this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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PeerTube doesn't have a monetization story aside from sponsorships which means that it won't be a real competitor from YouTube. There are lots of "for fun" YouTube channels but what enables so many people to publish so many videos is the fact that they can profit off of them. PeerTube is great, I follow a handful of channels, but it won't be a YouTube competitor until people can actually run a business on it.
That's such a double-edge sword.
I have a channel with tens of thousands of followers and nearly 200, long-form content in the educational/healthcare space.
I was creating videos way before I was "allowed" to monetize, and even after, I was not making them so I could profit. No sponsored content. No begging for likes. No paid products. Not even affiliate links.
If my motivation was driven by profit, then the quality of the videos would suffer. And when I see channels that really push hard to monetize, it's off-putting as a viewer, and I'm less interested in what they have to say - even if it might benefit me.
On the flip-side, I know some content creators have to spend a lot of money to create certain content, so they should be able to recoup that somehow.
I personally prefer a donation model, since it keeps things unbiased, with the creator having far more freedom, and it doesn't disrespect users. Even having a shop selling channel merch is a more ethical way to monetize, provided that the channel doesn't become one big ads for the merch store.
Good channels could absolutely make enough through donations to turn their channel into a full-time, paying job. And a donation model would also help to cull channels that create garbage content, AI generated content, and clickbait crap.
Not everyone wants to monetize. And the sooner everyone moves to a Peertube instance, the more in video sponsorship ads are going to be relevant and rewarding.
The best you tube videos don't make any money either.
Maybe, but some of my favourite channels do YouTube as a full-time job. Maybe they would still post part-time if they couldn't profit off of but the videos would almost certainly be less-frequent and be made with tighter budgets.
But even then I find it hard to believe. I subscribe to a bunch of seemingly for-fun channels but most of my favourites have by this point become full-time video creators. GCP Grey, Captain Disillusion, Technology Connections, Tom Scott, Veritasium...
It is true that money can corrupt, but in this world you also need an income, and if you need to devote a lot of time to get income from a different source then that only distracts from the time and energy that you can put towards making videos.
Yeah that’s fair. Feel to me like peertube just needs to find a way to monitize the platform. That can also be done from a server by server model. Sorta like every broadcast network runs their own monitization efforts. Either way seems to me that a solution isn’t out of reach and the platform can become quite successful.
I would love to see some easy built-in monetization system for PeerTube. Ideally this could be "micropayments" style subscriptions where you could pay a small amount to subscribe to a channel or a small-amount per video (with batched payments to avoid too high of fees). I would also love to see a "pay what you want" subscription option and tipping.
It would probably need to be plugable so that different payment providers can be used, but even just starting with one would be exciting.