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Comment by sumanthvepa | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that YouTube's business model is ad supported. They need to run ads to pay for infrastructure to support the service and make profit for themselves, since they are not charging the user. So a sufficiently large channel that does not permit ads will eat into their revenues.i.e. it becomes an expensive free rider. This, I guess, is the reason behind the decision. I suppose it makes sense. But I don't see why they don't offer a paid option to entities like Blender who don't want ads?

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More to the point, why don't they go ahead and permit those of us who are paying them -- i.e., YouTube Red subscribers -- to view the blocked videos?

I suspect that that would not result in sufficient revenue to offset the costs of hosting Blender's videos.

And that would be my problem because...?

If they need to charge more, then they should charge more. YT Red is arguably too cheap.

But then you are paywalling access to videos of non-profit organisation. Meaning 1. Blender will have to use different platform to make them accessible to everyone anyway. 2. Youtube/Google are still making money on otherwise free content.

Don't get me wrong i think they should get money for hosting but they want much more than that. That is the reason why they don't have any hosting premium plans (like vimeo does). If they did Im sure Blender foundation would pay for hosting of their videos.

Also lets not forget the overall highly positive impact these Blender videos have for the platform. They bring in people from embedded videos and people continue watching more videos (most likely monetized ones). When youtube hosts videos from blender or MIT they also can claim (as they love to do) how big educational impact they have...

The argument against that idea is that YouTube freely offers the choice to monetise or not monetise any video, if popular videos being hosted without monetisation is an issue for them then it's their duty to make it clear that clicking that button might mean having your entire channel destroyed without warning or explanation.

Which is frankly ridiculous anyway, if they want to change the rules for unmonetised videos, they should actually change the rules, have a setting on the button that says "if the video becomes popular enough, YouTube reserves the right to run our own advertising against the video" and just run ads.

Actually YouTube has started a patronage "Sponsorship" system, where users pay $5 a month to support a channel (and get "perks").

Yes. But this puts the burden on blender's viewers. That may not result in sufficient revenue. (Generally charging the viewer is not a winning revenue generation strategy.) The creator may more resources to pay and definitely more incentive.

I've been sponsoring a channel for a few months now but still find that youtube runs ads on their videos. I guess the perks are for exclusive live chats and stuff. Still, it's better than not having a sponsorship system.

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