In today’s creator economy, a handful of closed platforms – YouTube, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), TikTok – dominate online video. They have built empires on the content of millions of creators, but at a high cost to those creators’ earnings, autonomy, and creative freedom. Under the status quo, creators are tenants on corporate platforms, paying steep “platform taxes” in revenue share and constrained by opaque algorithms and policies. It’s time for a new paradigm. Open.Video is a vision for an open video platform where creators host their own channels on their own domains and keep 100% of their revenue. This manifesto lays out why such a model is not just desirable but necessary – for economic fairness, cultural diversity, and the future of creative independence.
Economic Impact: The Platform Tax on Creators’ Livelihoods
Closed video platforms have inserted themselves as intermediaries in the creator–audience relationship, siphoning off significant portions of creators’ income. On YouTube, the standard revenue split is 55/45, meaning nearly half of every ad dollar goes to the platform rather than the creator. TikTok offers even less – in fact, it offers no direct ad-revenue share at all to most creators. Instead, TikTok’s monetization relies on a fixed “Creator Fund” pool that, spread across the platform’s huge user base, translates to paltry payouts.
TikTok pays roughly $0.02–$0.04 per 1,000 views – about $20–$40 for a million views. By contrast, YouTube creators might earn on the order of $3–$5 per 1,000 views – around $3,000–$5,000 per million views in ad revenue. The difference is staggering.
For creators trying to earn a living, these platform-imposed revenue schemes make sustainability elusive. YouTube’s own CEO boasted that over $70 billion was paid out to creators, artists and media companies in the last 3 years – yet that sum is concentrated among top channels, with little reaching the long tail of smaller creators.
Studies have revealed extreme inequality in YouTube earnings: the top 3% of channels receive over 90% of all viewership, leaving 90% of creators to fight over the scraps (the remaining 10% of views).
Even hitting the top 3% is often not enough to live on – one analysis found that a channel with ~1.4 million monthly views (a threshold for top 3%) would earn under $17,000 a year from YouTube ad revenue, barely above poverty level. In fact, roughly 96% of YouTubers won’t make enough from YouTube to cross the U.S. poverty line on ad income alone. On TikTok and Instagram, the prospects are even dimmer. TikTok’s $1 billion Creator Fund (spread globally) was so limited that prominent creators like Hank Green reported earning only 2.5 cents per 1,000 views as more users joined the program, a decline from an already meager 5 cents. Instagram and Facebook launched bonus programs for Reels, but these were temporary carrots; Meta ended its Reels Play bonus program in 2023 as payouts shrank and the program “had its ups and downs,” leaving creators once again with no direct revenue share on those platforms. In short, the closed-platform model forces creators to accept a major cut taken off their earnings or rely on volatile, opaque “funds” and bonuses that can vanish overnight.
- YouTube’s 55/45 split: Creators receive 55% of ad revenue while YouTube keeps 45%, meaning the platform takes almost half of what your content earns.
- TikTok’s tiny payouts: With ~$0.03 per 1k views from the Creator Fund, a million-view video might earn only $20–$40 – virtually nothing for the effort and influence of that content.
- Most creators aren’t making a living: The vast majority of YouTubers (over 90%) split only 10% of total views, and even 1.4 million monthly views can yield under $17k/year in ad revenue – far from a sustainable income.
- Unreliable programs: Meta’s and TikTok’s creator funds were finite and short-lived. Instagram’s Reels bonus pool was terminated in 2023 as payments dwindled, and TikTok’s fund effectively penalized creators as more joined. There is no guarantee these platforms won’t change the rules or cut payouts at any moment.
For creators, this economic imbalance means working harder and amassing larger audiences just to earn a modest income – all while the platforms enjoy billion-dollar ad revenues. It’s an untenable status quo that treats creators as replaceable content labor, rather than partners or owners of their creative work.
Open.Video flips this script. In an open platform model, creators can keep 100% of their revenue, whether from fan subscriptions, tips, or self-arranged sponsorships. There is no platform “tax” skimming off 45% simply for the privilege of using a hosting service.
Every dollar your audience gives in support of your work goes directly to you. The economic promise of Open.Video is creator sovereignty over monetization: your channel, your audience, your earnings.
Cultural Consequences: Algorithmic Gatekeeping and Loss of Creative Autonomy
Beyond the economics, the closed-platform monopoly has dire effects on culture and creative freedom. When a few centralized algorithms and policies control what gets seen, promoted, or suppressed, creators and audiences alike suffer from a throttled, homogenized media ecosystem.
On YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, the algorithm is king – it decides which videos land on the front page or “For You” feed and which languish unseen. This algorithmic gatekeeping tends to favor content that maximizes watch time or ad clicks, often privileging sensational, trendy, or formulaic videos. Creators quickly learn that to succeed, they must appease the algorithm, tailoring content length, style, and subject matter to what the black-box recommender will reward.
This pressure gives rise to a culture of clickbait and endless trend-chasing, while more niche, experimental, or nuanced creativity is sidelined. The net result is a chilling effect on creativity: creators feel compelled to produce more of what the algorithm likes, rather than what they truly want to make. Their creative autonomy is subjugated to an automated feedback loop engineered for corporate growth and ad revenue.
Equally concerning is the centralization of content moderation and censorship on these platforms. A single company’s policies determine the bounds of acceptable speech for billions of users. YouTube’s demonetization and content takedown policies have been widely criticized for arbitrary decisions. Many creators have seen videos removed or demonetized without clear explanation, or entire channels shut down due to sudden policy shifts or algorithmic flagging. TikTok has been reported to suppress or remove content around sensitive social and political topics, sometimes without justification.
“Algospeak” – creators contorting language to avoid algorithmic censorship (using words like “unalive” or “s3x” instead of banned words) – is a new dialect born from fear of moderation.
Centralized moderation can also lead to outright censorship and uniformity in cultural discourse. When all creators are subject to one corporation’s content rules (which may be influenced by advertisers or government pressures), entire perspectives or art forms can be marginalized. By cutting off monetization on certain topics or videos, platforms effectively make some forms of content unsustainable, pressuring creators to self-censor.
Open.Video promises a different path: a decentralized network of creator-owned channels would shatter the one-size-fits-all algorithm and allow a true flowering of diverse content and communities.
Moderation in an open network would be community-driven and transparent. Each creator or independent host could set their own content guidelines suited to their community and values. Controversial or artistic content that might violate one site’s rules could still find a home on another node of the network that has looser restrictions – without the creator being exiled from the entire ecosystem. This federated approach to moderation preserves free expression and cultural pluralism.
The Promise of Open.Video: Creator Sovereignty, Pluralism, and Decentralization
Open.Video is more than a platform – it’s a principle. It represents a shift from corporate-controlled networks to an open, federated landscape where creators have true sovereignty over their content, their monetization, and their communities. Imagine a world where each creator is the master of their own domain – literally hosting their channel on their own website or a server of their choice – and yet is still connected to a wider video distribution network. This is the world Open.Video seeks to create.
- Creator Sovereignty and Autonomy: With Open.Video, you own your channel. Your videos live on your domain, under your rules. No arbitrary account bans can vaporize your life’s work, because your content isn’t sitting in someone else’s walled garden – it’s on a site you control. Creators can set their own moderation policies and community guidelines for their channels or open-video instance. You are the owner and custodian of your digital creative real estate.
- Economic Independence – 100% of Revenue to Creators: Open.Video envisions direct monetization without the platform middleman. If you sell premium content or accept fan contributions, those go directly to you. There is no 45% platform cut skimming off your livelihood. The key is choice: creators can choose how to monetize and use open-source or third-party tools to do so, without being locked into whatever limited options YouTube or TikTok provide.
- Cultural Pluralism and Free Expression: An open, decentralized video network supports a far more diverse and pluralistic media culture. Instead of one centrally curated feed or one set of community standards, Open.Video would consist of many interconnected communities, each free to develop its own identity. By decentralizing distribution, we get cultural resilience: no single point of failure can silence a voice across the entire network.
- Decentralization of Distribution and Innovation: In an open ecosystem, distribution is not beholden to one website’s recommendation engine. Viewers could subscribe directly to creators, use third-party apps to aggregate content, or rely on community-curated discovery platforms. Open.Video encourages a wave of innovation in video platforms, letting developers and creators build what the community actually wants.
- Resilience and Security for Creators: In the Open.Video model, a creator cannot be “deplatformed” at the whim of a company or a coordinated troll attack exploiting a platform’s report system. If a particular hosting provider goes down, you can move to another without losing your followers. Open.Video treats creators as independent media entities, not disposable content suppliers.
Conclusion: A Manifesto for a Creator-Centric Future
We stand at a crossroads in online video. Down one path, the creator economy remains boxed in by a few corporate platforms that dictate the terms, take a hefty cut of revenues, and algorithmically channel creative expression into commercially “safe” formats. Down the other path lies a renaissance of open, decentralized creativity – a world in which creators reclaim control of their work and livelihoods, and audiences enjoy a richer, freer media landscape.
Why does the world need Open.Video? Because the alternative is a cultural monopoly, and we’ve already seen the pitfalls of that: income inequality for creators, creative homogenization, censorship and self-censorship, and vulnerability to the whims of Big Tech. Open.Video is a call to action to flip the power structure: to build a video platform that is as open and distributed as the web itself, where creators and viewers directly shape the experience.
This manifesto is not anti-YouTube or anti-TikTok per se – it’s pro-creator and pro-audience. The existing platforms did bring us this far; they proved the immense appetite for creator-driven content. But their closed, profit-first architecture is not the end state we should accept. The next evolution is to take the infrastructure and democratize it. Just as the open-source movement revolutionized software and the open internet disrupted telecom monopolies, open video can liberate digital creativity from corporate gatekeepers.
To content creators reading this: imagine the freedom of not being at the algorithm’s mercy, of owning your community data, of monetizing how you see fit, and of collaborating across an open network without walls. That’s the future Open.Video is working toward. Every creator who stakes a claim on the open web – by starting a channel on their own site or joining a federated video instance – helps light the way for others.
This is our manifesto: We refuse to accept that the future of video must be governed by a few corporations’ terms and conditions. We assert that creators have the right to own their platform, own their content, and own their earnings. We believe that audiences deserve a diverse ecosystem of content, not just what one algorithm decides to serve. We commit to building and supporting open systems that return power to creators and communities. The world needs Open.Video because the world needs an internet where creativity is truly free – free as in freedom.
It’s time to unleash an open video revolution. The tools are ready, the need is clear, and the beneficiaries will be all of us – creators and viewers alike. When creators thrive independently, culture thrives collectively. Let’s make the creator economy truly of the creators, by breaking down the walls and opening up the video platform of tomorrow.
Sources: Data drawn from public analysis of YouTube and TikTok monetization models, studies on creator earnings, reports of algorithmic and moderation issues, and the documented benefits of decentralized video networks like PeerTube and Odysee.
