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Comment by dymk | Hacker News Reader

And yet there are still swaths of HN commenters claiming that people would surely support paid, ad-free alternatives to YT, if only they existed.

Well, this is try two. Think people will still try to claim it’s a viable model over ads after this one?

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Since the beginning of television, there have been commercials and sponsored television programming. NPR/PBS has made the user supported thing work along side the sponsored programming. The audience is willing to put up with ads in exchange of viewing free content. However, those commercials never had the ability of doing me or my viewing platform any harm. Apart from malicious ad networks, my biggest complaint over the ads is there entirely total lack of concern for placement. Content created for commercial television has breaks where ads occur. YT and other platforms just randomly place an ad based on some formula for number of ads per total run time.

It's way beyond Try 2.

And the last company to try this exact model, Vessel, was snapped up and murdered by Verizon to keep it from being a threat...

I honestly think it is, and becoming more so. I've personally already signed up for YouTube premium, because I hate ads. I've signed up to this as well.

I'd gladly pay for quality content. My time is worth it. And are most people's.

Well, obviously someone will find some actually unrelated reason for why this will fail. Let me try one: the thumbnails don't autoplay when I hover. That's why this failed. There's going to be a God of the Gaps thing going on here.

Oh oh, how about "this doesn't accept crypto. it's doomed"

> Well, this is try two. Think people will still try to claim it’s a viable model over ads after this one?

Is Nebula shooting for organic growth, or did they take VC money like Vidme did?

If Nebula took VC money, they are as equally doomed.

It is a viable method, you just won't get many customers. For a smaller userbase, it is entirely feasible and profitable to do stuff like this based on subscriptions. Ad revenue can be higher, but is volatile and harder to implement. Personally, I feel like this is delving too close to other SVOD services. While a potential four figure CPM is alluring, I don't think we'll truly begin to see it.

How is a smaller user base more viable? You can look at Patreon to see just how few accounts make anywhere near a fulltime salary, let alone enough to pay for top tier video production. This model depends on scale.

Also how are ads "harder to implement"?

Ads are harder to implement correctly. Obviously, you can get an AdSense script tag and probably get it working in a couple days, but if you want a good CPM, that's not plausible.

A smaller user base is more valuable as they're more targeted and likelier to buy subscriptions. There are your outliers like those Patreon accounts and Netflix, but they're not very common.

There have been hundreds of attempts and Youtube itself already has direct monetization options.

Video is the hardest because of the cost of production and hosting, but subscriptions just don't scale very far. People always forget that the vast majority of people on this planet cannot afford these rates, and putting up a paywall only prevents them from getting access.

> And yet there are still swaths of HN commenters claiming that people would surely support paid, ad-free alternatives to YT, if only they existed.

Nobody will and whoever claims that is either 1) mad wealthy or 2) out of touch. Or both.

Considering how well paid tech is, and how willing we are to resign ourself to our little HN bubble, I'm unsurprised to see the claim made so often here.

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