Odysee, a decentralised YouTube alternative focused on free speech, is officially ending the serving of ads on the platform, starting today. The post:
"Dear friends of Odysee, Starting today, we’re removing all ads. We don’t need ads to make money as a platform and we are confident in the development of our own new monetisation programs that will help creators earn a living and at the same time keep Odysee alive. Ultimately, sacrificing the overall user experience to make a few bucks isn’t worth it to us and nor is it even sustainable for a platform that wishes to make something truly open and creatively free.
As we take this decision, one thing is certain to us, media platforms (even ones that market themselves as ‘free-speech’) typically devolve into advertising companies and end up becoming beholden to their paymasters. It’s been that way for centuries and is never going to change.
As we see YouTube become more aggressive with their ad deployment and ‘Free Speech’ platforms try to build their own ad businesses it’s apparent to us that we’re building a model for Odysee that will keep it sustainable not only financially, but in its ability to provide an incorruptible user experience.
Our approach may be considered niche or unconventional, that’s fine by us. Odysee will be used by the world on terms that are agreeable to its users, and we know our users don’t like ads.
Best, Founder & Creator, Chief Executive Officer. Julian Chandra"
Unfortunately that’s one of the problems with a lot of alternative platforms.
You would think there’d be some decentralized video hosting thing popular with us Fediverse types but in practice they’re all the low spots in the gutter in which the densest shit gathers. Most of the audience is on Youtube, and you only migrate to an alternative site if you’ve been banned from Youtube, and the folks who haven’t been banned from Youtube don’t tend to want to go stand next to the people who have so it’s difficult for legitimate content creators to adopt those alternative platforms.
Dailymotion still exists and I think you can still upload there but I know of no “dailymotioners.” Vimeo seems to have gone in a b2b direction, Twitch is mainly for live streaming, Tiktok succeeded where Vine failed, Nebula was some Youtubers starting their own Netflix with blackjack and hookers, Floatplane was LMG starting their own Netflix with blackjack and hookers, then you’ve got the several porn sites of varying dubiousness, and then down in the sump you’ve got the likes of LBRY and Odysee.
There are a few creators out there that publish multiple places. If it doesn’t cost to publish, we could start encouraging more people to publish more places. The biggest problem is you do actually have a chance to get paid on Youtube. Most of the content worth watching is only doing it because they can make money
See that is what I think would eventually allow another platform to take off, is publishing to two sites at once.
Google’s Adsense…I guess there are people making useful amounts of money with it? A lot of Youtubers seem to prefer having their own sponsors and do the ad read themselves and/or have some service like Patreon to allow their audience to fund them directly. Especially since that revenue won’t just disappear on the whims of an algorithm like Adsense money will. “We’ve demonetized and age restricted this video. Reason? coin came up tails.”
