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!

  • rglullis@communick.news
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • Martín@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • rglullis@communick.news
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        4 months ago

        I really don’t see how you can get to this conclusion. We can only get to the $100k/month figure by using unreasonably optimistic numbers for revenue potential. A more realistic figure would be 0.5% of the MAU donating $2/month, which brings it down to $15k/month. That would be enough to support maybe 5 creators?

        The market is just to small to be relevant. I think we might even see more people setting peertube accounts as an alternative, but no sensible creator is interested in leaving Youtube.

        • Martín@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Even if so, your unreasonably pessimistic assumption is that this would be an exclusive source of revenue. Once content is created, cross-posting is free.