> When you publish with Streambus, you create a website, on your own domain name. Reach your audience over RSS on the podcast apps they already have on their phone.
This is the problem with most other current alternatives: no discoverability. YouTube has no serious competitors because it has significantly more viewers and creators. If I use Streambus, how will I get others to see my content? If I want to find new stuff on Streambus, where do I see others' streams?
IMO any serious contender for YouTube would need:
- People using it - Decent recommendation algorithm - for all the hate YouTube gets, I've seen worse - Decent moderation. YouTube is too severe, yes, but you really don't want hate speech and shady stuff on your site, and especially recommended. It will scare everyone away. And copyrighted stuff will get you into legal trouble
> If I use Streambus, how will I get others to see my content? If I want to find new stuff on Streambus, where do I see others' streams?
There's two answers to this.
The first is that the discoverability works through all the same channels as podcasts. You can put your feed on podcast listings, rank in the search and discoverability of the many different apps.
The second is that subscriptions don't need as large of an audience. If you're doing an ad model, you get a million people to watch your video and make maybe $5k in ads. But you could instead get 500 people to pay you $10/month and you make the same with a far smaller audience.
New platforms are a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Podcasts is our plan to solve it. If you publish a video podcast, you get to piggyback on the already large audience of podcast-listeners. Then subscriptions lower the audience size you actually need for the platform to be viable and drive more video-creators to RSS, which drives more viewers in a virtuous cycle.
That's the plan anyway. Hopefully it will work! Youtube ads and their enormous % cuts really suck.
If you find this as interesting as we do, or you'd like help launching your own show, send me an email at evan @ streambus . com.
Or if you're in the bay area and vaccinated, let's get a coffee or go for a bike ride!
https://mobile.twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1412881397375...
I think the challenges in my industry are greater, but I think what you’re doing is part of a growing trend I call the “digital crowbar” model. Supercast is an example of one in your space that has already had some major success stories, though their latest poster child (Breaking Points) piggybacks still off YouTube. And of course Substack and Ghost are doing well with newsletters and blogs.
Curious what you think of my framing and how much it applies to your space or not.
Their video search has started including a wider range of sources; I imagine they’d welcome your content (especially since you’re likely to have a better privacy policy than YouTube).
You could even ask them how they think they would recreate their growth story through your proposed platform.
On Youtube, you make an account, you click the "create" button, you select the video file you want, and it uploads. It works.
Another example: have you ever tried to upload a video to peertube? Typically you make an account and then you click "create" and it says "uploads are not allowed on this instance" or something like that. As if the person making videos has any idea what that means. This is trying to use a printer and it keeps saying "PC LOAD LETTER", of course some nerd knows what that means but 99.9% of people are never going to care.
If you want an audience, allow people to upload videos to the website. This website doesn't solve that problem. Peertube doesn't solve that problem except if you somehow manage to find the https://peervideo.club instance, which is apparently the biggest english-speaking instance, but if you go to the "about this instance page", apparently "video quota" is 20GB, and "User registration allowed" has a red X next to it. What the hell does that even mean? Why is it so hard for people to make a website that makes sense to the average person? It is astonishing to me the lack of urgency there is for creating an alternative to youtube. Isn't Peertube maintained by like 4 people? Isn't this a massive global problem? Why is no one taking this seriously? Do people not understand how powerful it is to be able to see videos of things? For example, footage of war crimes or atrocities or things happening around the world? All the proposed solutions look like cutesy little hobby projects. For example, I'm sure they are great people, but honestly I don't care about "Evan" and "Kevin" or their little cartoon portraits, which is the first thing you show me when I try to create an account on Steambus. It doesn't strike me as headed in the direction of being a genuine solution to this global problem. What's going on with youtube is a nightmare and to put it bluntly, lots of people across the world are suffering and dying because of it.
But it's not Youtube and never will be. Pretending that it can be defeats the purpose. As does an overly simplified UX that hides the system capacity underpinning the technology (20GB limit). It will feel like a bait and switch when a newly converted user runs up against the limits of decentralized solutions, because they were not educated about that before.
This service gives you a website, so I'd imagine you'd get an audience the same way you normally should on a typical blog:
- Make good content
- Judiciously share that content and collect feedback
- Let members of the circles you shared with continue the cycle as they re-share, adapt, cite, and respond to your content.
- Notice other people hosting websites of their own that mention you; advise them to follow the same steps.
- Sit back as the recursion triggers logistical growth.
This strategy has worked out quite well for multiple online identities of mine. Truly good content doesn't need a silo or advertising to be recognized.
Many people are making good content.
If you skip all of what you said and just upload to YouTube chances are you expose your content to X-hundred million people and you can then promote it just like you said.
- People using it (not that many, but there's a sizable community) - Decent recommendation algorithm (okay ) - Decent moderation (part of the whole appeal is "free speech", but it's pretty toned down compared to some others)
It's pretty okay on all fronts, but not the best. Still something to check out though!
Plus, you can pick (or host!) an instance that agrees with your moderation preferences, and block instances that don't (e.g. alt-right and troll havens). The distributed/federated approach to moderation and hosting scales well with a limited budget.
I guess the easiest way is to ask someone to donate me some, but I don't know anyone on LBRY well enough for this.
I see zero competitors that offer anywhere near the revenue that YouTube offers. Until you have another platform that can offer anywhere near this level of revenue for content producers, there will only be YouTube. (Twitch is a different market and doesn't compete with non-streamed YouTube content, which I think we'd both agree on)
For that matter, perhaps it's a good opportunity to regulate YouTube's monetization policies, so that other companies can compete for content producers more evenly.
A Youtuber with a million subscribers that can convert 1% of their audience to paid subscribers at $5 a month makes $540k a year on Streambus.
And they'd do it on their own domain name, with the full ability to leave at any time without losing their subscriptions or audience.
They don't need to leave Youtube, or turn off their existing monetization models either.
Meanwhile, their audience can use an app they already have on their phone, and don't have to watch ads from a middleman.
IMHO the core problem is the recommendation engines are optimizing the wrong metrics and this leads to destabilizing feedback loops.
The problem is likely AI complete, but it should be possible to tune recommendations so they don't create self strengthening conspiracy theories. I suspect a reinforcement learning environment that mimics users interacting with a recommender system would be the best way of tuning the larger system behavior so the longer term properties aren't catastrophic for society.
OTOH if the platform was setup so "good faith" arguments were somehow incentivized, there might not be any need to optimize for any other metric than engagement.
The only stuff I watch on YouTube come out episodically and don’t have shitty clickbait titles. Some of them already have sponsor ads similar to what podcasts do.
It’s not clear to me why you’re advocating for censorship. Why do you care if someone else shares content that you’re offended by? Just don’t click or watch it. Vague policies like “hate speech” are always just ways to suppress political opinions, and end up reflecting the biases of the provider or loud vocal activists. There’s almost no point to seeking out an alternative platform if it cannot differentiate itself by upholding basic free speech principles. Moderation should just stop at explicitly illegal content.
* buzkilling and revolting
* makes you associate the platform with nonsense
* scares people of association with the platform.
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=XX
Where XX is the channel ID (the last component in the URL when you go to a channel).
It's actually how I consume YouTube these days. It's a slightly orthogonal problem to the solution posted here, since it doesn't follow the RSS "enclosure" spec. Though my feedreader knows enough to call youtube-dl on these URLs, which is fragile at best, but works for me.
They used to have an OPML export, but it looks like it was removed
What's wrong with the "subscriptions" tab/page on yt?
Or use RSS Bridge (huge, huge supports for thousands of website), it required PHP though.
Unless you are from Europe and are getting this stupid "Before you continue to YouTube" page.
And woe unto the Android app that tries to circumvent this and download YT vids directly.
I could just subscribe to the channel and open the subscriptions tab on YouTube, but RSS allows me to add manual filters on my RSS client (blogtrottr), because for some channels I'm only interested in some of their content.
Now that RSS has been effectively killed, this word/concept has disappeared without trace.
I have over 400 RSS feeds subscribed in QuiteRSS and FreshRSS.
Is this true?
Every time RSS comes up we have this same discussion
A: “RSS is dead”
B: “well, I’m still using it and it’s great. Clearly it’s not dead!”
But A and B are having two different conversations.
For broad public consumption the only success RSS had was podcasts, and Spotify is actively trying to capture that open ecosystem and make it their cash cow.
Kids aren’t sitting around sharing the RSS feeds they like, it’s YouTube, TikTok, Discord; all proprietary walled gardens of content.
So yes, the technology isn’t dead, and the world is big enough there’s even a self-sustaining (probably) community of RSS users, but it still hasn’t quite lived up to it’s promise.
Streambus is exciting because the cost of hosting content keeps dropping, maybe we can reproduce the podcast model with video now. But as always the network effect and discoverability are big hurdles to overcome.
Podcasts succeeded not just because of RSS, they succeeded because Apple supported them in the iTunes Store (which is _still_ the most important place to get reviewed as a podcast) solving the discoverability problem.
Does that mean that my hundreds of still-functioning RSS subscriptions are undead?
Edit to add: I actually really like this idea. I haven't tried a video podcast before, but if players start adapting to this format it could be great.
Our current bet is that it's got better economics than Youtube (lots of video plays, but little revenue flowing through per video), but probably worse economics than Substack.
Do you remember when Revision3 hosted their own torrent tracker for their shows? And MediaDefender hacked it, then DDoS'd them over Memorial Day weekend 2008? https://web.archive.org/web/20130721014755/http://revision3....
Youtube offers a lot for "free" and has good discoverability if you play the clikck-bate game — a beautifull garden, and at the same time a prison.
Many of content creators are not getting revenue from donations/subscriptions. For example, influencers have a personal contracts with companies. Some of them deliberately ignore turning off YouTube monetization for their videos, against, because they have different revenue source.
But there is also a case that confirms a part of the hypothesis: maybe you know guys who have a YouTube channel “Corridor Digital”. They have created their own mini-platform for their subscribers and are using youtube as a traffic source. I think you will be interested to know about their motivation and relevance of the idea.
P.S where can I follow the development of your idea and product?
In the "creator economy" realm, this looks like the missing part of YouTube - where creators can actually make money without being forced to make content optimizing for clickbait advertisement catered content.
I always do those peeks and ctr-f -? porn, adult
then look for what I call the anchor.fm/cancel culture language.. and if I see that then I move on.
So now I wonder if playboy porn is okay like vimeo, or if it's choose-your-own bouncer like peertube, or what.
popped over again for more info - clicked on pricing - saw something about "stripe" - so the content is to be beholden to the visa/mc/stripe censors?
I think paypal is less prude at this point.
sadly I think a thing like that that uses alt-coins is more needed - if you have to play within the terms/censors of youtube anyway, why bother doing something alternative? It's just gonna cost more time and money.
Love the idea - prefer a version that can cater to non-cancel culture / adult or whatnot would have more staying power.
Pyro lets you...
- Create a site with your own domain name
- Find, curate and display videos on your site from multiple sources (YouTube, Vimeo etc) based on keywords that you are interested in (e.g. AI, ML, startup)
- Allow users to sign up and login as a member, submit videos, upload videos (admins can review + approve).
- Build a community based around those videos and scale, members can comment, like, create watch list etc.
