to handle money for people and become a payment provider. That’d probably require them to change their legal form. They need to hire people to manage that money. They get liable for it. And where money is involved there are disagreements and lawsuits. So they need an additional customer service. Probably also a proper legal team. All those people want a salary, so they have to make profit to pay them.
I think it’s a nice idea, but it would turn Peertube from a nice project that’s made by some programmers for us, the people, into a business halfway alike YouTube. And we already have YouTube. The nice thing about Peertube is that it’s about freedom and the content and less annoying business things involved.
And that’s often the case with smaller projects. Now the programmers do the thing they’re good at: program the software. If we make them do something else, that’s gonna be at the cost of the project. They’ll become managers and can’t attend to the thing they’re good at and what we’d like them to do.
Feel free to come up with a solution. I’d like to hear it. Because I’d also like to see some bigger Youtubers on Peertube. And they won’t come if they have to spend money on servers, instead of earning money.
Because anyone with a computer can host a peertube instance. Therefore is you want your videos on peertube it will cost you nothing more than what you already have : a computer running and an internet access.
The only real barrier is having the time and the knowledge to set it up.
Peertube is tech solution to host video, not a way to make money with videos. Monetisation can be done with peertube, but it’s up to creators to set it up.
Peertube is tech solution to host video, not a way to make money with videos. Monetisation can be done with peertube, but it’s up to creators to set it up.
Why should it be up to the creators? On youtube creators don’t have to think about “setting up monetisation”. Upload a video, ads are active, done. Peertube doesn’t have something that simple - and I’m not saying “we need ads”. Monetisation != ads.
Because YouTube wants you to not think, but just provide content and shut up.
Peertube (libre softwares in generals) requires to think about things and to make choices by yourself. It doesn’t try to be more than what it is = a tool for easily host videos.
Peertube isn’t a platform.
Because YouTube wants you to not think, but just provide content and shut up.
What’s wrong with that? When you drive a car, ride a bus, fly on a plane, or use anything in general, do you have to understand the inner workings of everything?
It’s true that peer tube is the ugly duck of the fediverse right now. But I don’t think is about monetization.
On its core it’s true that is the most complex project as videos are resource heavy, and producing videos is time consuming.
I don’t think people does not make videos because lack of monetization but because lack of users. And there are little users because there are little content.
IMHO the UI and UX should be the smoothest of all fediverse because it need to put it as easy as it can to everyone to attract as many users or creators as possible.
Because, let’s be true, monetization (even you can already monetize if you want) is useless is there’s nobody watching anyway.
IMHO the UI and UX should be the smoothest of all fediverse because it need to put it as easy as it can to everyone to attract as many users or creators as possible.
Thats true of ALL platforms. Fediverse or not. Biggest reason Linux fails where Windows 11 sucseeds is because the vast VAST majority cannot figure out linux’s user experience.
In windows, you install a program by downloading a file, and double clicking it. To change settings you go into the control panel. To update a program, you download another file, just like installing it.
I could literally never have a keyboard hooked up to a windows pc, assuming all my web browser bookmarks are already saved, and I don’t want to reply to any messages online.
With Linux, you can’t do that. You can’t just uninstall terminal, and expect to get help online if something is new and confusing to you. First thing they say in Linux is “ok, to help with this problem, open up terminal”. It’s baked into the Linux culture, just the same as a mouse is baked into the Windows culture since the 80s.
Now I use Linux as a standin for peertube, or any other platform since I haven’t used peertube. But the lack of Linux users, despite having the technical superior OS just shows how a bad user experience can cripple a platform.
The way Linux sucseeds is by having a distro that embeds into its own culture the lack of terminal. A distro that not only DOESN’T come with terminal, but uses it as a “selling” point. Heavy airquotes there since I’m not suggesting that this distro cost money.
As for peertube, I’ve been meaning to try it for a while. All it needs is good content, good user experience, and it should be the EASIEST of the fediverse platforms to sucseed. Look at youtube. Find me one creator who says “I enjoy dealing with youtubes overarching control and restrictions”.
I’ll wait…actually no I won’t. I got things to do.
Point is, if you normalize a federated video platform where the content creator can control their own hosting? Youtube would die, and content creators could negotiate their own prices to serve ads individually on their videos.
And they don’t HAVE TO host their own videos. Just that they can.
If I host a peertube instance, and 5 of my friends want to create videos, but not host them, then I can host them. But if I get greedy and say they must obide by my rules, then they can say fuck off and host it themselves. It takes overarching power away from the hoster, and that would be VERY appealing to a lot of content creators.
Then once you have the good user interface, and good content, you gain the followers, and with the followers comes the monetization.
And yes, it will be ads. Because if there were a better model, don’t you think tv, and streaming services, and youtube, and the internet would have already been doing so by now?
Biggest reason Linux fails where Windows 11 sucseeds is because the vast VAST majority cannot figure out linux’s user experience.
Nope, the bigest reason why windows is more popular than linux is the same as youtube is more popular than peertube - its the default and most people dont look past that. Honestly default Gnome UX is better than win11 these days unless you already have thousands of hours of windows muscle memory, which a very large chunk of people do.
The way Linux sucseeds is by having a distro that embeds into its own culture the lack of terminal. A distro that not only DOESN’T come with terminal, but uses it as a “selling” point.
This is the stupidest idea I’ve heard since I heard the stupidest idea and that was in this same channel / community, a few months ago. Half the power of Linux is the terminal, because you can be expressive in doing things there that simply can’t be done in a reproducible manner in GUIs. and reproducibility is very important when you want people to adopt Linux because you need the support you give to work “almost everywhere”, which the terminal does.
What is missing, more than “no terminal”, is “everything (or at least most of the stuff) that is doable in a terminal SHOULD have an associated standard to access it via a GUI”. But then you get into issues such as “the start menu should be in THIS corner of the screen and labelled THIS way and have the menus in THIS order”… and at the end that’s just corporate Gnome image, which by this point is just Windows but for Linux (see: Icaza, Potterdung, et al.).
