Self streaming your content?

[Wayne Morellini]

Seeing a recent comedy show called "China Boy" staring a guy that came off of YouTube, reminded me of what I wanted to do years ago, and got me wondering about YouTube and such forth.

Years ago I had wanted to do my own streamming, to get the dollars rather than the cent scraps off of youtube. But now I wonder what are the most profitable ways of setting up streaming? Is there pay per view streaming out there, or better ad revenues than $20,000 for 1 million views?

 

[Brandon Veen]

The most profitable model is probably the Netflix model, where it's a paid service and users get access to a lot of content. The problems with something like that on an individual level:
1) You'd need to make a lot of content to make it worth people for buying it. For an individual that's gonna be nearly impossible.
2) With all the other services out there (Netflix/Amazon Prime/Hulu/etc) the paid model isn't going to attract people a small service.

Although, in addition to releasing videos on YouTube, LinusTechTips started up a second site called Floatplane that at the moment primarily hosts only their content. It's been awhile since I've kept up with it, but the business model of it is users pay a monthly fee (way smaller than Netflix/Hulu) to a specific creator on that platform in exchange for getting videos early and ad-free. Basically it's the spiritual successor to Vessel.com, which was bought out and eventually closed by Verizon. With something like this though, they still release their stuff on YouTube as well, and I'm guessing whatever it is you're wanting to stream/yourself would need a fairly substantial following to begin with. Although I suppose there is the Patreon option as well which has become fairly popular recently.

One of the other models is free streaming with ads. The challenges here being that if you're self hosting, you'd need to go search for brands that would want to advertise on your platform, which probably is the biggest hurdle (other than bandwidth requirements and overhead cost).

There could be a middle of the road option there, but it presents it's own challenges. Integration and quality. Offer something on your site that they couldn't get anywhere else and they'd be willing to pay for it.
For example, Tidal offers Lossless quality audio. It's sort of niche in a way.
YouTube's codec tends to ruin footage, you could go off of that and offer a higher-quality option, but be ready for the overhead cost to maintain that.
Otherwise things like in-depth looks into and documents relating to the production could be offered on the site behind that paywall.

If it's a small thing, you might be best off with doing the YouTube and Patreon option. Potentially set up an amazon affiliate link that people could use too.

Ultimately regardless of the route to the goal, what you're producing has to either be worth advertisers' attention or worth individuals' support.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Brandon, thanks for that. I haven't heard of Patreon. I'm grateful. Around here you tend to get non answers and even virtually objectionability to having thought of the question in the first place. It's insane.

I pretty much am including using other's service, like YouTube.

The issue with Netflix, is there are only one at a time normally. I'm planning on rotating through services, because they are deficient here. It is a flawed where a major service can hog the content, but at the same not cover the basis. Exclusivity is the issue. So, I am worried that the use of these services stops people from paying for another one too.

Advertising. It's a matter of finding a good advertising partner network that pays more but has access to the user's local advertising market. Local advertising is the key profitable ads. At the moment the volume of advertising, and irrelevant advertising, has been killing the market, plus the ability to tighten down the cents on the host website end so they can't make good profit. The situation has got so insane, they must be relying on user profiling and tracking to make it profitable, which should further squeeze down the offered returns for pure advertising. When I wanted to propose a new advertising system for the internet, it was privacy centric, relevant, with local advertising but also reduced advertising per page, to raise the mind share and profitability per advertisment by cutting out the middle man, raising proportion of returned advertising revenue.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

So I guess, I'm more about which streaming service returns more per viewer. Best advertising, better pay per view, better paid to buy.

Others who want to diy, may appreciate better hosting, advertising partners, and commerical store partners.

The problem with YouTube, is that you are lost in muck, and there is no netflix like media guide or recommendation system to find content, no pay per view or pay to own, and limited advertising revenues. They could make 10x the profit off of good content this way. No tie ins, just rock up and self publish, and may good content win. I'm more interested in how good content makes more money, rather than what suites bad content mass market. I'm not bothered about exposure on site. As long as it maximises profit, if content is good enough, people can refer it, and a teaser can be put on YouTube.

 

[Craig Parkes]

Wayne Twitch TV which is mostly streamers playing games (computer games or board games) is probably the most successful service for individual streamers, excepting for cam girls / pornography (which is undoubtedly the other most financially rewarding streaming platform in raw dollar terms - Twitch is pretty main stream though so I'd think as a streaming platform it'd be the largest for ad revenue / subscribers earned by users.)

 

[H Dewey]

Ummm, the answer is right under your nose. Red Channel allows us to charge for our content or give it away for free. Don't know if this includes live streaming, but if not, "stream" it immediately after you upload it.

CORRECTION: I think Jim refers to it now as the Hydrogen Network.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

I should say, for pre-recorded content, but good suggestion anyway Craig.

H, is there a Red channel. Wow, I thought those plans were cancelled with redray odemax. I wanted them to do a indie content service. It's good. On comedy and drama you can do it do cheap in reality. One sketch (this is not my taste) was just a guy playing a taxi driver trying to give this woman the run around for a minute or so before finding that there was a uber driver near by, cutting across to him still with his passenger, kidnapping the uber driver and roping the woman as an accomplice and disposing him before asking the women for the complete taxi fare for all the time, and then taking the heathen sugar bag and rope into his boot for a nap (that was spontaneous addition). Brilliantly cheap. So people have the ability to sort out the good from the bad with these platforms and move onto better deals, and if good enough move to their own platform.

Hey, thanks for the suggestions guys. If anybody has any facts, figures or studies about actual cost to revenue comparisons, please feel free to contribute.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

This is interesting. A while back I was suggesting that Red could do a deal with YouTube or others over redray technogy. It appears they did something. They helped upgrade the VP9 codec to a new edition.

http://www.red.com/news/red-and-youtube

I had been wondering what they were going to do with the replacement of the VP9 codec against h266 and h267. With Red on board they could definitely outdo the next one or two generations.

This makes sense too. YouTube infrastructure is an excellent hosting source for the Red/Hydrogen Channel, and YouTube has been experimenting with paid prescription service.

So, after Red's collaboration with Google, we have an android phone coming. The year or so after the collaboration Google starts working on a new realtime OS more suitable for a Red camera. I thought it was strange how easy it was to get suggestions incorporated into Android OS, and the new OS.