An example: YouTube pays content producers per click, so to speak, a ridiculously small amount, but in total, with billions of clicks, a crazy amount. The money to finance this comes largely from advertising revenue (also Google's main business model). They are the Gatekeepers so to speak.

But the content producers can't live off this because Google keeps most of it for itself. They do give people the opportunity to find sponsors themselves tho - and that's how people actually make the most money. But you have to find them for yourself or through intermediaries (that's an industry in itself). This is only realistic if you have sufficient reach (subscribers in the example). And that, in turn, is only possible if you have already invested hundreds of hours in the production of content (you can't make a living if you don't get paid for that).

So I think it would be best if the platforms themselves were powerful enough in terms of reach to be able to negotiate well with advertisers. But not as powerful as Google, for example, who can afford to pay content producers a pittance because - unlike small platforms - they are not dependent on them.

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 days ago

I get what you're saying. This stuff hinges on essentially finding small businesses to run, for example, a commercial PeerTube instance. And then leave it up to the rest of the fediverse if they want to federate with them.

I don't think any of us, or the current devs, would be the ones to add this commercial functionality just because we're not the sort to chase those types of incentives. But who knows, maybe some business will develop a plugin or peertube wrapper, or hell just a whole new thing, and see if anyone federates. 🤷