Donations are one form, but the flow thereof isn't optimal in peertube. Viewers can't donate just by having an account on peertube. It's not "a click a way" like a "donated subscription" or something. I can't create an account on peertube, connect it to my bank directly or some payment processor, go to a creator and click "donated subscription", then expect money to end up with the content creator.
Youtube doesn't require setting up KoFi or patreon or something. At the base level, if your video gets popular and you have subscribers, you'll get paid (or that is my understanding). Peertube has a higher barrier.
Yup YouTube makes it very easy to receive money from adds and people that have YouTube premium. Having a YouTube premium subscription means that you are at least supporting the creator of every video that you watch a little bit (from what I can find 55% of what you pay is going to the creators). Yes YouTube takes quite a large cut, but video hosting in high quality costs a lot of money.
I think it will be very hard to do this on a decentralised platform. People don't trust just anyone with their money, so it could lead to people abandoning smaller servers and you can be sure that bad actors would pop up and try to abuse the system. And even if you do this the right way, you would have to build this system entirely before you can convince creators to move to this platform.
It will also be really hard to offer the same quality and reliability that YouTube offers, without taking a larger cut than the 45% that YouTube takes. Hosting a large video platform is expensive, and many of the Fediverse users are anti-adds and will run an add-blocker and maybe even sponsor-blocker.
It will also be really hard to offer the same quality and reliability that YouTube offers, without taking a larger cut than the 45% that YouTube takes.
Why do you assume so? Peertube instances have been pretty good for me so far. I rarely stumble upon unavailable videos nowadays. Still a little salty that they implemented their own protocol making webtorrents unavailable --> no headless seeds.
many of the Fediverse users are anti-adds and will run an add-blocker and maybe even sponsor-blocker.
Good question. Probably high enough for people to want Patreon and KoFi and with a low enough barrier that people are fine starting out with it - something peertube cannot claim.
One way would be to have a monthly subscription on your home Peertube instance with a certain percentage being passed through by the instance admins to creators on other instances.
What way is there to make money relabile while watching something besides ads?
A monthly subscription. Source: Real life. We've explored all of these a long long time ago, and it comes down to subscription and ads, everything else didn't make the race.