Plenty of good creators do this (as it works), just to keep up with their peers. It really has nothing to do with the quality of the rest of their content. Don’t blame the player, blame the game IMO
I would far rather pay an honest few cents for a page view or a video roll than be subjected to in-content advertising and begging from the creators. Certainly, creators would prefer to do their thing instead of beg and scrape.
What can we do to accelerate micropayment tech and patronage communities for creators?
> far rather pay an honest few cents for a page view or a video roll
I don't think this holds true for most people. PPV TV has always been kind of a minor thing, and eclipsed now by all-you-can-stream services. The feeling of continually inserting coins, or the taxi meter running, is uncomfortable to many people.
This is true, but I think fails to be a good counter-example. PPV has always been expensive and focused on single events. What we haven’t seen is AWS style small payments.
Imagine if instead of paying $100/mo for cable TV, we could pay $0.25/hr. If you watched TV 24x7, you’d pay more, but the vast majority of people would pay much less.
The main problem with smaller amount PPV and micro transactions in general is that it is hard to get the billing/accounting right. But this is something that could vendors get right. You only pay for what you use, and what you get is billed in small enough increments that it makes sense for everyone involved.
How this could be applied to online videos, I’m not sure.
Micropayment news services have existed (Blendle). Unpopular.
Pay-as-you-go prepaid cell phone service is also niche. So is the a-la-carte gym membership. It's not that billing/accounting is difficult. It's that it plain straight up makes less money. SAAS vs one-time upgrades, etc.
The reason for that is that it's much more expensive than paying by the month. I wanted pay-as-you-go specifically because I have nearly zero need for cell service, but would prefer to be reachable even if I'm not at home.
But you can't get a pay-as-you-go plan with pay-as-you-go pricing. T-mobile's monthly plan now is "$15" (actually something like $16.60) per month. The pay-as-you-go plan would cost less than that, given usage rates, except that it also costs $1 for each day you use it to any degree. The incredibly high minimum fee overwhelms the already small advantage of not paying for service you don't use -- as soon as you use any service, you get charged for more than a full day of every service, and then you have to pay a usage rate on top of that!
Make them nonprofit foundations democratically run rather than middlemen biding their time until they can increase their margins or sell to a megacorp.
You're not wrong though. Most creators probably hate asking for stuff.
Personally I refuse to do this and my channel on youtube still grows but it is probably growing a lot slower than if I had been begging.
Since I do it for fun and not profit I couldn't give a damn though.
He is the only one I can think of that doesn't do this and it makes me personally much more inclined to watch him. He also feels "uncommercial" even after 10 years I think it's fantastic that he is able to keep it that way.
While I haven't taken time to measure this out to academic standards, it's extremely obvious in niche interest channels - eg I'm into synthesizers, and there's a whole little subsystem of review videos, technique videos, not-talking demos, jam sessions etc. The more heavily branded/self-promoting presenters tend to get vastly more views. My favorite reviewer centers the equipment under review and makes occasional appearances talking to the camera, but his maximum views tends to be near the average minimum for reviewers who center themselves, eg always being on-screen in a box, mirror, or direct-to-camera shot and always showing their face and a relevant emotional reaction to the subject of the video in the poster frame. I'm sure the same patterns play out in many other specialist topics.
To some extent this may be a product of the Infamous Algorithm, but it might also reflect cognitive preferences of viewers in that many people prefer to have information mediated by a recognizable presenter whose reactions and emphases become more meaningful with repeated views, while others like me find an overly-expressive presenter distracts from the material under discussion and gravitate towards a more subdued/restrained communication style.
In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan distinguishes between 'hot' and 'cool' media which employ more or less intensity to solicit and maintain attention. 'Hot' styles with a charismatic and overtly solicitous presenter seem to be more popular in general, so even people who don't like that style may end up adopting it to gain viewership in a competitive market. There might be a market opportunity here for catering to different kinds of viewers, eg a 'CoolTube' for people who strongly prefer a more low-key presentation format.
Incidentally, I sometimes do prefer hot 'in-your-face' sort of media, especially on things like experimental music videos or the occasional guilty pleasure of a cheesy monster movie. It's just a hunch, but it seems to depend on things like a rapid tempo of editing and high levels of discontinuity/unpredictability rather than spatial maximalism.