I saw a post today talking about how youtube is making it even harder for newcomers to become monetized, or even reach the milestones to apply for monetization. While youtube is a bit hard to compare to Hive due to the hosting costs, a better comparison would probably be @threespeak which I'm not up to date on lately how it operates, maybe @tibfox can add some more details about it if there's interest.
But my point remains, given that there's also many other blogging sites/ twitter which also has similar milestones towards becoming monetized, which I've talked about in the past that it's not easy to get there to something like, what's that name again, oh right; Hive.
I feel like many ignore this about Hive, as well as how the reward pool can scale.
While we do have our own barriers, account creation, key storage/security, standing out as a genuine person over fake accounts swarming in, etc. But people are a lot more welcoming here and encouraged by the ecosystem/currency to be so. On Youtube for instance there may be some comradery but they don't really have any good reason to help you out in terms of visibility/rewards, the latter obviously they cannot even influence much there.
While there's movement on improving some of our barriers, lite account is in the process, key storage is becoming more important and at the same time commonplace due to crypto adoption in general, who knows, maybe we may even have some more serious custodian appear on Hive over time as exist in the rest of the crypto space. We also have social account recovery which is still something lacking in most currencies while we've had it for over a decade.
But let's get back to barrier of entry. A serious content creator who joins and quickly verifies they are who they say they are can quite literally earn their first coins in a single week. Not just that, they can get hive/hbd tips/subscriptions feelessly instantly. The only thing they need to figure out is how to convert that to another coin/fiat which over time should just get easier as more and more services pop up with adoption growing. Naturally though creators can also get demonetized if they're doing something the community deems unacceptable or a few larger stakeholders have good reason to null.
That last part is something I think deserves a whole post of its own, and while it may seem bad to hear for some, I'd like to take my time to talk about how it makes hive a better place over time compared to what we see happening on other socials where earning is possible for the few.
Anyway, not much to say that's not already been said. Just got prompted on writing something about what I've been reading today.
Keep in mind that these platforms benefit from the 99% that never earn anything, and some of it may go to the 1%. And while we're not perfect, we're damn sure a lot better than that.
To make the devils advocate
Low barrier of entry and even lower cap of profits. Even if someone is a top witness, top author and has a dhf proposal passed maybe they can make at current prices what? 150 USD ? The diminishing user base suggests this number will only continue to go down.
On the other hand there are plenty of YouTubers making ten times that with much less effort. And overall, I bet there are way more monetized YouTube users than the current user number of hive. So, in a way even the main argument of "lower entry" for hive is problematic.
Point is 99.9% of youtube content creators will never reach the milestone of becoming monetized as it keeps getting bigger and bigger. They prefer this because they can place ads on non-monetized users to 100% profit off of your activity and to make up hosting costs. Same with twitter, first everyone could make money, then okay but only if you buy premium, then okay, but you need 5m impressions per 3 months, then ok but you need 500 premium users who follow you, etc, etc, they'll just keep pushing the post further and further both to prevent abuse and to keep 99.9% in the unmonetized.
Compare that to hive where even shitposts like this one and most of your existence can earn something and decide if they wanna stay invested or not instead of always being the product.
Yes I understand that, hence why I chose the word "problematic" since even that 0.1 % of youtube is still (much) bigger than the entire user base of hive.
This is the number given by Gemini, considering both are google products I guess the number is legit.
Another angle to add is that we get more average Joes here on hive. Well, Mr beast and a good chunk of big YouTube channels started like that.
Average Joes. So again, big social media are winning at that.
Myeah, that's quite vague however as you can technically get monetized after reaching 5000 watch hours within a year and some subscriber threshold, but for $5-100 per year considering the investment it takes to get monetized from scratch doesn't mean much for majority of those 3m I reckon.
Fair enough. Just pointing out that when looking at hard numbers points can be made for both.
for sure, i mentioned it's hard to compare hive with most socials these days, at least the ones with millions of users cause we've never really experienced it. But we've both been around when there was hype and steemit was sweating trying to accept applications for new users cause everyone wanted in and due to some crazy hbd and hive pump in 2018 or whenever we saw authors on here easily make 20-40k per week for a short while.
The tech is there, it scales and it allows for it. How we use it and how it develops compared to traditional monetization which is mainly ads depends on us. I'd much prefer this version even if it's quite a long shot cause at the end of the day at least I know no one will take my voice away from me.
for sure, i mentioned it's hard to compare hive with most socials these days, at least the ones with millions of users cause we've never really experienced it. But we've both been around when there was hype and steemit was sweating trying to accept applications for new users cause everyone wanted in and due to some crazy hbd and hive pump in 2018 or whenever we saw authors on here easily make 20-40k per week for a short while.
The tech is there, it scales and it allows for it. How we use it and how it develops compared to traditional monetization which is mainly ads depends on us. I'd much prefer this version even if it's quite a long shot cause at the end of the day at least I know no one will take my voice away from me.
I am not fan with yt, which just cut ranges of my videos from 1k to 100 views and they just saying something is bad with our views count we recalculate your views later, but later nothing changes. 🫠
Fb is not better after 2 months I just lost recommendations of my fanpage, I don't even know for what. It was hard to appeal and recover my recommendations, but after that surprise, my views for month still was pretty low.
Big platform don't care about small creators, of course in time, when my views were low, I got many offers from platform to just buy promotion boost, even with blocked recommendations xD 😆
And you know what?
I decided to just stop making content for them, because is pointless. To get money for my work I need to upload videos for years and still don't know, if I get monetization. So basically making content for free and they use your content to show adds, wchich are annoying. So platforms can earn money from my effort, but I get nothing back. If someone value their time, hive is better, you can earn from first day, it's complicated for new people to understand crypto, but you don't need to wait for invite to partner program with big entry barrier. 🧱
I'm happy that I'm not wasting my time anymore on centralized platforms. I here with real people. Because at the end of the day Community matters and I like to talk with people 😀
From what I understand Youtube used to be much better for earning. I know some people who went from earning 100-150 a month with moderate views to not even qualifying to earn. (which understandably was pretty gutting.)
One other thing Hive is better at by miles, is transparency. No tools needed anyone can click to see votes and such.
I really gotta get onto is making more process vids for 3speak. Even if it's just the procreate made + some music it'd be fun to see if folks enjoy it or not.
I feel like at one point advertisers were fleeing it for some reason and revenue got decimated. It's felt like most ads have been quite odd lately, AI slop and gross stuff that many have reported on.
I know that's def happened on twitter. Something about the site running rampant with hate speech makes people not want to advertise there.
I don't spend much time on youtube and when I do I borrow a friends premium log in :P.
I don't know about youtube but some time ago I saw an artist on facebook who said that he got 1 million(?) views in about a month. And during that time he earned around 7 dollars. On Hive I sometimes earn that much in a week. So that seems insane to me.
Yep that's what I mean with only the top 0.1% make "real money", sure no one on hive does that these days but we've seen how it can quickly turn around. We just need users which is the hardest thing to accomplish as a new social media platform. Only ones that come to mind in recent years are tiktok and letterboxd.
Indeed Hive has a low barrier of entry, but it likes potential rewards that have an edge in Web2. If there was a formula through which besides our web3 rewards as Hive or Hive Power we could outreach into web2 and bring the money here, Hive would really fly out of the shelves. Or at least the apps supporting it and built on top.
I really understand what you mean, especially about YouTube. I have been creating there for a very long time, and breaking through today is so hard. The competition is huge, and reaching those monetization requirements feels almost impossible now.
In that sense, Hive is definitely different because you do not have to wait for permission to start. But I also wouldn't say it is easy to earn here. As someone who puts a lot of time and care into creating good quality content, it can be very discouraging when the payout after all that effort is very small. The learning curve is one thing, but staying motivated when the rewards do not match the work is another challenge.
And regarding downvotes, to be honest, I really do not like that system. I think if people do not like a post, they should just ignore it and move on. If people appreciate your work, they will support you. If not (for whatever reason), the post will simply be ignored, and that should be enough. Maybe that's what is happening to me! 😂
Still, I believe in HIVE and will do my best to keep creating good content.
There's more to stake based voting that doesn't really work with the "simply ignore stuff" rather than downvote. If 50% of the reward pool is going to spam/plag/selfvoting then it means a bad time for the rest of regular users trying.
The conversion crypto to fiat is a big hassle for first world people, that's where most of influencers are from... Also an other big point is that those kind of people like to make shit posts, litterally low effort garbage, they get tons of likes just cause they are hot chicks (usually) and earn... Here that wouldn't work, as it's pob the reward...
I don't know much about metrics, but if I had to choose, Hive would be my first choice. And if more people knew about Hive, I'm sure they would choose it too.
Youtubers are shifting to members only & patreon only content. Indicating payouts and terms are on a decline. Merchandising is the largest source of income for top 1% of content creators. Shirts, stickers, coffee mugs, hats, etc.
A decline in youtube could represent an opportunity for HIVE to expand and grow into the vacuum left behind.
About YouTube - yeah they are doing great bcz they don't want their platform to b cringe like TikTok or Instagram where tons of Fake AI content with no value available. In terms of hive, if we need to save it from ai slops + reward stealers, then witnesses & Hivers need to take some steps.
We recently opened up scrobble.life/report, though keep in mind if you constantly report things that shouldn't be reported you won't be able to do so anymore.
Well it's been a very long time that I didn't visit scrobble.life due to my exploration on hive but yeah I love that site like I find unlimited recommendation in terms of movies. Yep I am not that freak in school who rings fire alarm in terms of curiosity 😂, understood that we need to report serious issue rather then this or that,,, Thank you for this info
The IPFS/encoding/transcoding backend servers of 3Speak are definitely some of the heavier machines, but I don't have real numbers on them. Obviously it is much much lower than any of the mainstream video platforms.
The barrier to entry on Hive is pretty huge when you actually want to understand where you're posting. The rewards are something we can use to promote Hive on web2, but for a lot of people I know, "crypto and blockchain" is an instant nono. The scams in the past few years and the eco-related posts about nfts haven't helped. Now nobody wants to touch a platform that's "so bad for the environment," even though they use Google/Meta and co every single day without a second thought.
On the 3Speak side, I'm doing my part to make it compatible with mainstream expectations, in terms of features and usability. Also we are working on a patreon-like experience on 3Speak that will launch soon and maybe could help with onboarding if our fees are lower than Patreon (and that's not hard I guess). But we can't really fix the blockchain image without sounding fishy or scamy. I remember @detlev putting together a presentation with energy consumption numbers of Hive. If we update that data (give that witness servers have cut resource requirements a lot recently) we could have a solid starting point for comparison. That could help convince people we are not worse than fortnite haha.
The elephant in the room: we're community-owned and community-driven, and no CEO profits off users' content. If big tech keeps going the way it's going, all the work we are doing now could really pay off someday.
I had some numbers 2 years ago and this data need to be updated
ah dang, missed this comment til now, my bad :D
Ahhhh no worries - thanks for the tip! :D
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