Oddbean

The point isn’t the platform. It’s the money/revenue. Obviously Mr. Beast is a high profile example, but it gives an idea of the upper end of the scale when it comes to content monetization and what Nostr is up against when we talk about wanting creators to put their content here.

It's a problem of scale, not monetization model. Given an equivalent number of users between YouTube and Nostr, he would earn far more from Nostr's direct V4V model. And given Nostr's censorship resistance, there's not much to stop people from ripping content and posting it over here, on flare for example, and earning sats that should rightfully go to the original creator, but won't. Can only sleep on Nostr for do long before you start losing out.

Scale is the problem. You can’t compare “what ifs”. There aren’t enough bitcoiners in the world willing to spend their sats to support the levels of monetization people can make on other platforms.

It won’t happen overnight. I do believe it can trend that way, and passionate people are building good tools on Nostr. But it puts the massive difference in scale into perspective when I think about this post from Mr Beast.

Well yes, we're talking about 10k daily active users vs 120M daily active users. And still a stark difference in UX. But I'm optimistic about Nostr because of the pace of development in that UX. The more frictionless it becomes, the more enticing. Primal having a built in wallet is the way. Amethyst and Damus will be apps for power users, but clients like primal will onboard the normies. More content creators will attract more users and more users will attract more content creators. Flare is a great start for video content, but I've already been saying that I need to be able to pay for more storage and bigger upload sizes. It needs both free and paid tiers for creators. As the Nostr UX improves, it will reach a point where it's so easy to use that user adoption will finally start to snowball. We're not there yet, but at this pace, we're not that far away either. I don't have the dev chops to contribute that way, so I will continue donating to OpenSats and zapping the devs directly.

I’m optimistic and believe Nostr and bitcoin are superior, but I do think a good dose of reality is healthy. Nobody is coming here to create content if all they can expect are a few measly pennies worth of tips for their time.