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Comment by jshen | Hacker News Reader

The solution is paying for content, but it's been shown over and over again that the vast majority of people won't pay for most of the content they consume.

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It's been shown that when companies will run products at a massive loss for years in order to capture a monopoly that most customers will make the individually rational choice of taking the free service offered.

Youtube only got to where it is now by Google plowing billions of dollars from a different monopoly into it. Most of the other major "free" consumer tech products gained their market share by burning way more money than most competitors could afford.

I'm not so sure, people pay for Netflix and Spotify and other content services. Maybe most of the content on YouTube is not worth paying for?

There are YouTube channels i watch, but it's just a fun distraction. If they went away I'm not sure I would care that much. The educational stuff is handy, but that is all out there in different forms on the web anyway.

YouTube has a lot of content that is the highest quality of any platform. It also has a ton of crap content, because they simply have an enormous amount of content. It's like a supermarket in that sense. You could refuse to go there and buy the highest quality beef because you don't like that they also sell soft drinks and processed candy bars in the front.

Youtube has a wealth of highly valuable content that is very niche. I'd love for someone to figure out how to pay the creators of that content via a paid platform like netflix or spotify, many have tried, and no one has succeeded yet.

I'd like to be wrong, but so far the ad model is the best business model for such content.

Seems like the content market is due for a correction, then. If people are sick of toxic ads, and toxic ads pay for content, but nobody else wants to pay for the content, the content can just die and we'll figure something else out I'm sure.

I think you're on the right track. Unfortunately, the toxic "free" model with ads has trained everybody to expect all content for free. This is completely unsustainable; there will be a correction of some sort, and it's my opinion that we've already entered that stage. It's going to be painful, but I'm hopeful that the end state is that people consider ad-laden "free" content to be not worth their time. I'm already there.

I signed up for Kagi search recently (I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just a satisfied customer), and aside from searching reddit, I consider their results to be superior to Google's. One of their main signals for downranking is how heavily ad/tracker-laden a page is.

Why do you believe that youtube and facebook aren't sustainable? They seem sustainable to me.

I'm also a Kagi user! I'm leaning towards using products that I pay for that promise me a dignified experience. I worry though, that we're heading to future where there's a class of people that do not see ads and have some degree of privacy and a class of people that do see ads and have no privacy and I fear for their minds and that culture, as I do not think that system lends itself to narrowing any inequality gaps. I worry for increasingly ad supported hardware. I worry. ;)

I think people would pay. Ads offer more money then people are willing to pay. Alot of content is expensive for what it offers.

I agree, and I think part of the correction would be because of your latter point.

Paying for it has added consideration "costs" of commitment and calls for more checking out before watching it if it would be worth it or not. Viewers come easier when they can try before they buy and the quality threshold for "would pay money for" is much higher than "would pretend to pay attention to ads for". Not paying for content thus has less friction to it.

I think people won't pay for licenses to access to content (well they already are). But I think it comes down to the tangibility of the product in question. Digital licenses to access content can come and go at a whim. No thanks.

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