I know Nebula is not exactly open source, but it is pitched as a creator-controlled (or, at least a creator-centric) platform.
YouTube is my main platform of media consumption, and I would prefer to find other avenues that are not quite as monolithic.
Has anyone here tried Nebula? Is it worth it, and is there anything sketchy about it I should be aware of?
I’m subscribed to Nebula and like it.
The site isn’t meant to be a YouTube replacement. It is more of a collective of YouTube talent wanting to be on a platform that they collectively own together. There is a paywall because that is how they get funding for their activities.
I signed up for it because I want to contribute to people like them more to a finer degree than Patreon subscriptions of individual creators.
I have been using Nebula for years and it has replaced most of my use of YouTube. Whether it is worth it for you or not depends on what you watch. You can see what content is on Nebula without subscribing to get an idea of what is there.
The biggest problem I have with Nebula is that it is advertised as a “creator owned” company, but that is not actually the case. Here is a blogpost that goes into more detail about that. That being said, from what I am aware of, Nebula still pays creators more than YouTube per view. I just wish they were more transparent about their business.
That being said, from what I am aware of, Nebula still pays creators more than YouTube per view.
I think it’s really important that we stop talking in terms of payment on a per-view basis - Nebula does not pay on a per-view basis. Nebula uses the same model as music streaming companies, i.e. a pro rata stream share model. This means that creators get paid based on how large of a percentage of the total streaming time was on their content. No additional money is generated for each view, it’s conceptually still a fraction of what you pay monthly. The more content you view on the platform, the less each view conceptually pays.
Wait so YouTube premium actually has a better pay split model (per view.)
This is a bizarre turn of events. The only reason I was interested in nebula is because I thought it was paid by my personal watch time.
No, YouTube premium is the same.
From what I’m reading it’s split based on my watch time instead of doing a global pool like Spotify. The language is confusing though
It’s a bit hard to tell from the public information on the subject, but either way, it’s not a per-view model - which cannot exist in a fixed-price all-access environment for practical reasons.
I’m not sure how practical it would be to do the royalty payments on an individual user consumption level, but I have little insight into the implementation here.
I’ve been using it for a year or two now, and here are my notes on it.
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There are a lot of pretty good creators on there (real engineering, hacksmith, berm peak, and real life lore, for example.) .
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Though Nebula has a lot of good creators, the vast majority of youtubers are not on it, so you will really only be switching for the ones that are.
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It has pretty much every feature (user-facing, anyway) that youtube does except for likes/dislikes, comments, and live streaming.
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It is paid with no free-with-ads option, but it is cheap (currently $36 a year) and provides a comparable experience.
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It handles podcasts well, but there aren’t that many good ones (imo) and a lot of them seem discontinued.
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It has really good discoverability, but it does not match content to the user (i.e., no personalized home page).
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It’s homepage is made up of various categories like a normal streaming service, including continue watching.
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It is not a pay-creator-directly kind of service. you pay nebula and they give 50% of the subscription fees to creators based on view count. It is more like a streaming service version of youtube, in a good way.
Overall, I really like it. It does a lot of stuff right and I feel that my money was well-spent. I would like for there to be more of the people I watch on it (Dankpods, for example). Nebula’s pay scheme seems like a fair deal to me given the type of platform it is.
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I try to throw Nebula a month of subscription every so often, since they do feel like a step in the right direction.
But the one that really replaced YouTube, for me, was DropOut.Tv.
And yeah, I guess that means silliness is more important than science videos, for me.
I’m still looking for a non-monopoly service for handyman stuff, if anyone has suggestions.
DropOut won’t load on my browser, even with my VPN turned off
That’s good to know. What OS and browser?
I haven’t had any trouble but I mostly watch via their app, on Android.
Android via Brave
Ah. Makes sense. It seems like many Android browsers don’t enable streaming digital rights management bits, lately, because they figure folks will use the dedicated apps anyway.
The mobile browsers are rapidly approaching parity with their desktop cousins, so this may get better in the near future. Although Brave might not decide to support DRM streaming, because there’s no real guarantee what’s in the DRM binary.
It’s not a total alternative but I have had nebula for years and it’s a great platform.
