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Brave expands Basic Attention Token platform to YouTube

(basicattentiontoken.org)
321 points Helloworldboy | 4 comments | 17 Nov 17 14:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.706s | source
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Cthulhu_ ◴[17 Nov 17 15:36 UTC] No.15722757[source]▶
Yeah this isn't going to fly with Youtube itself, they're not going to host ad-free videos so that a 3rd party can take their nontrivial portion of the ad revenue.

Schemes like this are nice, but don't forget who pays for hosting, serving and promoting the content.

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Helloworldboy ◴[17 Nov 17 15:41 UTC] No.15722822[source]▶
I think you might be misunderstanding how it works. Its essentially Patreon. Will it work? Who knows. Can youtube stop it from happening? Probably not any more than they can stop Patreon.
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thisisit ◴[17 Nov 17 15:56 UTC] No.15722993[source]▶
But then the question becomes what do these guys offer which Patreon doesnt?

Still my understanding is that Patreon doesn't automatically allow people to view YT videos ad free. Sure people get donations and the amount of donations drive the number of videos etc but they don't go into YT's territory.

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1. glenstein ◴[17 Nov 17 17:59 UTC] No.15724286[source]▶
I may be misunderstanding something, since I'm not a youtube creator, but couldn't someone sufficiently comfortable with the other revenue streams they have at their disposal voluntarily choose to demonetize their own youtube videos?
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2. tialaramex ◴[17 Nov 17 19:37 UTC] No.15725302[source]▶
Yes, Jim Sterling's videos are deliberately demonetized, his revenue comes via Patreon.
3. rcthompson ◴[17 Nov 17 21:24 UTC] No.15726080[source]▶
For now, yes. But what people are saying is that if large numbers of YouTube content creators turn off ads and switch to getting their monetary support through Brave, Patreon, or some other income stream that YouTube doesn't profit from, there's nothing stopping YouTube from changing their policy in the future to make video ads mandatory.
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4. ForHackernews ◴[18 Nov 17 00:07 UTC] No.15727008[source]▶
> there's nothing stopping YouTube from changing their policy in the future to make video ads mandatory.

Ideally in that scenario, competition would push creators and viewers onto some other platform.

Not sure how realistic that is, given the network effects involved with YouTube.