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"
Nice, but the platform we need more is Peertube
PeerTube is great too
It never seems to load, is my hardened browser breaking peering ? What exactly needs to be whitelisted ?
I know it sounds like capitalist crep, but Peertube needs a solid form of monitization (I think).
Creating videos is expensive and hosting videos is expensive. Without a source of income for creators it cannot survive.
It’s more market anarchism than capitalism IMO. The factors of production here are controlled 100% by its users, not whoever last bought the whole thing.
I’m going to try setting up an instance but one issue with it that I see is that instance owners will be the only permitted uploaders for most instances since storage and bandwidth is a huge issue when it comes to video hosting platforms.