What is the best social media platform for niche content creators? I'm thinking of starting a small project for one of my hobbies but I'd hope to make at least enough to pay for my setup (mic, camera, etc.). Is that unrealistic?
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
495 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
87183 readers
3628 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Nothing.. I for some reason just simply don't think nowdays you can start out unless you want to make dogshit ragebait content that acts on the emotion of others..
If youre doing niche hobby stuff why are you even talking about monetization? This is for people who dont have a real job and trying to make it in youtubes version of hollywood.
load more comments
(6 replies)
Reminds me of that woman who made science videos on both YouTube and Pornhub and she makes more money on Pornhub.
If I'm remembering correctly it was more money per view on pornhub but she had significantly more views on YouTube so the total amount per platform was still significantly in YouTube favor.
Still wild that a porn site theoretically pays better than Google.
load more comments
(1 replies)
YouTube became evil the moment we all dislike-bombed their year in review video and they never made another one.
YouTube became evil when google ditched their slogan "don't be evil!".
So, it was evil from the start. It just needed to lure enough uncritical consumers in before enshittification started. Piece by piece.
YouTube became evil the moment Google got involved.
Maybe but YouTube wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for the years Google paid for it with no monetization in sight.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I subscribed to YouTube Red back in the day, when that’s what it was called.
Then circa early 2018 they changed the rules for monetisation from the previous 10k lifetime views to 1k subs & 4k watch hours over 12 months. That was when I unsubscribed from Red and installed an ad blocker. I had always been anti ad-blocker because my view was that people creating content deserve to get paid for it. That’s still my view in principle, but the increasing enshittification of the web thanks in no small part to shit like this from Google has meant I weigh the pros & cons differently. YouTube showed me very directly that they don’t care about supporting their creators. So I decided I didn’t want to support them anymore. It’s not like this was the first problem…the whole “where’s the fair use” thing came before that, and many other events besides. But cutting off small creators like that, without even grandfathering in existing creators who had been monetised with that threshold, was the last straw for me.
It was also Google’s fault that I moved from Ad Block Plus, which I chose specifically because of its “acceptable ads” policy (basically: let through ads that aren’t obnoxious), to uBlock Origin, which lacked such a policy, after YouTube tried blocking ad blockers from YouTube, and UBO was quicker to adapt.
That’s twice now that Google’s own actions have directly led to me supporting them less than I used to. This won’t be the third time, but only because I have no more cuts to give.
And they will never stop extracting more value. I just want to prop nebula here, it's great for creators and there's a lot of them already on there.
The only thing 'missing' is the commenting system, but to me that's an upgrade.
Comm Systems is essential for the community pointing out mistakes or wrong doings
And if you want comedy, Dropout (formerly College Humor) is a great service that openly encourages you sharing your account with your friends.
The only streaming platform I sub to is Dropout and I happily do it. I believe I stumbled upon Breaking News first, watched first season or so on the high seas. I was in tears from laughing and I've been subbed ever since. Great value for the money, imo.
Nebula is awesome. I took a gamble with them and bought lifetime during their second round two years ago and never regretted it. It has only been getting better, here’s to hope that they keep direction.
YouTube says the changes are being introduced to “keep pace with the growth of YouTube, which now sees over 200 billion daily Shorts views and over a billion hours of watch time on TV” every day.
This reminds me of some past employment positions I had with extremely lucrative companies that, upon several employees having pushed and developed their skills to be able to reach production quotas (despite increasing safety hazards), simply raised production standards to avoid paying what was promised (certainly not meeting the threshold of what workers are worth).
In short, if you are a content creator on YouTube, do it for the love of your hobby and make money with your day job.
In short, if you are a content creator on YouTube, do it for the love of your hobby and make money with your day job.
The problem with this is that if you want to get any exposure you have to keep the algorithm happy and the algorithm wants consistent release schedules which means you'll always have that hanging over your shoulder and fucking up once means nobody will ever see your video in the sea of millions of other videos. It's an absolute meat grinder which is why so many channels fade out and why people try to do it full time.
Sure you can upload as a hobby but if people aren't watching it, why go through all the trouble?
All creators start out with zero viewers. That’s just something you have to do until you get traction
The same goes for bands and whatever else
If you can’t deal with that then don’t try
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
The end result is that channels will just post twice as much slop to get to those hours and actually human creators give up, meaning YouTube becomes even more sloppified.
As Google intended.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Nice. Would be good to see youtube go away or go back to people making things for the love it.
Sadly, needing to regulate for CSA, etc. causes it all to get centralized. Also, it’d be great if everyone could self-host their content and then post the searchable in a fediverse indexing host or something?
At this point I'm convinced that yt just hates smaller creators.
Nah, they hate signing checks. Not that long ago, they had a push to bring views to smaller creators, and my algorithm definitely shifted to people with hundreds to thousands of subs, instead of the hundreds of thousands to millions folks.
Now they raise the payment threshold.
Result: big creators get less traffic (money) to "boost small creators", small creators get less money because they're too small. YouTube gets to keep more cash.
load more comments
(11 replies)
Work for free before getting paid! There will still be ads on your videos, but they ain't sharing the attention money.
Why I just push Patreon or another platform fuck trying to earn money through YouTube that worthless.
load more comments
(14 replies)
Meanwhile, you set yourself up on PeerTube and add a Monero address to your tipping thing and people can tip you as soon as they want to, whether you have one view and less than a watch hour or billions of views and tons of watch hours.
You can set up tipping links on youtube on day one as well.
And it has a much bigger pool of potential viewers.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Jesus who watches this much yt? The only thing I watch are a couple of how to videos a month. It boggles my mind that people watch so much pure crap.