Youtube is going to start putting advertisements on more videos, including those that cannot be monetized by the uploader.
YT was never in our best interest, but even less so now.
Here's the details:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55016142
Now let's talk about what this means for creators, and what the hell we're going to do about it.
1) It means that the non-premium youtube experience for viewers is going to keep getting worse.
2) It means that sharing things like family videos, PSAs, showcases/portfolios, or videos for your business through youtube is no longer viable. You don't get to pick the ads, you have no control.
Imagine you've embedded a YT video on your website, and YT decides to run a pre-roll ad for your competitor?
For a business big enough to have real servers, it doesn't matter. They'll just throw the video on their own servers and pay a CDN or whatever.
But for the small business down the road from you? The folks who can't afford to host their own videos, and can barely afford to host their own website? This is a mess of the highest order.
So what do we do?
1) NewPipe and Freetube and Youtube-dl have been recommended in various places in the replies to this already, and they are positive but insufficient. Don't pay google, don't watch google's ads.
2) If you're a creator, start moving your videos elsewhere. Where? That's hard to say. I've been using Peertube and Archive.org, but I'm a fucking nerd. Vimeo seems like a less horrible option than youtube (but also like a stopgap.)
3) If you're a consumer, and a creator who's videos you enjoy are moved to somewhere other than YT, pay them if you can. Reward them for not using youtube.
$5/quarter, or something like that. ($1/month doesn't work because paypal or whoever else will eat most of that. A slightly larger payment slightly less often means more of that money in the creator's pocket.)
We, as consumers, have to indicate a willingness to be flexible, to reward people who embrace their own platforms, to spread by word of mouth in place of the algorithm.
We, as creators, have to start experimenting. Youtube was never in our best interest. Letting someone else control your platform is never good.
(This ain't news. It's why you're all here.)
There is a middle ground. The indieweb folks call it POSSE. Publish it on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
The indieweb version of youtube is a video podcast with a website.
Publish an RSS feed with a link to the video on youtube, on vimeo, on archive.org, on peertube, and in a torrent or on Dat or IPFS or whatever if you're feeling brave.
Make sure the description of the YT video is just a summary and a link back to the canonical version. Always/only link to the canonical version.
Lest you think this a new bandwagon for me, here are my thoughts on this subject from the past:
Why you should release art, even if you think it's bad - http://ajroach42.com/diy-media/
We're bad at preserving the past, Youtube is bad for sharing media in 2017 - http://ajroach42.com/we-are-terrible-stewards-of-history/
How to Archive - http://ajroach42.com/document-your-art-how-to-archive/
Why to archive - http://ajroach42.com/document-your-art-archive-your-art/
This isn't a hypothetical, it happens - http://ajroach42.com/document-your-art-the-ace-of-cups/
Sometimes I read old stuff I wrote and I'm gobsmaked by really simple stuff that I completely forgot about (like the DIY Media Archive I mostly finished and never released because I changed jobs unexpectedly and moved twice in 6 months (1200 miles total) shortly after writing that.)
"The digital revolution enabled people to make their own media in ways never before possible, but we haven’t developed the technical or legal infrastructure required for long term archival and preservation. Laws like the DMCA criminalize breaking digital locks, even if the thing you would do after breaking the digital lock is completely legal.
Without active legal reform, much of our culture will remain inaccessible for years to come.
Put simply, we’re pretty shitty stewards of culture."
I was on a real one when I wrote this, lol.
And it was before I had Mastodon, even, so I reference reaching out to me on Twitter several times.
I'll reiterate some of the offers I made there, here.
If you want to make your own website, for free, message me. I'll help you get it online, I'll help you find places to host it. I'll help it live forever.
If you have media you produced and you need help archiving or documenting it, I'll probably help with that too (time permitting, but it probably will.)
If you want to help build a thing that will serve as a viable community alternative to youtube, and might outlive it, HMU.
@ajroach42 IMHO the problem is how to deal with the bandwidth of popular video; I'm guessing peertube can; youtube is massively distributed including having caches inside large ISPs; those things cost serious money to distribute like that. What an individually maintained platform doesn't have to worry about is spammers/abuse laden videos - that costs Google a lot to deal with.
@penguin42 bandwidth can be distributed via peers provided you're not concerned about copyright infringement.
@ajroach42 Right, that's why I say peertube is OK for that; but I'm not sure how to make it work for normal people.
@penguin42 peertube isn't the only option for distributed distribution, but I take your point.
@penguin42 @ajroach42 I sincerely hope that there must be a line of inconvenience, distrust and frustration that turns a “normal” person into a “tech-savvy” person.
That said, it is evident that distributed social structures tend to converge into centralised ones. For system designers, there is not much choice but to make distributed systems with centralised UX.
@ajroach42
As with so many other things, the real solution would be two things:
1. Support decentralized systems wherever possible (financial, using for your creations, submit code, help with triaging or community support, documentation, translation etc)
2. We need to massively simplify self hosting. Currently #Yunohost #Freedombone #Freedombox seem the best options, but all need to simplify more of the technical side for normal users. Helping out these projects would help greatly, too.
@Blort yunohost is easy enough for a non-technical user building with support, but it doesn't have a video sharing option.
@hairylarry @Blort What hardware is behind it? How well is that working?
I didn't realize yunohost had a peertube module, but I'll have to try it.
@ajroach42
I use #YunoHost myself. They do an amazing job considering the size of the team and the complexity of the task.
That said, setting up still requires learning about opening ports, updating to adjust for dynamic IP addresses, dealing with routers that don't do NAT loopback/hairpinning etc etc.
I just wish @PINE64 would get together with @yunohost and #openwrt and make a router that did most of this automatically.
Yunohost's diagnostic tools are a huge step in the right direction,tho
The install process on a pi 4 is simple enough that I was able to talk a non-technical user through it in about half an hour.
The tricky part for us was that a lot of what we were hoping to run didn't work on the hardware on which we were trying to run it, and a couple of the applications had no or wonky LDAP integration.
That's all manageable, I'm gearing up to contribute.
@yunohost
This is great news to hear that you're already working on simplifying installation! I know the Yunohost team works really hard on this complicated problem. I'd love to help out where I can. Sadly, my skills don't include coding (nor the time to learn it), but if you could use any help with marketing, English, graphic or UX design let me know (or just point me to an issue on the tracker).
@ajroach42 @PINE64
@Blort hello, your second point is very interesting. I would love to add Mail in a box https://mailinabox.email if you don't mind.
@ajroach42 I'm also offerring my services to help, I've got plenty of diskspace I'm not using!
it's been a while since I checked but I always appreciated that cinemassacre and loadingreadyrun have kept up their own personal websites, and that escapistmag publishes all their videos on their website first
@ajroach42 if your RSS feed has links to YouTube, that’s PESOS
@ajroach42
I wonder if there's a similar way of doing this but using #Peertube instead of a direct download of the video file from your server. I'm wondering about this in case you get a video that does get popular, so your server still has some assistance and doesn't just bottleneck or crash. I presume PeerTube has #RSS feeds?
It splits your viewership numbers up over multiple platforms. I think that's fine, but other folks might not. It splits your potential revenue streams up over multiple platforms (I think that's fine! Let people pay you directly if they like your stuff, advertising is a failed model. Other folks might not agree.)
It's more work, but I imagine there's a tool to automate it, or we could make one pretty easily.
I guess it's time for me to start releasing episodes of my silly computer show.