 Three years ago, you all said it wouldn't work. Up until now, you've been right. Yeah, but that all changes today. Floatplane 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, wanna 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. Yeah. Did we have time to build an algorithm? No, there's still a lot of work for us to do. 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, we've already battle tested the platform with the Linus Tech Tips channel acting as our own biggest customer. 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 Floatplane. 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 P-score controversy, actually I wrote this a while ago, but that's okay, because they've got the new COPPA 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 Tencent or business interests 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. Floatplane 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, bearing 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. 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 TechDeals, UFD Tech, EposVox, Science Studio, and the one and only Lyle from Bitwit. If you want to learn more, head to floatplane.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 people that are like, this is stupid. This is going to fail. 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.