Recently I’ve been thinking about the earning potential of a big YouTuber that comes over to DTube. Usually someone with a following will attract some big upvotes, but what about the thousands of followers that a YouTuber can bring with them to the platform.
Today I’m going to look at a comparison between how much a YouTuber can earn from a single view, versus how much they can earn from a single upvote from a new user on DTube.
Reward Comparison
On YouTube, you can choose to display ads on your videos to earn some money. After searching around a bit, it seems that earnings on YouTube vary dramatically from creator to creator depending on a bunch of different factors, but the general range is between $1 and $5 per thousand views. This article was helpful in finding these numbers. With a range from $1 to $5 per thousand views, we have that a single view will earn a YouTuber between $0.001 and $0.005.
On Steem, new user accounts have about 15 SP. I used the upvote calculator on Steem Now to find that the upvote of a new user is worth roughly $0.003. (It only shows two decimal places so I calculated it for 150 SP and then moved the decimal on the upvote value). This value is based on the current Steem price of course, so changes in Steem will mean changes in the new account upvote value. Also, keep in mind that with the higher SBD price right now, a $0.003 upvote is actually worth more than that. In most cases authors will receive about 75% of the payout from the post, with the rest going to curation rewards.
It’s pretty interesting to see that this number falls right within the range of the average YouTube view value.
Platform Comparison
So if the average value of a single YouTube view is comparable to a 100% upvote on a brand new Steem account, let’s take a look at the differences between the platforms.
The first difference is that a video on YouTube can generate money for as long as it’s showing ads — there isn’t a 7 days payout limit like on DTube. Also, it’s more difficult to get an upvote than a view. On YouTube users don’t have to have an account to watch a video, and they aren’t limited in how many views per day they can hand out. This is a pretty big deal considering how many users there are on YouTube. On DTube people have to register and then remember to vote for a post, or decide which posts they want to give their limited voting power for the day.
A big thing in DTube’s favor is that a new user can start earning money immediately. They made some changes recently on YouTube that require 4,000 hours of overall watch time within the past 12 months and at least 1,000 subscribers to be eligible to display ads. Also, a post on DTube with only one upvote can have a huge payout if it’s from a whale. Another really important point is that no money needs to come out of someone’s pocket to pay for these upvotes. The price we pay on YouTube for this fact is the need to watch ads before videos.
So it’s pretty hard to compare the reward potential on YouTube and DTube directly because they do things so differently, but it’s cool to see that even a new user on DTube can hand someone about as much as a view on YouTube would earn.
In any case, it will be fun to see how DTube develops this year! 🙂
Thanks for watching!
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