If your earnings have been massively cut by YouTube, you may want to find other avenues to make money. One of them that I know is DTube (Decentralized Tube).
DTube is basically a video sharing platform that is similar to YouTube, but it’s decentralized, meaning there is no one body controlling it. Yeah, you have the developer who made it, but he can’t shut your account down or anything like that.
It’s still new, so it can’t handle anything above 480p for now. Kinda like the old YouTube. It uses IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), which is something like P2P torrents (a feature which makes it sort of decentralized).
So how do you earn on DTube?
Before understanding how you can earn on DTube, you need to first understand what the Steem blockchain is. Steem was created by Ned and Dan a couple of years ago. It is a blockchain with a fast token (3 second speed) and zero fees. Think Bitcoin but much faster and it’s free!
Steem is normally confused with Steemit. Steemit is a platform created by them to reward content. How it works is that you can vote on posts and comments, and the author of the post/comment earns some Steem Power and Steem Dollars (aka SBD). Here’s where it gets confusing.
There are three terms you should know, i.e. Steem Dollars, Steem and Steem Power. Steem Dollars is pegged to 1 USD for the purpose of creating a stable currency. Clearly it failed because you can’t peg the price in the market. It’s like 4 USD in the market.
Steem and Steem Power is related, i.e. Steem is like the liquid state and Steem Power is like a “fixed deposit”. You can power up Steem to Steem Power and of course power down Steem Power to Steem. It takes 12 weeks to power down Steem Power fully.
What gives your vote more value is your Steem Power. A person with 1,000 Steem Power can only give a vote of maybe less than a dollar. A person with 1 million Steem Power can give a vote of at least $100. The value also changes depending on the Steem price in the market.
Both Steem and Steem Dollars are traded in the exchanges (markets).
You must also know how the rewards are split. Authors pretty much get 75% of the post payouts and curators get 25% roughly. Curators are your voters. This is to give incentive to people to vote for other people’s content.
Screenshot of how it looks.
So how does it work on DTube?
DTube is a 3rd party platform that was created by someone not related to Steemit Inc. The way you earn is the same. People vote for your videos then you earn. This means if you have followers with lots of Steem Power, you may benefit a lot. But do make friends with everyone on the platform, not just the rich ones.
Furthermore, DTube has a Steem Power delegation by Steemit Inc, which means they could potentially vote on your video. If they do, you may earn quite a bit.
As it’s on the blockchain, your videos on DTube are automatically posted on Steemit as well.
How do you calculate post rewards?
Do note that at the time of writing, DTube takes an additional 25% of your post rewards as beneficiary rewards. For e.g. if your post makes $100, $25 will go to DTube. The remaining $75 is then split by curation and author rewards. You’ll be left with $56.25.
That $56.25 is then divided into Steem Power and Steem Dollars equally. You will get around 28 SBD and a lower amount of Steem Power. As the system assumes SBD is $1, you have to divide 28 SBD by the price of Steem in the market to get the Steem Power. Lets say the price of Steem is 4 USD. You will then get 7 Steem Power.
To sum it up, for a $100 post payout, you may end up with 28 Steem Dollars and 7 Steem Power (assuming price of Steem is $4).
28 Steem Dollars may be worth 100 USD at the current market price and 7 Steem Power is about 28 USD.
So you may earn about 128 USD for that video. It changes all the time depending on the price of Steem and Steem Dollars is in the market. If it’s higher, your earnings may even double. Similarly, if the price of Steem drops, your earning drops.
To add to that, your post can only get votes for 7 days. So the total after 7 days is what you get.
In a nutshell
DTube or any similar decentralized platform are still new. They’re still buggy but you can still earn from it. Who knows if they’ll be big in the future?
Do check out my other articles too:
30 Top Altcoins and Cryptocurrencies in 2019
