OG founder of Giant Bomb / Comicvine / Whiskey Media here. I was also at CNET during the acquisition of Metacritic and helped build large portions of Gamespot and TV.com. I'm 10-years removed from these properties so I feel OK talking about them.
The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have various traffic to ad scams and a creator economy built on the backs of a couple large platforms like Twitch, Reddit and YouTube. While the later option seems freeing for some creators, the reality is that soon those too will become hard to make a living from as those large platforms start slowly squeezing their creator class outside of a couple few who play nice. It's only slightly better than the journalism field because at least some of the personalities can shoot over to Patreon and work directly with their audience (albeit still tied to another large platforms).
I love this space, and it's where I grew up as a kid in the late 90s. I love community websites where I can engage with some experts. With video though, it's extremely hard to run independently. Hosting video for Giant Bomb in 2008-2012 meant home rolling our own streaming service, chat service and edge-based video platform. We had an all-star engineering team. We had one of the largest podcasts in the world and the hosting bills were killing us. Getting an audience with good content was easy. Monetizing it was very difficult. That's only continued over the years as I've seen various companies buy Giant Bomb (CBS, then RV, now Fandom) looking to pick up a premium brand that they could use to mask the giant volume of dead, but trafficked content they had in the background. The shill back then was was to sell Giant Bomb or GameSpot ads, but serve it on GameFaqs or Comic Vine (which had huge traffic at low cost). Various SEO tricks were pulled to hide traffic. For example, Comic Vine moved to a Gamespot subdomain to make this seem more legitimate. I anticipate similar dark patterns every time these sites are resold to cheaper owners. Likely, these brands will be used to promote a mountain of google-driven traffic in other properties.
The question I haven't been able to solve:
How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible? Right now good monetization strategies beget bad content. There's got to be a better way than cobbling together five platforms under a Patreon account, giving all of them 10-50% along the way.
> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization?
The problem I see is that there's just too much supply compared to demand, thus the price of content is literally zero. Even the monetization models that are (still) available are on borrowed time.
Ultimately there's no easy way to profit off something that is already plentiful and that there's a never-ending stream of passionate people happy to produce said content altruistically out there.
> there's a never-ending stream of passionate people happy to produce said content altruistically out there
This is the concept that is most frequently left out of otherwise thoughtful analyses on the topic at hand.
Although I would not label the motivation as purely altruistic, what many people fail to realize is that people who create art of any kind, and have honest motivations for doing so, are going to be doing it no matter the profit potential. Personally, I am a music composer [0] and I must make music. I am so unconcerned by profit that I have given all of my work away for free for more than a decade. I do all of my album releases on a podcast feed so that people never have to pay money, accept the terms of service of Spotify, or be raped by ad tech just to hear my work.
To me, payment is the fact that people heard my work. On that metric alone, SoundCloud has given me a lot more "payment" than any other online service out there, since it was so apparent when people did engage with my work, and those engagements were very meaningful to me on the whole.
I'm interested to know, if it isn't too personal, what kind of work do you do to bring in income?
There's a few passions that I have/have had, but I've found it hard to devote the time to any of them because I tend to feel very drained after doing work on things that I don't particularly care about.
I do media engineering related stuff, things related to media codecs, DSP, and p2p networking. The work I do during my day job is often somehow relevant to my music work.
For example, I used to work in VR, which enabled me to begin exploring ambisonics in my music.
> With video though, it's extremely hard to run independently.
I just left a company that's doing its level best to make this more affordable and achievable for small organizations, and I wish them the absolute best, but this was true when GB was new and it's still true now. Video is just too many bits across too many gatekeepers (like any of the big clouds). It's not that there isn't transit capacity, it's that everybody who anyone "trusts" wants to bill you per-gigabyte and if you want decent quality-of-experience you have to play ball with the CDNs, who then proceed to have a noose around your neck.
> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization?
I think, most strongly, it either has to not be video or consumers have to be willing to put up with early-2010s video jank. That's the crux of it: an audience trained on YouTube and even Twitch--despite their own jank, they're about as good as it gets for streaming and they're free--is much less likely to put up with something like a 2014 Giant Bomb media player (and 2014 Giant Bomb video quality; the cinematography was always great but 720p lasted for a long time in GB-land).
How far does PeerTube or something similar go towards solving this problem? You'll still need to seed the initial streams, but if you get a big spike of users, they'll seed the video amongst each other.
Peer to peer non-realtime video distribution has a pretty core fundamental flaw in that users are only seeding when they're watching. Users are likely to stop watching a video if it doesn't interest them, if something else comes up, or more importantly for this conversation, if there's a technical issue that prevents smooth playback.
When a user stops watching for whatever reason, they leave the swarm. If a client has been getting segments from a peer that is close to them, and that user completes watching the video and closes the browser window, that peer goes offline. The player client then needs to find another peer to pull segments from, and hope that the peer can deliver at the same speed. Because most of these player extensions are on top of HLS or DASH, you're not "buffering" in advance very far, so you're sensitive to this bump (this is tunable, and P2P clients generally buffer more segments than those delivered by CDNs exclusively). Whether you can't find a peer with the segments you need, or the peer can't deliver fast enough, or the algo stalls and doesn't fail back to CDN based delivery fast enough, you get a playback stall.
Playback stalls always add frustration, and they're often multiplicative. One stall, you assume there's an internet issue, and it'll be fine. Two stalls, you grow frustrated with the service. Three stalls, you close the window. And now there's another peer dropping out the swarm, causing more interruptions in playback for other users.
IMO, as the tech stands today, P2P video delivery doesn't work super well unless you're setting up a P2P CDN, or have some other mechanism that allows for a peer to more gracefully exit a swarm to avoid stalls and signal to clients to shift before an abrupt exit.
What are your thoughts on Popcorn time? That was quite successful even among non-technical people. Is the difference people were keeping their torrent client (ie PopcornTime) open all the time, providing seeds, which doesn't happen with a webpage that you just close? Is the solution a 'RSS reader', but for P2P videos?
You've hit the nail on the head. A set-top box that would keep a torrent active through normal seeding configurations out of band of the client worked wonders, because your ability to participate in the CDN wasn't determined by code you loaded in the player. You also have that it was targeting longer form content (>10min), so even if that was being shipped through these web based P2P clients, a person committed to a TV series or a movie would suffer through slightly more buffer jank.
Even then though, your average content viewer has different standards. We're opting for 1080p/4K content over the much more common smaller feeds. Netflix loads the first few segments of even the most esoteric content not in your local ISP cache in 100's of milliseconds, users flit from YouTube video to YouTube video randomly, and scroll TikTok like we used to scroll through the Twitter firehose back in the hey-day of the PopcornTime. More content is consumed on mobile devices than set-top boxes, which brings power and data constraints, both from metered data and with networks that are both highly latency variable and not tuned for upstream bandwidth, that make participation in a P2P swarm not ideal.
While content protection is certainly a core tenant of why content is centralized, if the big players at YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, et al, haven't figured out a way to shirk their highest cost center in lieu of putting it on the backs of someone else even cheaper than ISPs without causing a substandard consumer experience with P2P, then you can be darn sure that this is a tough nut to crack.
From a content and branding perspective, I wouldn't touch PeerTube with a thirty-foot pole. It is fundamentally untenable unless you want people able to take screenshots of your content being featured next to literal-not-figurative Nazi shit. Yes, that's the point of federation, and that the watcher is the one who has those settings to put them next to one another. No, it's not your fault. Yes, it looks awful and it's your responsibility. No, nobody cares about the explanation and if you are in a place where you must explain "well, actually, it's the viewer's fault that my thoughtful video is next to some guy hanging swastikas in his bonus room," you have already and irrevocably lost. (This can, I want to note, happen in a more diminished form on other platforms--there's nothing stopping somebody's YouTube recommendations from being a disaster area. But people know what YouTube is. They know YouTube picks the hits. PeerTube isn't that, and having to explain at all is what would sink it.)
Also, even if you ignore the "we're camping next to fascists" vibe of the whole thing, PeerTube quality-of-experience management is deeply poor besides. If you're using some small DIY CDN, you have predictably bad performance, instead of suddenly bad performance, and if you're using a big CDN, you have working traffic steering.
You can self-host and un-federate PeerTube, such that the user isn't even aware they're on a PeerTube instance.
If I had a website where I'd host my videos as an alternative to YouTube, I'd probably go with PeerTube and have people support me by seeding videos for me.
Ehh. You totally can, but at that point you're still stuck with a pretty bad model of shipping video in the first place, namely relying on having peers and dealing with PeerTube's bad failure modes when peers leave the swarm. I am not a fan--the sibling comment about those failure modes tracks with my own experiences, and I think it's scary enough to avoid. If the choice is "mediocre to okay perf based on geography, consistently" or "mediocre to okay perf, mostly based on geography, with very bad performance for some users in ways that cannot be reliably predicted", it would be pretty bad to recommend the latter for most use cases.
I tend to think that, since you're already foregoing discoverability by not federating with other PeerTube instances, you might as well also just build your bootleg CDN off of Hetzner nodes or whatever and have points of presence in places you care about. It's not that expensive and it's likely to be more consistent in perf. (You could say "well, run PeerTube and register your pops as peers", but other peers falling out of the swarm is the problem, not your own.)
I just don't really see a point to doing so as a small/individual creator or as a brand/channel.
That sounds a bit far fetched. If that was a problem, it would also be a problem with the dozens of Youtube frontends, that are much larger than any Peertube frontend.
The other problem is that doing high quality video content is hard - you can do a one-man channel but it will NEVER be as "flashy" as channels that have dedicated editors, etc. And once you have a group, you have deadlines and income requirements you have to meet.
I think the hard, honest answer is getting people to pay for things. Netflix, Prime Video, etc. have leap-frogged TV in terms of audience enjoyment by optimising for being a good product that people will pay for. The hard thing is getting people to recognise the options in front of them: pay for the thing you enjoy, or have it slowly turn to shit as it desperately morphs to optimise for ad money.
Patreon is in a similar category to "donation" links on Twitch/YouTube. It's all phrased as this weird "support us!" thing, instead of "pay for the damn videos you've enjoyed for the past year", which might be necessary right now just to get people to sign up, but I don't think it's sustainable or healthy. Journalists, streamers and video creators shouldn't need to pretend they're busking on the street, asking for donations and support. They're working a damn job, pay them.
> The hard thing is getting people to recognise the options in front of them: pay for the thing you enjoy, or have it slowly turn to shit as it desperately morphs to optimise for ad money.
With Netflix dipping into ad supported type things I'm not even sure "pay or watch it turn to shit" is the case. I know right now the ads are going to be on a new, even cheaper tier, but I am not convinced it will stay that way. Increasingly I feel like over time it will all just turn to shit eventually anyway.
Netflix has gone completely down the shitter in the last decade.
Ruined the UI, got rid of all the good content and replaced it with C-tier series that get canceled before concluding anyway. Oh, and have basically doubled prices. I canceled a year ago and haven’t missed it in the slightest - and I had it back when it was still dvds by mail.
Netflix has consistently made the cut for me to keep it. I'm happy as long as my household uses it 6-8 hours each month. Same goes for Hulu and HBO Max.
Other streamers I find myself starting and stopping as I find stuff to watch. For example, I've started and stopped Disney twice. The first to watch Mandelorian and the second to watch Get Back. It's one reason I really like subscribing through Apple. Subscribe-unsubscribe is a single click away.
I'm the same as far as Netflix, they have enough "good enough" shows for me to keep them around. I figure if I average ~2-3 hours a week it is still worth it.
Yes some of their new shows are... not to my liking (hey, maybe somebody out there really loves Warrior Nun but I stopped after a few episodes) but several are (Shadow and Bone, Witcher, Umbrella Academy, Ozarks, Cobra Kai, Lupin) I'm looking forward to future seasons, or finishing the series (in the case of Ozarks).
HBO Max might fall into the season-subscription category for me, where I take it 3-6 months a year. And maybe Disney+ too except I've got a large backlog there.
Anyway, the behavior change for me is to watch a show sooner rather than later. I was working my way through Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Hulu and reached season 6, taking a break for a few weeks, to return and discover the remained of the episodes are tied to a live TV subscription. Not sure if some license deal expired in time I took a break after season 5, or if it was always like that (however, I don't think so).
> instead of "pay for the damn videos you've enjoyed for the past year", which might be necessary right now
Maybe start showing customers estimated cost of what they got for free ? Maybe a sticky header with "You watched 84 hours worth $173" next to a "Donate now" button ?
I 1000% agree with the idea of having to pay for what I consume. Not many agree with me.
Sorry if that old joke is now annoying! On a serious note, thanks for all your work on Giant Bomb back in the day. That site meant a lot to me for a long time.
Hey there Dave! It's Chris, better known as ZombiePie on Giant Bomb. I made this account to drop this comment and have no idea if I will use it any further and I have no idea if you will see this. I definitely appreciate everything you shared here and wish you nothing but the best in where you are in your life. There are just a few things I'd like to add. The precedent the Whiskey Media era made of what a video game website could do with as little interruption to the user experience set itself apart at the start, but it also was largely unsustainable as you outline here. I'm not sure how many upstart video game networks today will be able to keep the lights on for full-time staff with wages and benefits without the two or three known ways to keep a website running and profitable. There are no Shelby's that are willing to funnel millions into a digital risk like Whiskey Media in the hopes of selling everything for a profit.
Likewise, and I understand it because I was there, but the nostalgia for the "old way of things" on the internet sometimes ignore the constant failures. WM hit it out of the park with Tested, Comic Vine, and Giant Bomb, but it also had Boompa and Political Base. Also, constantly increasing the size of the net of a website network without refining it and ensuring the starting portfolio is profitable was always a constant frustration. You said it best during the 10-year anniversary podcast when you listed the many times when Giant Bomb should have died, but the new monetization systems followed by new monetization systems left behind other key features that needed refinement and updates. Also, the new systems posed issues and didn't draw nearly enough money.
All that aside, the reality is that just having a single domain your one stop shop for everything, like what Giant Bomb and Comic Vine tried to be just is not how people consume media on the internet these days. Web 2.0 also had its glory days and I certainly look back at it with a big smile on my face, but you look at things on YouTube and Twitch and you cannot help but thing media online is just changing. That's the nature of the beast.
All that aside, I wish you and your family nothing the best and I want to thank you for the many memories and for listening to my nasally voice during those call-in segments many years ago.
The biggest problem is this all-consuming search for a bigger profit. It's absolutely possible to make a decent living off of content-creation, and YT or Twitch could be profitable businesses by just supporting that. However, they have probably reached their maximum audience, and so their profit would stop increasing if they just did that, and no growth, even for a profitable business, means desperate investors in this crazy economy we live in.
I don't know how reasonable it is to make a decent living off of YT/Twitch without an added patreon or some other revenue stream. Creators I'm a fan of constantly complain about being demonetized and unlisted, and needing to wrangle the algorithm.
Ad impressions pay next to nothing on YouTube, but it does add up to something nontrivial if your videos get millions of views. That's tough to maintain, admittedly. Most creators I'm aware of at least have sponsors for all or most of their videos, many sell merchandise, but there are definitely exceptions in any case.
Get big enough -- like Linus Media Group, for example -- and companies will tear down your door to sponsor your videos. I do wonder how much a smaller (say, 50k subscriber) channel gets from shilling for Hello Fresh. I just can't imagine many viewers of Joe's Long-Form Gaming Essay Channel are looking for a meal delivery service or a men's grooming accessory.
I meant that it used to be possible to just use YT/Twitch, but as those have been nickle-and-diming creators and modifying their algorithms to control what content is served, it has become harder and harder.
Eh. It's inevitable that Google would nickel-and-dime creators because YouTube is extremely expensive and lost money for many years; I'm not even sure it's profitable now. Something had to give. I suspect most YouTubers (and Twitch streamers) who've been smart about business worry less about losing money from ads and more about algorithm-driven censors age-gating their content.
> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible? Right now good monetization strategies beget bad content.
I don't think such a thing is possible in present society. As you kind of get to, there are two audiences: The people for whom your content is useful, and the people for whom your platform can make money. Appeasing the latter will invariably ruin your content, but their financial resources dwarf the former's, and they're more than happy to use those resources, since the result is that they end up with more.
You would need to create an ecosystem that rewards public good more than private capital. To do that, you would have to start with an enormous amount of capital, and be willing to essentially give it away.
In theory, that's what government is for. In practice... not so much.
(edit: my cat submitted this post half-finished. I've completed it now.)
> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible?
Unfortunately I don't think this is possible. As soon as you bring in ads you open the door to the AdTech bullshit parade. The incentive goes from making good content to clickbait because that drives hits. Subscriptions can pay hosting bills but it's not going to let anyone get paid a meaningful amount of money for co tributing let alone write full time for a site.
I think the best content is going to continue to be entirely community run Wikis. Stuff like NIWA. They aren't going to replace journalism but then game journalism has been barely journalism for decades. Most has just been/is warmed over press releases or reporting on someone else's reporting.
> I think the best content is going to continue to be entirely community run Wikis.
The challenge here is that Fandom own a near monopoly on videogame wikis. Competing with them is exceptionally difficult.
It's something myself and a few other folks have done when we forked the Path of Exile wiki from Fandom to poewiki.net, we've been officially recognised by the game creators, have acquired hundreds of thousands of legitimate backlinks and yet Google still prefer to serve Fandom pages instead of ours.
> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible? Right now good monetization strategies beget bad content. There's got to be a better way than cobbling together five platforms under a Patreon account, giving all of them 10-50% along the way.
From the outside, it seems like a lot of people bring their audiences to those platforms and make an okay living at it — not becoming millionaires, but making a "grown up living" — and that they can be relatively audience-driven as opposed to advertiser driven, or following the dictates of a distant corporate directive. That's what it seems like. Is that hopelessly naive of me to believe?
This is hinted at by dbingham's comment elsewhere, but I believe many fan communities and information stores that host user-generated content should be run as non-profits. One of my favorite YouTube channels is PanTheOrganizer, who is effectively how I learned to detail and care for my own vehicles. Far and away the best channel in that particular niche, but something that stands out about it he is extremely professional, with well-produced content, but he doesn't support himself with the YouTube channel. Dude lives in a McMansion and drives a Porsche, but it's entirely from a normal day job, and filming videos about car detailing is just him filming a hobby he's been passionate about for decades and would be doing anyway even if YouTube didn't exist.
Asking how to monetize something like GameFAQs or Wikia feels like how do you monetize friends sharing tips and talking about common passions with each other? Why does that need to be monetized? Some dude figures out left-right-B-A-B-B and posts it to a message board and doesn't need to be paid for it.
I guess another example is my favorite podcast, Iron Culture. Both the podcast and the YouTube channel don't accept sponsorships and lose money, but the hosts are both coaches, one is a scientist, one runs a small supplement company and hosts a History channel YouTube show, and they make their money from that. Recording themselves talking about their research and interests that they'd be talking about with each other anyway doesn't need to be its own full-time job.
Granted, I don't know what this means for real journalism that involves running beats, traveling, long-form investigations, all of which are definitely full-time jobs and not something you just want people doing as a hobby they record themselves during. But a lot of "good content" is not journalism. It's just people recording their thoughts and findings while doing a hobby they love in a way that they would have done for free in the past while still having a regular job, but for whatever reason, that's no longer good enough.
Because it costs money. Some things, e.g. contributing to the Wikia, don't cost money, they just cost time. You can't pay for a website with time, though, you need to pay a host.
I think that's valid. I guess then what I'd look to create is something akin to Stripe Atlas + a content delivery platform for non-profit communities. I think it's a lot easier to just say "make it non-profit" without understanding how hard doing something like that might be for your average content creator.
Maybe the average content creator isn't actually making something that is financially sustainable. Just because a lot of effort went into something doesn't mean someone else owes them for the act of creation. Someone else has to value the created content. Even then that value needs to be somewhere north of a dollar because it's not practical to conduct transactions less than that. Before anyone screams "crypto" the transaction fees for cryptocurrencies are ludicrous and even in the best case there's not really a way to pay someone less than a dollar.
Even though magazines are largely dead/dying that subscription model seems like the only workable one. You get a bunch of content for a relatively low yearly price. Even then no individual creator is going to get independently wealthy.
Seems like the folks over at Dropout.tv are doing it right now. They have their own Netflix-like subscription model with their own content and no ads. They put out older videos onto free streaming platforms like YouTube to attract people to come subscribe for the things going on now. They have huge production value, tons of different content, hours long videos, etc. I have no idea what tech they use on the back end, but maybe a bunch of folks in the gaming space could bundle themselves under a brand and take that approach.
Thank you for your insight, Mr. Snider. I really enjoyed your work on-camera at Giant Bomb even before I knew how much you did behind the scenes. I miss your plane-flying video work with other staff.
Great question, this is essentially trying to solve the trilemma of creators: building reach by cracking algos, retaining relavence in ever changing content formats and monetization (ads or otherwise)
Drawing an analogy from movies where MCU gets made for theatre format and smaller independent movie for OTT format, creators would also need to diverge in their engagement and monetization paths.
Someone like Joe Rogan may build large audience in big platform to build different monetization model whereas a creator creating content for D&D enthusiasts would depend on building strong community driven monetization model.
My bet is that most of the creators would fall in the latter category who are trying to force fit their content to be relevant on larger platforms which is sub-optimal. As long as they get a chance to bring audience out of the bigger platforms to engage their audience in a format of their liking & create an experience for them, they stand a better chance of monetization.
That is the bet I have taken in my start-up. The idea is to create an ecosystem of tools that help content creators engage with their smaller set of audience who are willing to pay for the content. Keep the whole experience as seamless as possible to make the experience exceptional.
This still does not solve for the discoverability problem for which they have to still rely on larger platforms. The idea is to give as many tools as possible to help creators once they have identified audience who are willing to pay the creator and give them a better fighting chance.
>> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible? Right now good monetization strategies beget bad content. There's got to be a better way than cobbling together five platforms under a Patreon account, giving all of them 10-50% along the way.
I'll tell you how: pay-per-view content
But don't do it by individual silos. I want a service where I pay monthly, say, $50, and I can go to ANY content to get what I need: Bloomberg, WSJ, wikipedia, Medium, CommonSenseMedia, Gamespot, whatever. Stop forcing me to view these sites daily to maximize my return (ie. newspapers). I want ala cart that pulls from a common fund. I don't want to sign up for 20 different sites with recurring fees that I have to remember to cancel when I don't use it anymore. Anyone can put what they want in ($5, $50, $100) and the premium content pulls from that. Per article. Per visit. Per 5 requests, whatever.
> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible? Right now good monetization strategies beget bad content. There's got to be a better way than cobbling together five platforms under a Patreon account, giving all of them 10-50% along the way.
I wish there was a frictionless as possible way to pay content creators per consumption of their content. For example content creators could set a price in a podcast app per episode or maybe a bulk deal if I bought a "season". Don't make me think too much about paying and I'll gladly consume.
I am not a huge fan of signing up for a Pateron and setting up how to ingest the content. I don't mind paying to read an article but I don't want a huge yearly subscription. Give me the chance to pay you right then and there and my poor impulse control will do the rest.
Hi, Dave. I just wanted to say thanks for building Whiskey Media and carrying forward some of that old Internet spirit. I was a big Giant Bomb and Tested fan when I was younger, and the platform you guys built was part of what inspired me to become a programmer. It’s sad to hear that the bandwidth economics were so unfavorable given everything that you did right, from my perspective.
I think subscription-based instead of ad-based is the only way to monetize good content. It doesn't scale nearly as big (which is why companies like Meta will never go for it) and won't make any unicorns, but that's OK. An ad-based model will eventually pollute the platform no matter what esp as companies try to extract as much revenue as possible from it.
I wish instant, frictionless micropayments was a thing, would love tip blogs, journalists, and other content creators directly without entering credit card info and risking my finances.
Brave Browser's BAT infrastructure is good for this; even if you don't want to manually tip people, you can set up auto-contribute amounts that deduct from the amount of BAT you earn from seeing ads monthly.
I think the habit of doing so (manually or automatically) sadly isn't there yet, because most conversations I see about Brave/BAT are "how much money can this make ME by earning BAT."
Subscriptions is what you see all the top tier journalistic sources pivoting towards as hard as they can. But to the sites who based their business on casual users coming in via SEO/Social it will never work. Arguably that's a good thing because it will end the bane of clickbait. But the cycle of clicking news links off of reddit or facebook is already locked in to too many consumers minds. The daily paper newspaper consumption seems ancient to young consumers. Good journalists need to be able to reach all the audiences immersed in social media, but also get them to form a habit of visiting their site directly regularly. Newsletters is a big help, but not a magic solution. Paywalls are popping up everywhere, but it's a real speedbump to acquisition.
> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead?
The answer that every other entertainment vertical/industry figured out 100+ years ago (thousands?) -- merchandise sales.
Whiskey Media tried that though. for a good long while there in the late 00s/early 10s I bought more or less every shirt they put out, in addition to my subscription, because I loved the content they were producing and wanted to support them any way I could. it still wasn't enough though
The problem is that most Youtuber/Patreon/Twitch creators are extremely lazy when it comes to merchandise and just clicks a couple of buttons to spin up some template logo t-shirts on BigCartel or someplace.
Looking at merch from the music world, I believe there's a market for would pay for merch that's thoughtful and creative like a mini-book, custom playing cards or posters that do a deep dive on something that streamer is interested in.
> Looking at merch from the music world, I believe there's a market for would pay for merch that's thoughtful and creative like a mini-book, custom playing cards or posters that do a deep dive on something that streamer is interested in.
Maybe so, but all of that stuff is expensive to produce and create, music has big publishing companies that build this stuff.
> We had one of the largest podcasts in the world and the hosting bills were killing us
Was this true even after you launched the payed GB subscriptions? It felt like you guys were the first ones to do something like that and I payed for it and would have payed more at the time, especially if I knew it would keep whiskey independent.
It seems like now other similar people like nextlander and action button are having success doing the same thing with Patreon. That seems like the solution to the problem you describe to me, just let me pay directly for the things I watch, it seems like there is an audience there who is willing to pay for quality.
You must have a strong brand, a strong team of content creators who probably are co owners rather than employees. That is the only way. It cannot function as a a regular business.
I don't see too much wrong with Patreon. I support a variety of things I enjoy using it, and the folks who I support get to do what they love while giving me content I love. Maybe we need some Patreon competition? I don't know honestly.
Patreon's fine and lots of people make a living with it, but it can be a tough sell. The rewards rarely make it worth it (sorry, I get no use out of the Drawfee discord), so you have to be willing to part with $5-10 a month for something you'd otherwise be getting free. That's an unjustifiable expense for anyone who doesn't have money to spare.
Yeah, but I'd argue those who don't have money to spare aren't going to have it for whatever alternative we propose either.
Right now I'm paying $50 a month (highest tier) for a group of writers / comedians I really love, and I don't see an alternative to Patreon that would allow me to support them at that level. I don't get anything extra out of it beyond knowing they can support themselves.
I think there are probably those with money to spare, but it's probably like the prisoner's dilemma and they don't want to be the one's contributing if others can get it for free.
Depends on your definition of free. Most of the Patreons I support have a minimum threshold to get their stuff. For example I support someone which makes software available only through Patreon. It is not available for free outside of that. So it's basically like I'm paying for software but through Patreon as their vendor instead of Stripe or PayPal.
P2P video is extremely difficult to do well. Video is sensitive to transfer bitrate, data order, and timing. None of these are things P2P is really good at providing. While P2P can ask for data ordering the actual availability of that order is dependent on the participants in the swarm.
Even then as a host you need to provide seeds for all your videos as a P2P swarm will only ever help with currently popular videos. So in actuality P2P ends up with similar hosting costs to traditional video hosting only providing a bandwidth savings on viral content everyone watches simultaneously.
If I recall correctly, the amount of streams you could support with a cheap VPS + Cloudflare + similar things is pretty impressive.
The reality is most people don't need to be able to handle millions of simultaneous views, and so a basic setup with "p2p on top" might work exceedingly well.
Modern HLS/DASH streaming off a VPS/CDN combination is extremely fast because it's just HTTP as far as the servers are concerned. If you've got a fast HTTP serving system you can serve tons of clients without many problems. Storage however is still an issue. You need enough storage for your content at the distribution edges.
My point is the P2P on top is very difficult to actually build and have work well. Like HTTP serving it doesn't obviate storage needs. You need to seed all of the content you distribute via P2P.
But what's the cost for storage? If nobody is watching your "back catalog" you can serve them off your server (maybe not a VPS, maybe a dedi, but you can get 1 Gb/s and 2 TB of disk for like 130 euro: https://hostslick.com/dedicated.php )
Then you're just down to what the CDN cost is for the "active" video, maybe the last two?
Hard to take credit for that as the "one", but I did work on the site as a community manager near its launch. The idea (which wasn't mine) was that in a world where digital downloads existed, there would be no one store that would have them all in one place. People were likely going to need to go to multiple places to get their music, and mp3.com would act as a registry for that content, pointing you in the right direction. If you didn't see what was coming it wasn't a terrible idea.
What we didn't know then in 2003-2004, was that Apple ended up eating the entire industry (at the time) and everyone just bought an iPod and called it a day. MP3.com rightly fell apart shortly after.
Weirdly enough, that assumed model and need now exists now that content has fractured again, this time with video. Which service is streaming that movie I want to watch? We're getting to the point where we need those registries as much as we need "caniuse" for browser comparability.
Should that directory concept have been attempted on a very important domain like mp3.com, itself having fallen apart earlier in the Internet bust? Probably not, but hindsight is easy looking back. Back then domains were more important.
Anyways, just answering to some trivia for you. I didn't have much to do with that site's origins.
Ha, interesting - Thanks for taking the time to share, the original site was very special to me when growing up. I heard that the rights to all of that original music got transferred to some BigCorp that had a lot of involvement with elevator music. Lots of history lost there, which was a catastrophe if you ask me. The original I'm talking about was from 2000-2001 or so. Can't believe it's been 20 years.
Personally, my "holy grail" is a website that lets AUTHORS monetize their product using the site's ad network. If I upload a video, I shouldn't HAVE to pick the ads that run as pre, mid, or post-roll, but I should be ABLE to. I should be able to make my own deals, on the platform, with advertisers participating in that network. Essentially, the site should act as a facilitator between advertisers and content creators, rather than the programming scheduler. For providing this facilitation, the site should be entitled to a small percentage of whatever deals are struck.
Once the network is established as a good place for creators to be able to actually make money, you attract the good creators. They aren't getting pennies on an ad (or, if they are, that's what they were happy with; we all start somewhere/traffic volume is important); they're getting the full ad buy minus some percentage for the site (more like 10% -20%, less like 50%-90%).
As the site, acting as a publisher, you get to dictate the ad network, and set boundaries for keeping things profitable (neo-hayes-code "cost of doing business" gatekeeping). As content creators, they get freedom of association and deal-making (which includes refusing to serve ads that they disagree with).
Then, when you have a solid network of solid content, you layer in a subscription model which could allow you to sensibly bundle content. While each content creator could set their own subscription tiers (including free ones, for the purposes of advertising their own content or giving things away for free because they are such absolute champions), they would be able to opt-in certain tiers to be "bundled", which would allow users to pick and choose content creators that they want their subscription bundles to apply to.
This is where you get to the first rumblings of reasonable payment for journalism work. Because, as far as I know, it's almost impossible to get people to pay for journalism, no matter how good it is. But if you can add it in to a bundle, while still letting people choose their outlets/sources, you can subsidize the journalism with the media profit (like how we do it on TV).
Of course, to facilitate that, the site would need some robust utilities for writing new articles, such that it might be indistinguishable from a WYSIWYG website creator, but that's not something that's insurmountable. Especially if the site is profitable.
Anyway, that's my swing. I've been working on it, myself, but it's not like I ever intended to run a social media app. I certainly don't have the funds to run it, myself, and it's an untested model so investment would be very surprising. So just POC stuff and collecting feedback from content creators. It all seems very promising, but I still haven't answered the question of 'will it make money?'
Why do you feel that the site's cut could be as low as 10%? It's very expensive to host and serve high-quality video, and you've not described anything that would lower the site's costs relative to something like YouTube (which I don't believe is stunningly profitable).
First of all, it's the appropriate price for the service provided. Full stop. Publishers don't create anything; they facilitate. Facilitation is not WORTH the lion's share, even if publishing isn't possible without the lion's share. But that takes us to the second point, which is that the research I've done shows working models of the hosting service operating with as little as 2%, given appropriate volume, technology (bleeding edge video codecs and image compression; that's your expense so it gets the research), and scope (youtube serves the globe; targeting is the startup's best friend). But there is also another option of content creators hosting their own content and providing it to the site via a stream api that can handle content dynamically (for working with CDNs, and whatnot). This would, incidentally, prevent content creators from tying up all of their online value in a single platform that can unilaterally shut them down (even if it is a burden; at least it's an option).
But I think the answer you're looking for is that the publisher gets to make money as a facilitator, rather than a program scheduler. The model doesn't make users the customers, it makes content creators AND advertisers (together; doesn't work without both) the customers. If advertisers want to work with a content creator on your network, and they want that content viewed with your network, then they will have to make a deal to join the network. That's passive revenue for the site, on top of the percentage of the ad buys. Essentially, you put the "no free rides" subscription model on the advertisers, and then let content creators decide who gets free rides for THEIR subscription models.
On top of that, there's a whole other revenue stream in developing "networks" and selling "social" functionality to advertisers and content creators that get value out of interactivity (ex: monetizing the inclusion of advertisers in "best value" ad-buy deals that target a "content creator type" like "these ads go well if you provide cooking content") . And we haven't even talked about "whales" and monetizing the customer base with twitch-like engagement mechanisms. I cringe at the thought of some of it, but if the creators can make money off of it, more power to them! And a little percentage of their windfall to the site! ;)
Of course, there's always a new way to make a buck, and there's some very deep pockets in advertising, so I don't fear for the innovation that could go on, in a site run as described.
With webtorrent that is feasible, but requiring a client download would just ensure you weren't the largest anymore and probably infect your users with spyware when they downloaded a bad client.
> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible? Right now good monetization strategies beget bad content. There's got to be a better way than cobbling together five platforms under a Patreon account, giving all of them 10-50% along the way.
HN skews critical but NFT and web3 poses a possible path to improvement for certain types of content creation.
An artist or content creator can deploy their own smart contract, have full control over what media it points to, and be paid directly through it. Marketplaces like Foundation[1] act as wrappers on top of this content, and it is in their best interest to keep the fees low and website free of ad-spam and algorithmic nonsense to retain top talent on their platform that drives revenue.
Isnt this why subsets of creators are excited by web3/nft sales? Theres huge backlash from their communities but most community members don’t directly pay the creators. I suppose this only solves the Patreon piece though - distribution of content takes highly skilled labor (engineers) and capex (server infra). Had you ever tried using something like AWS MediaLive?
NFT is bullshit and doesn't address any of the problems that surround content creation. Creators who push NFTs do so either because they are sponsored in the background (paid a lump sum in fiat to engage with NFTs) or have direct involvement in the market and would like to benefit from the (temporary) speculation bubble. That bubble has now died and so will NFTs.
The bubble dying is the perfect opportunity to re-examine the technology and determine whether it is a suitable means of freeing artists and creators from the problematic revenue models of major tech platforms. I pointed to the artist
omentejovem in another comment[1].
Let's say my bread and butter is making video essays. What do NFTs bring to the table that would make it so I don't have to rely on the revenue model of a major tech platform? Somebody has to host and serve my videos, and it's probably going to be a major tech platform. I could make an NFT that points to my video once it's hosted, I suppose, but I'm not sure that's a sustainable revenue stream ... I'm still going to want Patreon, merchandize, and video sponsorships.
Hypothetically: if an audience is paying for your digital content or paying to support you on Patreon, they could instead pay for your content through crypto - if they are so willing and have it at their disposal. Aside from the lower fees you’d also be your own payment processor - more resistant to censorship, less platform lock-in, ability to self-host your content.
Same applies to selling digital assets on Bandcamp or running a Kickstarter campaign.
If your audience is unwilling to pay for your content or support you financially, and unwilling to pay a platform fee like with Netflix, then you might be stuck with monetizing through ads.
In a Bandcamp-like platform, the NFT would be a proof of purchase. When a user purchases your digital NFT album, they can at any point sign a message to get a link to the MP3 or FLAC files.
In a Patreon-like and Kickstarter-like platform the NFT might be used just the same, as a proof of purchase to access special content. Or, it could be used as a token or badge of appreciation, such as for being the first patron or a 1-year-continuous patron. The same way GitHub profiles show achievements and who the user is sponsoring.
In digital art platforms NFT is as it is already being used: certification and scarcity.
There’s other applications like streaming payments with vesting schedule:
Im discussing in good faith here (and used to watch Giant Bomb religiously back in high school, and remember how the Gamespot \ Giant Bomb schism occurred). There are many creators who use NFTs perfectly well to raise money for their work (like the guy that creates the excellent Blender donut tutorials), and use simple fixed prices to monetize (not auctions, so speculation has nothing to do with it). Please dont be rude.
True but I wanted to preempt the point that NFTs are independent of payment platforms & their censorship. Which is true, but so is "boring" crypto without NFTs.
The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have various traffic to ad scams and a creator economy built on the backs of a couple large platforms like Twitch, Reddit and YouTube. While the later option seems freeing for some creators, the reality is that soon those too will become hard to make a living from as those large platforms start slowly squeezing their creator class outside of a couple few who play nice. It's only slightly better than the journalism field because at least some of the personalities can shoot over to Patreon and work directly with their audience (albeit still tied to another large platforms).
I love this space, and it's where I grew up as a kid in the late 90s. I love community websites where I can engage with some experts. With video though, it's extremely hard to run independently. Hosting video for Giant Bomb in 2008-2012 meant home rolling our own streaming service, chat service and edge-based video platform. We had an all-star engineering team. We had one of the largest podcasts in the world and the hosting bills were killing us. Getting an audience with good content was easy. Monetizing it was very difficult. That's only continued over the years as I've seen various companies buy Giant Bomb (CBS, then RV, now Fandom) looking to pick up a premium brand that they could use to mask the giant volume of dead, but trafficked content they had in the background. The shill back then was was to sell Giant Bomb or GameSpot ads, but serve it on GameFaqs or Comic Vine (which had huge traffic at low cost). Various SEO tricks were pulled to hide traffic. For example, Comic Vine moved to a Gamespot subdomain to make this seem more legitimate. I anticipate similar dark patterns every time these sites are resold to cheaper owners. Likely, these brands will be used to promote a mountain of google-driven traffic in other properties.
The question I haven't been able to solve:
How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible? Right now good monetization strategies beget bad content. There's got to be a better way than cobbling together five platforms under a Patreon account, giving all of them 10-50% along the way.