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Would You Pay For YouTube Videos?
secmartin writes "A couple of weeks ago, Google's CEO mentioned to investors that they might start charging YouTube's users for viewing content: 'With respect to how it will get monetized, our first priority, as you pointed out, is on the advertising side. We do expect over time to see micro payments and other forms of subscription models coming as well. But our initial focus is on advertising. We will be announcing additional things in that area literally very, very soon.' With the recent Disney-Hulu deal, Google is under increasing pressure to generate more revenue and at the same time attract more premium content. That means we might see payment options coming even sooner than expected, with control over the pricing models being handed over to the studios providing that content, like the way Apple caved in over variable pricing on iTunes. This raises an important question: would you actually pay for premium content on YouTube and other sites, or will this draw viewers away to other video sites?"
Yup, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't pay for YouTube. Now, if they set up some sort of system where you could tip the people who put up particularly neat stuff and skimmed a percentage off of that, I could see doing that.
Remember RFC 873!
YouTube could much more easily make money by charging a small fee to UPLOAD video to YouTube. If they charged you $1 per video upload, they'd make a mint and most people would be happy to pay it.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Pay to view? Sorry. There isn't much quality content on youtube worth paying for.
Pay to post? That might work. People who pay could have more control over their content. They could keep it from being compressed to hell, do things like swap the youtube logo with their own, have embedded links in their content, etc... I bet there is money in that market. But I'll tell you one thing... there ain't a damn thing on youtube I'd pay for. Cover bands doing cheesy remixes, teenagers getting their 15-minutes, and videos of cute pandas eating bamboo aren't worth paying for.
I work in a media corp that is currently in a long-term transition to all ad-supported, and, from experience, I'll tell you it's not going to work.
The problem with ad supported on the internet is that you can't charge what you charge for a TV spot or a newspaper ad...There are too many people vying for a slice of the internet ad revenue pie. But the majority of the costs for producing your high-end product remain.
So what's the alternative to charging for it? I mean, I've been thinking about this for (literally) a decade, and I really used to think that we could be self-supporting by ad revenue, and it's just not happening.
We've been riding the "free" gravy train for a long time. Lot of companies have been using their web presence as a loss leader, or justifying their losses on the potential for future monitization. This is going to end. It simply has to.
I can very easily see YouTube transitioning to what is effectively an a la carte cable TV provider...You pay a buck a month to the ESPN channel on YouTube, or whatever. The current configuration becomes effectively a massive public access cable channel, supported by subscription-based premium channels.
And, when it comes down to it, I see nothing wrong with that. I'd cancel my cable service in favor of something like that, in a heartbeat. It'd kill Tivo, and traditional cable.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The question is not "IF", but "HOW MUCH".
If youtube offered full-length feature films with good quality, then I'd be ready to pay a reasonable amount. Let's say about the same price I pay to rent a DVD for a 700 MB download. The DVD has a better quality, but downloading is more convenient.
It's about time the media industry learned about this thing they call a "market". It's up to the seller to set a price but it's the buyer who accepts to pay the price or not.