A lot of Youtube channels are reporting declining viewership lately.
EX1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cpVnx4_yqTo
EX2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF0tmhEtVJE
Fun times. Looks like a lot of channels are seeing a decline not just Linus. Hes just the latest to talk about it.
Then I saw this article as well and thought I would share.
Anyone here youtube creators? Are you seeing the same thing, a general downturn in viewership?
The problem is that there aren’t any really viable alternatives. YouTube has three major advantages and all three are necessary. First and most critically it has a viable business model (that is it has a way to earn money to pay creators). It’s a shitty business model, but it is viable which already puts it ahead of most services that are coasting on VC funds and hoping they’ll trip over a business model before they go bankrupt. Second it has the infrastructure and capital to actually serve content. Running a video streaming service is the single largest bandwidth consumer you could possibly come up with and that means considerable network infrastructure costs, to say nothing of the storage demands. Third it has network effect going for it. Nobody is going to watch videos on your platform if there’s only a couple dozen of them total. The sheer size and scope of YouTube means no matter what you’re looking for you can find something to watch. It’s a one stop shop for AV content.
Every single competitor to YouTube has failed on one of those points, usually the first one, rarely the second. The last service I saw come close to hitting all three was Vimeo, but it flamed out not even a decade after it launched. Twitch.tv is struggling to make their accounting work and isn’t even a direct competitor because they’re pushing hard for live streams as opposed to pre-recorded videos. Alternatives like PeerTube have no business model and will never attract creators or a mainstream audience. Paid hosting platforms like Floatplane are replacements for traditional video streaming services like Amazon Video or Netflix not really platforms where just anybody can set up a channel and start posting videos.
To paraphrase a famous saying, YouTube is the worst public video streaming service except for every other one. Until someone comes along and figures out how to make enough money to reliably pay creators and has enough capital to actually serve that content reliably and in high quality YouTube isn’t going anywhere.
I wanna like Peertube as an alternative, but I can’t find any content I like there. And the app is so awkward to use.
I use Odysee and Peertube where possible but yeah they’re somewhat awkward, and the biggest thing I typically miss is the comments. As awful as most Youtube comments are, the critical mass is there, if you’re looking for a quick link to something in the video, the summary that the author should’ve included but didn’t, the correction where the author was wrong, or something else of actual value, chances are whatever it is you’re trying to find somewhere on the top heap of Youtube comments. As with most social media, the value is not in the service itself, it’s in the community. Steering that community towards somewhere where it will actually be appreciated is a herculean task when someone has to be the pioneers and live in that desert and put in the work to prepare it for the ones who will come after them.
As much as I do complain about Peertube, I do like how it’s like the old personal blog days. Just kinda quietly do your own thing. I’m actually thinking of starting a channel to teach Japanese. I’ll probably have a few lines of my diary and break down the vocabulary and grammar in English and French. It’s like shit nobody would give a crap about, but it’ll get me to keep up with my diary and maybe someone will find the info useful, which I think the earlier days of personal websites and blogs were like.