three years ago you all said it wouldn't work up until now
you've been right but that all changes today flow plane is
now in beta meaning that we're opening up our doors to creators everywhere who
are looking for new ways to connect with their biggest fans want to become less
reliant on a short list of giant tech companies and who want to make their
income a lot more predictable so i feel like i should start with what floatplane
is not it is not a youtube competitor not now
not ever it is not a twitch competitor not now not ever
so then what are we right now we're a place for creators to upload their
videos in high quality while earning money from their supporters directly
there are no ads there's no algorithm we didn't make any of those
did we have time to build an algorithm no there's still a lot of work for us to do
we're not we're not interested in that and because we spent the vast majority
of our time building a solid content delivery system that isn't reliant on
any of the big cloud providers there's no way for them to prevent a creator's
content from being served to those followers that are supporting them and
because we are creators or at least you used to be uh we've already battled
tested the platform with the linus tech tips channel acting as our own biggest
customer yeah our users thank you guys have already streamed
over a petabyte of data including both high quality vods and live streams like
that time we streamed a live event where people made fun of me for an hour and a half to the tune of 26 terabytes of
bandwidth yeah so if you're a creator here's some good
reasons to consider getting on flow plane one
join floatplane if you want a more diverse online video ecosystem while i
personally feel that the youtube platform has changed my life for the
better between the monetization their poor handling of the various
controversies the recent peace corps controversy actually i wrote this a
while ago but that's okay because they've got the new kappa one since then
honestly it feels kind of like youtube has made it their mission to act as a
proxy pr department for us here at
floatplane which is great because we can't afford a pr department yeah they
always seem to be looking for an opportunity to demonstrate why we
shouldn't entrust our entire livelihoods to one corporation's decision-making
process so that's a big part of it for us at least we're not youtube we're not
facebook we're not amazon we're not microsoft we're not apple either we're
none of those things we have no investment from 10 cent or business
interest to protect in china this was again written a little while ago but
still relevant and in fact we have no external
investment whatsoever so floatplane is
by creators for creators yes we know it's a cliche at this point
but the reason that we started building this thing was that we needed an
alternative to vessel which was a platform that offered us a revenue
stream that we had come to rely on but that ended up being acquired by verizon
and promptly shut down which i guess brings me nicely into reason number two
we're not going anywhere we're built on a model of slow and steady growth rather
than chasing large rounds of venture capital racing to acquire millions of
users then selling to the highest bidder before anyone realizes that the
platform's just leaking money and never worked in the first place floodplain
took so long because it's built on real tech whenever we hit a roadblock we
developed a solution to it rather than paying for a quick fix from a canned
solution that we don't really know anything about and that we know will get too expensive to properly scale burying
us under our own weight finally reason number three floatplane gives you
control over your audience you can correspond with your audience directly
in an environment that's a lot less toxic and should you ever decide that
you no longer require our services we will provide you with a list of your
subscribers allowing you to take your audience with you wherever you happen to
be going now let's talk about the reasons you should not join floatplane
number one you hate money i guess it's very funny yeah seriously though you
shouldn't join floatplane if your goal is to expand your reach as a content
creator we are not a discoverability platform remember no algorithm and our
traffic is both relatively low and very
intent based nobody is going to floatplane.com to
look for random stuff to watch and that is the whole point so most of the traffic
to the entire site is from creators who are on the platform directing their
users straight to their pages we promise
to not only keep free of banner ads and other clutter but also free of promotion
for other creators it's your page yeah
and you also shouldn't join if you're perfectly happy with the tools that
youtube already provides through their community posts and member features
youtube has built in many of the features that we had intended to use to
differentiate which is a little frustrating but whatever and not
everyone worries about having all of their eggs in one basket maybe that's
fine for you but if you want this content creator gig to evolve into a
stable lifelong career and you want to make the most of the fan base you've
worked so hard to build then consider creating on floatplane it's
become an invaluable resource and revenue stream for us here at linus tech
tips with no observable impact on our youtube growth by the way a lot of
people ask me about that and we're not alone just ask our early access creators
like tech deals ufd tech eposvox science
studio and the one and only lyle from bitwit if you want to learn more head to
floaplane.com and click this button where you can apply to join the platform
we're going to have that link below as well i'm actually super excited that
this is finally happening because the number of tweets i remember we talked
early on about having like a wall of hate yes like for people that are like
this is stupid this is gonna fail um hey they might still be right but the
step that we're taking today gets us a little bit closer to
not being that problem honestly if this goes well and you guys let the creators
that you love know about this option and even a small fraction of them reach out
to us we think that it's got a very bright future absolutely so thanks guys
thank you bye