[Linus Tech Tips'] Response to YouTube's Shenanigans - Floatplane is Finally Here!

They are making millions of dollars and are basically nobody. With no sense of capitalism except they get payed for eyeball views.
 
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yea the floatplane name forever I though was something to do with 3d modeling or CAD or something mechanical and not video content streaming.
 
That seems rather petty. YouTube is a terrible name but I bet you still use it.
It’s not petty, it’s marketing 101. The name has absolutely nothing to do with anything. YouTube isn’t a terrible name. It’s both relevant and personal. “You” ... the person watching ... and “Tube” ... which is pretty self-explanatory. Floatplane sounds like they went online and used a random business name generator. It’s awful.
 
I literally said the connection. Hundreds of changes good demonetized or deleted as fallout from YouTube trying to punish someone for saying something they didn't like but didn't break YouTube rules. You don't have to go look up what happened, but then don't complain you don't know what's going on.

And if you don't want to pay to watch Linus, don't. I bet he doesn't care.

LTT is not a channel making political statements, hence it seems unlikely that the punishments mentioned would apply or ever happen to them.

As far as not paying for watching youtube channels, I recommend you not take someone elses' viewing habits personally, as your childish response implies.
 
Linus Shill Tips, where would I be without Linus telling me what to buy

I'd challenge you to find a video where Linus tells people what to buy. At best, you'll find ones where he says "Don't buy this," or "if you are in the market for this, here's why you should strongly consider this." And he's unquestionably honest about both the experience of working with the products and with any conflicts of interest, like sponsors or when the company gave them the material. I feel like you haven't really spent much time watching LMG videos.
 
It’s not petty, it’s marketing 101. The name has absolutely nothing to do with anything. YouTube isn’t a terrible name. It’s both relevant and personal. “You” ... the person watching ... and “Tube” ... which is pretty self-explanatory. Floatplane sounds like they went online and used a random business name generator. It’s awful.

unless you happen to know what "youtube" was actually suppose to represent and it has nothing to do with what "youtube" is now, lol.. youtube was suppose to be a dating video site which failed miserably. P
 
unless you happen to know what "youtube" was actually suppose to represent and it has nothing to do with what "youtube" is now, lol.. youtube was suppose to be a dating video site which failed miserably. P
And it would have been a relevant name for that as well.
 
I dont particularly hate YT, but I'm willing to support certain Tech Reviewers outside of the YT platform.

Linus is not someone I watch, but good on him if he can pull this off.
 
LTT is not a channel making political statements

Looks like phone autocorrect messed up some of what I was saying, but the WHOLE POINT is that during the Maza-Crowder thing, hundreds of channels who weren't making political statements got demonetized or deleted. For example, from a Washington Post article: "Curiously, the company’s sweep also took down a history teacher’s archival Nazi footage and some videos by creators who were challenging or debunking white-nationalist propaganda."
 
Yeah honestly the name makes no sense and I don't see this surviving more than a couple of years as much as I want competition.

It's getting really hard to find a meaningful name for new projects these days. Do you think Kubernetes or Node are better?

Again, this isn't a YT competitor as such, so the bar for success is much lower.
 
Linus is not someone I watch, but good on him if he can pull this off.

The site's been up for months already with Linus and Bitwit, and they added about 3 more creators a month or so back.
 
The site's been up for months already with Linus and Bitwit, and they added about 3 more creators a month or so back.
Eh ... my cousin has almost a million subscribers and she's pretty pissed off about the YouTube situation as well. I'll show her this. If it works for her I'll happily support it, despite the odd name.
 
It's getting really hard to find a meaningful name for new projects these days. Do you think Kubernetes or Node are better?

Again, this isn't a YT competitor as such, so the bar for success is much lower.

The fact that their marketing this directly to Youtube content creators puts this in Youtube competitor territory. Sure they may not be able to keep up with Youtubes bulk content (which is generally trash and memes) but they should definitely go with a name that captures the spirit. Floatplane just sounds long and annoying to say. They could shorten it to just Float or Plane and it would do better granted those are some pretty generic terms to copyright but just making an example.
 
I'm not 100% sure I understand their business model but as soon as they said $5 per channel PER CREATOR you want to follow ... that was a big no for me (as a viewer/consumer).

It is TRUE Floatplane is a benefit for the video creators but there is NO benefit for the viewer/customer (unless the creator is keeping something exclusive to Floatplane / behind a paywall). If you don't like ads - just pay for YouTube premium. Boom - no ads. And that applies to ALL of your YT subbed channels = flat rate. Not $5/per creator. <- this is what I do.

Sure I understand YouTube / Google likes to eff around with how they calculate / pay out for ad views or clicks or edit / limit content (maybe for topic controversy or cursing or nudity or age or ...) but they are also subsidizing all the costs and fees related to hosting and marketing a creator's content. I've found a bunch of new creators to watch and follow as a result of random late night youtube clicking / channel surfing that I wouldn't have otherwise found.

The main thing about Youtube-ing which I think some creators are missing is that its best function is as a springboard to other things - selling merch, doing sponsored ads, instagram, advising/consulting, other channel related businesses (i.e. auto channels that do auto things IRL), etc. People who are actually relying on YouTube ad revenue paychecks as the primary source of income without diversifying their revenue streams are just asking for trouble.
 
The fact that their marketing this directly to Youtube content creators puts this in Youtube competitor territory.

Except that they say in so many words this is for existing channels who are trying to get a bigger cut of the money people are giving them. You can think of it like the Epic store vs Steam, although of course analogies only ever go so far. they explicitly say they're not a general-purpose site, and don't expect to grow your channel organically the way you can on YT. Every current creator is staying on Youtube. FP gives you, as the viewer, the opportunity to support a creator more directly, just like Patreon. If you weren't going to pay anyone anyway, then FP is meaningless to you.

You're arguing against a position FP isn't taking.
 
there is NO benefit for the viewer
Aside from "supporting the creator directly" you also get videos a week early.

You may sub dozens of different YT channels now, but you probably aren't supporting all of them directly via Patreon or whatever, are you? There's people out there who have like 5 different streaming services, but are only paying for one or two a month, and they rotate every so often. This could work the same way.

And if it doesn't work for you, then just don't use it. That's cool. But it's not a stupid idea just because it you don't like it.
 
I'm not 100% sure I understand their business model but as soon as they said $5 per channel PER CREATOR you want to follow ... that was a big no for me (as a viewer/consumer).

It is TRUE Floatplane is a benefit for the video creators but there is NO benefit for the viewer/customer (unless the creator is keeping something exclusive to Floatplane / behind a paywall). If you don't like ads - just pay for YouTube premium. Boom - no ads. And that applies to ALL of your YT subbed channels = flat rate. Not $5/per creator. <- this is what I do.

Sure I understand YouTube / Google likes to eff around with how they calculate / pay out for ad views or clicks or edit / limit content (maybe for topic controversy or cursing or nudity or age or ...) but they are also subsidizing all the costs and fees related to hosting and marketing a creator's content. I've found a bunch of new creators to watch and follow as a result of random late night youtube clicking / channel surfing that I wouldn't have otherwise found.

The main thing about Youtube-ing which I think some creators are missing is that its best function is as a springboard to other things - selling merch, doing sponsored ads, instagram, advising/consulting, other channel related businesses (i.e. auto channels that do auto things IRL), etc. People who are actually relying on YouTube ad revenue paychecks as the primary source of income without diversifying their revenue streams are just asking for trouble.

YT Premium really doesn't give creators all that much money unless a lot of Premium members are watching a lot of their videos. With FP they get a flat amount per subscriber, so you are more directly supporting them. It's more akin to Patreon or the "Supporter" sub that YT offers for some channels. FP members could give subscribers rewards as well, things like early videos, some exclusive vids, theoretically they could even have exclusive Discord servers for subscribers by sending subscribers links to the server or putting links to it in the descriptions of their FP vids.
 
FP members could give subscribers rewards as well, things like early videos

At this point I believe every one of the (few) creators puts (most) videos up a week early, so that's a nice benefit. LTT, in particular, makes it clear they don't put ALL of them up early--sponsored videos, for example, hit FP and YT the same day, like their recent Junkyard Wars (or whatever they call it) season. I wouldn't be surprised if creators start putting up external bennies at some point--for example, a lot of Minecraft Youtubers who use Patreon will give donors at a certain level access to a private server. (There's one who has a hilarious perk: for $50, he'll skip one midroll ad, and say it's sponsored by you, and read a poem he wrote. For $100, he'll skip the poem.
 
The fact that their marketing this directly to Youtube content creators puts this in Youtube competitor territory.
Not quite; they are marketing to a very specific subset of YT content creators, for very specific reasons. The fact that many of those providers will continue to put content up on YT, including LTT. This kind of generalized thinking (any video = youtube competitor) would pit the new Disney channel against YT, which simply isn't a useful way to look at the two.

Sure they may not be able to keep up with Youtubes bulk content (which is generally trash and memes) but they should definitely go with a name that captures the spirit.
They explicitly are trying to separate the murk (ie, the water) from things that float above it.

Floatplane just sounds long and annoying to say.
It's literally the *exact* same length and difficulty as YT. And You tube is neither about "you" (most people aren't making their own content) or "tubes" (no one is using a CRT to watch Youtube).

They could shorten it to just Float or Plane and it would do better granted those are some pretty generic terms to copyright but just making an example.
https://www.float.com/ is already taken.
Plane.com is not, but it's also simultaneously ambiguous and generic, but oddly specific in a completely unrelated way.
Floatplanes actually speak to their larger mission... Floatplanes are designed for a very specific audience (like this platform) to keep them from sinking in adverse situations (like the weird stuff that happens with YT policy shifts that tank content creators on whim, and everyone looses from that).

Honestly, I'm not sure why everyone is so worried about it, regardless...
 
Some of that dissecting of my thoughts especially towards the end there was a bit reaching. Leaves me even more suspicious.
 
Leaves me even more suspicious.

Suspicious of what, exactly? This is LInus Sebastian, not Bernie Madoff.

More seriously, though, what would his endgame be? Stealing more of creators' fees than his platform cut? That wouldn't last long and he'd wind up in jail.
 
So... Floatplane is another proprietary, centralized video host that is pretty much banking on creator discontent with YouTube in one way or another. It seems to creator focused to the point of being exclusionary to potential viewers - you can't even see a granular breakdown of its features (for creators or viewers) without applying for an account. What's more it it seems they're pretty much entirely focused on the "You already have a huge viewerbase, sponsorships, and generally have lots of people throwing money at you" demographic, including LTT . The idea that users should have to pay $5/month PER CREATOR to view a given channel is the frosting on the exploitation cake, proving it doesn't care anything for users and creators in general, it simply wants to extract as much value as possible and thereby only allows those with legions of sycophants ready to open their wallets to start on the platform.

This is evidence they're not a "better" alternative to YouTube in general, but instead they're more of a specialized TV channel signing existing shows for cash. The idea isn't new and the recent (often hyperbolic and marketing driven, though undercut with real concern) fears about YouTube policy changes has caused niche-content branch-off, but most of these have at very least (ie Curiosity Stream,Skillshare) have made subscription relatively affordable and sitewide, without per-channel payment requirements! It is important to remember that YouTube itself , for all that they do, actually LOSES money for Google/Alphabet - it is sustained through their other ventures and the fact it gives them tons of data, platform to sell ads, and a huge section of the medium etc... but its still a net loss in raw expense. This isn't surprising - the raw amount of uploaded and viewed footage, hosted, commented, stored, and liked for "free" from the user perspective is immense. But it does mean that a real "alternative" for YouTube has to find a way to deal with this.

I've been interested in alternatives to YouTube for quite some time and I've only seen that has the potential to ethnically, technically, and financially step into the role given enough time and engagement - PeerTube. Nearly every other alternative is either a "Pay TV" platform, someone trying to essentially do the same centralized thing as YouTube, someone tying their platform in some way to a crypto-asset (I could write a whole post on why this is a bad idea, but essentially it means introducing speculation and the variation of your crypto to how cheap or expensive it is to run, create, and view on your platform - not to mention its easy to manipulate or fall to greed). PeerTube is the one exception I've found - https://joinpeertube.org/ - For the user that mentioned it before, it is probably the best I've seen to date. Fully open source and decentralized, PeerTube is a platform not just a site - its actually compatible with and part of the "Fediverse" ethical social media alternative platforms (ie Mastodon, Diaspora, Friendica, PixelFed, Matrix etc). Anyone can spin up their own instance and manage it as they wish, but they also are capable of federating and showing content from other instances as well if desired. Each node admin can decide which other nodes are part of their "universe' stream, where users will see both local content as well as content from federated nodes as well by default. Users can sign up on any instance they wish, yet view/subscribe/comment etc on content anywhere on the network with that same account - like many other "fediverse" protocols, it works somewhat like Email or XMPP in this regard. This system is able to get around issue of YouTube being net negative in terms of profit, by spreading out the costs of hosting among all instance/node hosts. Furthermore, PeerTube uses WebTorrent so that viewers of any given content are also helping to seed it to others, further cutting down on the costs of serving all that content.

PeerTube is still developing but they've made a lot of great strides forward from a technical perspective. There are still some things yet to debut (ie livestreaming is the next really big target and they're quite needed ), but overall it seems the best alternative for a YouTube sort of service going forward. Their userbase is growing but, like any alternative social media, the network effect and inertia thereof if the thing keeping more people on the old, big name platforms. Thus, everyone who tries to shift their content and viewing onto a PeerTube instance is an important contributor, the very same way that using Mastodon/Pleroma for microblogging or Diaspora/Friendica instead of Facebook, helps to move things in the right direction. Its a good thing that people are saying "enough" to the big name social media platforms, but the reasons for which they do so and their actions afterward are important. Floatplane sounds like a step in the wrong direction, beneficial only to those who already have a presence with tons of paying subscribers. PeerTube on the other hand, is where we should be heading, capable of handling a wide variety of approaches thanks to its open, decentralized platform.
 
https://variety.com/2019/digital/ne...ng-creators-ryans-world-pewdiepie-1203447625/


The highest-earning YouTuber this year is once again Ryan Kaji, the 8-year-old star of the Ryan’s World channel who’s the main talent for a small media empire that pulled in an estimated $26 million.That’s according to the annual YouTube creator earning estimates from Forbes, which tracked gross income from a variety of sources from June 2018-June 2019.Ryan and his family’s 28-employee production company, Sunlight Entertainment, also topped Forbes’ list last year with $22 million in estimated earnings. The company’s gross income for the most recent 12-month period was roughly double that of PewDiePie, the No. 1 most-subscribed YouTuber and most-viewed creator on the platform for 2019. PewDiePie, who has announced that he will go on hiatus next year, is tied with fellow YouTube gamer Markiplier at No. 7 on Forbes’ list, both with an estimated take of $13 million.
 
Aside from "supporting the creator directly" you also get videos a week early.

You may sub dozens of different YT channels now, but you probably aren't supporting all of them directly via Patreon or whatever, are you? There's people out there who have like 5 different streaming services, but are only paying for one or two a month, and they rotate every so often. This could work the same way.

And if it doesn't work for you, then just don't use it. That's cool. But it's not a stupid idea just because it you don't like it.

i suspect people with millions of subs on YT don't actually get money directly from their viewers anyway. sure some small subset probably does but I bet most don't and most would not pay a dime to have to watch their content. this is dilemma of services like this. I subs to a lot of people on YT. they make money off my views but if I had to pay to watch their stuff, no matter how good it is, I would stop watching them and find someone else. Pretty sure the majority of others are like this. I dont think pewdiepie would be like he is if people had to pony up 5 bucks a month to watch him.

Now if Floatplane was $5 bucks a month and watch anyone you want...that would change things as its more like a streaming media service then.
 
i suspect people with millions of subs on YT don't actually get money directly from their viewers anyway. sure some small subset probably does but I bet most don't and most would not pay a dime to have to watch their content. this is dilemma of services like this. I subs to a lot of people on YT. they make money off my views but if I had to pay to watch their stuff, no matter how good it is, I would stop watching them and find someone else. Pretty sure the majority of others are like this. I dont think pewdiepie would be like he is if people had to pony up 5 bucks a month to watch him.

Now if Floatplane was $5 bucks a month and watch anyone you want...that would change things as its more like a streaming media service then.

Youtube has a per-channel paid sub option for some channels that views can use to directly support creators. There is also Patreon, something a lot of creators use. Obviously, it wouldn't work if it was the only way to watch content. This is why FP, and similar services, are not alternatives to Yotubue but options on top of it. FP, Patreon, etc are never going to be discoverability platforms because they're not designed for that. They're really there for people who want to directly support creators and take advantage of whatever benefits (if any) are offered on those services. For example, I back Digital Foundry on Patreon in order to get access to download higher quality versions of their videos.
 
Any particular reason you'd take peertube over Bitchute?

PeerTube is an open (source, spec), decentralized platform, more akin to a protocol like XMPP than a single video hosting site. This offers myriad benefits in how it functions, as opposed to something like BitChute which is a centralized site with singular management/monetization. While BitChute claims to be "peer to peer" thanks to using WebTorrent, there have been serious doubts cast upon this as many users and investigations have shown that it doesn't seem to be in use. After DailyDot published one investigation on the issue last month, I decided to check for myself and, as a test, watching a popular video with many concurrent viewers it didn't seem to show webtorrent style traffic nor did an attempt to connect to a magnet/torrent address pull down the video successfully ; doing the same on PeerTube however worked successfully and depending on node UI you can the status of how you're interacting with content be it directly downloading from the node exclusively or using webtorrent and how many peers you are uploading or downloading with.

There are other reasons related to content / ethos / policy that one may find BitChute less than desirable, but technical reasons alone I believe are enough to favor PeerTube over BitChute (and for that matter, other sites as well - DTube, Vimeo, etc..)
 
they make money off my views but if I had to pay to watch their stuff, no matter how good it is, I would stop watching them and find someone else.

Sure. But like I said, that's OK! If you want to throw a creator some money, you can subscribe to Patreon, or now Floatplane, or PayPal them some cash, or whatever. This doesn't really change that.

It just occurred to me--you can look at this as more like AMC's streaming service: watch The Walking Dead on Sunday like everyone else, or pay a few bucks a month and see it a couple days early. Or, you know, if you don't like TWD, just don't watch. Nothing wrong with any of those options!
 
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