Wait what? Do you still see ads even if you pay?
I don't care about NordVPN, Brilliant, SkillShare, or any other trash. I'm entirely less likely to use services that annoy me with their advertising.
Issue is that the UX isn't great (e.g. there are no playlists nor queues, and downloads don't work as well as they do on YouTube).
UX is pretty meh (although the "Nebula Enhancer" browser plugin at least fixes the missing queue), but that doesn't work in the app obviously
https://youtu.be/40Q7usuG2Cw?si=gfUS6TzIgNImTORX
On my phone so I can't easily timestamp but showing monetary amounts begins at 6:50
Brilliant, $4500 for 3 videos. Blinkist, $2000 for one video. VPN, specific brand not named, $5800 for a 90 second ad read. Raid Shadow Legends, $2000-6000 depending on if he's willing to dedicate time in his video to just playing the game on camera. Skillshare $2000 for a 90 second ad read.
The most interesting part to me was these are often not directly offered by these companies. They are from advertising partners who have a referral program with the primary company. So he would often get multiple emails to advertise the same product from different senders and offering different amounts of money.
Especially if they're small creators. There really is a threshold in advertising where a lot of indie creators are not going to be offered this kind of money.
I don't blame creators for doing what they need to do to make money, the state of advertising is not their fault. But as an ecosystem of users and developers and as an industry, we can make a choice about whether a system that encourages influencers to lie about product recommendations and directly influences their content and the topics they can talk about is more or less exploitative and regressive than asking people to give money to creators directly.
Advertising is often phrased as an alternative to regressive taxes on content -- it allows us to give content to people who couldn't pay otherwise. But advertising is itself a regressive tax; advertisers would not be paying any money for advertising if it didn't change purchaser behavior. And for the social cost of that regressive tax, content creators get very little payout in return. $2000-6000 for a video sounds good only because we're thinking about it in comparison to Youtube payout. But it's not very much money for a video that likely required multiple workers and several weeks to a month to produce.