Google may have shown us a revenue model because of how mouthshit they are. “We’ve demonetized this video for no reason we’re willing to articulate.” Okay, I won’t rely on AdSense then, I’ll monetize my channel by:

• Merchandising. Sell T-shirts with catch phrases on them or things related to my topic at hand. The New Yankee Workshop made its money selling project plans on broadcast TV decades before Youtube was even a thing.

• Patreon or similar. Allow fans to subscribe to the creator out-of-band, and reward higher donations with anything from a name in the credits to early access to content or even patron-only content. Youtube accidentally allows for that kind of thing. Wouldn’t it be funny if Peertube became a good place to put patreon-only videos instead of having them on Youtube at all?

• Independently negotiated ad-reads. When Tom Scott looks to camera and says “This episode is sponsored by NordVPN” Youtube didn’t get a cut of that.

Assuming an audience large enough, this could support the creator, and then perhaps the instance can then bill creators.

I don’t know about technical help, like…Peertube has a P2P aspect to it where if you watch a video, you might help seed that video to other viewers, which helps shoulder the bandwidth load for the instance. If I’m a video creator, can I become a permanent peer for my instance and always seed my videos? I figure that would help more than…not doing that.

Youtube did what Internet Explorer did: It got the general public used to the idea that an entire category of something on the internet is free. IE set the maximum price for a web browser at $0. Youtube did the same for video hosting. Can that be reversed?