YouTube's paid subscription offering takes shape | Hacker News Reader

YouTube's paid subscription offering takes shape

theverge.com

38 pointsprostoalex48 comments

Finally. Call me sentimental, but ad blocking makes me uncomfortable, especially on a site like YouTube where most creators seem to really struggle to earn a reasonable amount of compensation for their effort. Yet a short while back, I finally lost patience with the ever-increasing duration and prevalence of YouTube's video ads and installed a blocker; to me, personally, their demand on my attention was starting to bring back bad memories of ad-festooned TV shows and just feel truly obnoxious and disrespectful. I will be happy to turn off the blocker and switch to paying with money, which I do not value as much as my brain.

I wonder if ads will come back for the subscribers anyway, as happened with cable. Especially once advertisers start pointing out to google that the only people they actually want to advertise to are the subscribers.

Bingo. The people most likely to pay are by far also the most valuable user segment to advertisers. Sooner or later some ads will find their way back in.

If they did, why would they subscribe at all? Okay maybe they get special subscriber only videos, but if a channel wanted that Patreon already has that feature.

Maybe people would subscribe so they could actually find what they're looking for. Good luck finding a specific movie or a series episode right now. It just doesn't work.

Hulu comes to mind. I can't fathom why someone would pay for such a service, but I presume that they do.

I assume this deal has no affect on the sponsor ads creators already put directly in their videos.

YouTube may introduce multiple premium plans:

Less ads / bubble ads only ($5/mo).

No ads ($10/mo).

More expensive content, like new movies ($20/mo).

Premium subscribes would see occasional ads anyway, when they are not authenticated under their premium YouTube account.

"We'll double the rates for your subscribers!"

Yeah, that could happen.

I assume in that case subscribers will have no qualms using ad-blockers.

In the current system most pro youtubers have patreons. This one for cgp grey[0] for instance. You'll have explicit acknowledment of adblocks and plenty of options to pay directly the video producer.

I kinda think this is the only viable tradeoff, where advertiswr will always have the upper hand for wide public services, while creators will benefit from having a more tight knit core of viewers willing to pay for more convenience.

The deal youtube is offering doesn't garanteead free, while the creators aren't guaranteed signifiant revenue.

[0]https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey

It's great, but very late. I'm unsure about the pricing - $10 is very pricey (I pay ~$20 for internet). I would've /thought/ about it if it was $5, though, to be fair, I'm not a huge Youtube user.

$10 is Netflix money. I can't really make sense of it in proportion to lack of premium content. Especially since YouTube have been awful at stringing together a smart way to build a station/feed to watch people regularly.

$5 would make a lot more sense.

There is a lot of music there, the article sounds like this would be music key + everything else. That would make it an extra cost of $2 for all non-music videos.

Honestly I'd pay $10 for youtube given the quantity of letsplay/podcasts I watch through yt. $10 is definitely not beyond the realm of possibility.

I already pay $2/month for a channel for the kid and then $30 for a random third-party "youtube downloader pro" app that lets me load those videos on iPad for a long car ride, some YouTube use cases are better than others.

"And YouTube's carrot comes with a stick — creators are required to participate in the subscription offering, or every video on their channels will be set to private, sources said."

Does this mean that uploading free videos to YouTube for free viewing is dead?

My interpretation is just that if an uploader turns on monetization for a video, then the money they make for that video can come from both ads and from the people with paid subscriptions (i.e., you can't have a video which doesn't participate in the new program and that just continues to show everyone ads, because then the paid subscribers would not be able to skip ads for that video, even though that's what their subscription is supposed to do).

This has nothing to do with uploading videos for free that can be watched for free.

Isn't that a similar issue [1] to what Zoe Keating went though not long ago?

[1] - http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/108898194009/what-should-i...

Not really, she was required to release her entire back catalog and any future releases too.

I don't get that interpretation, unless you mean "ad-free videos" in which case maybe. I'm not sure if you can upload ad-free videos (edit - I mean, I'm not sure if you can do this currently).

If you can, then I'd expect this means that if you have ads, then they won't be shown to anyone with a subscription.

The monetization formula for subscribers and free viewers will obviously be different. It means the channel owner can't just accept the free viewing model exclusively.

> It means the channel owner can't just accept the free viewing model exclusively.

I pray that I'm either misunderstanding you, or you are misunderstanding Youtube. Partners must be able to choose whether they want videos to be shown to subscribers only, or for everyone. There can NOT be any forced exclusive deals for subscribers.

It sounds like it's just a strong incentive for creators not to opt-out of the the program entirely.

I think they are simply trying to force all partners to accept the new terms.

Something particularly interesting there is the way the money will be split:

> Individual partners' cuts will be apportioned based on how much time their viewers spend watching their channels

This could provide a nice incentive to have longer videos rather than shorter ones (for quick views). Particularly for full episodes of something.

I wonder if that's the route they're hoping to go down? If they had a good selection of films & tv shows then this could be quite nice (much more so with offline viewing!).

It will mean minute physics will get very little and any random let's play will get a lot more.

That's one side, but a very specific example.

If you pay for views rather than duration you incentivise short videos, if you pay for duration you incentivise long videos.

If you go for duration the risk is that you have lots of long easily made videos getting money instead of short hard to make videos. Is that going to harm more things than paying for views?

I think I'd rather have a 10 minute lets-play earn 10x more than one minute physics video than have a playlist of the ten funniest 6s cat videos earn 10x more than one view of minute physics.

Thing is though, making one minute of lets-play costs a lot less (time / money) than making one minute physics or crash course or you name it.

Also, I probably watch hundreds of hours of youtube every month so the amount that ends up at each channel will be extremely small 5.50 / monthlyHours * oursPerChannel isn't going to be very much in the end.

The biggest winners are going to be MCNs (Multi Channel Networks, which most Let's Plays are part of) which take another 20-30% of the revenue generated by each of their partnering channels.

If you want to support single channels, something like Patreon is still going to reign superior in terms of actual money received at the other end.

> Thing is though, making one minute of lets-play costs a lot less (time / money) than making one minute physics or crash course or you name it.

Well yes, as I say it's a tradeoff. A 10s video of a cat falling off a chair takes less time and money to make than any of those.

Here's a way they could solve it: give ability to donate money directly to channel(s). So let's say I want to give $1/month to MinutePhysics - I donate, and get this channel ad-free. Or maybe I want to donate $10/month to be split in half between MinutePhysics and Scott Manley, so I do that, but since I'm over $10, I get the whole no-ads plan as well.

YouTube will take an ad fee anyway, and the current option could stay as the default ("I don't care about any channel in particular, I just want no ads!").

I don't really care about the playlist of cat videos - assuming youtube divides based on the individuals time spent there and not globally - they aren't getting much from me. I do care about lets play/minute physics because that is what I watch.

And I actually like to incentive short videos because that way I get the info I want faster.

> I don't really care about the playlist of cat videos - assuming youtube divides based on the individuals time spent there and not globally

Ah yes, now this is quite an important distinction. If it's my $10 split over what I watch, then that's different to splitting everyone's money globally.

I thought it was the latter from this part of the story:

> Subscription revenues will be pooled, with partners receiving 55 percent of the total. Individual partners' cuts will be apportioned based on how much time their viewers spend watching their channels, though

However, I'd like to see something that more clearly defines what it is.

I think one big issue either way is that watching a video doesn't define how much value I derive from it, and the value is what I personally want to incentivise. One five minute video of a random lets-play is not equivalent (to me) to a five minute smarter every day video, even though both would get one view and 5 minutes of watching time from me.

But, provided they don't just take the full length of the video - you have to keep those people entertained for that full length.

That's not very easy (except perhaps for let's plays where the persona is amusing)

Indeed, I would expect it's viewing duration, otherwise we'd see 20 hour videos with 1 minute of content.

A better system would be to take the the higher paying of either duration based or view based pay.

> A better system would be to take the the higher paying of either duration based or view based pay.

I'm not sure how this would work when sharing profits between people.

Next step: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/

But they will still track and log everything I do no matter what kind of subscription I have, won't they. And the site won't become any less bloated.

Well, at least it's a step forward.

Or you could just use a script like youtube-dl and not deal with ads or tracking cookies or anything of the sort. And, y'know, actually get to keep the video.

Yes, but I like to reward people whose content I consume regularly and not everyone is on Patreon, sadly.

Changetip? Find out their email and then Paypal to them?

Seriously, I mean they have to have a path to accept money somewhere if you wish to push money at them. Or, "You can lead a content creator to money but you can't make them accept teh cash". ;3

Never heard of anyone using Changetip and not everyone has Paypal. Also not everyone is using their public email as their PP email.

I know some people who refuse to accept "donations" for some moral reasons that are unfathomable to me. TotalBiscuit is one of them, actually.

https://soundcloud.com/totalbiscuit/maybe-subbablepatreon-is...

That's a giving steep price they are demanding, good luck with that.

Netflix is cheaper and has more content of a higher quality.

There was a time when search worked on YouTube. Then came Google, the world champion of search. And search got worse and more nonfunctional by the day on YouTube. Now they want me to believe that search will work again, after I throw money at them? “Don't be evil” my hind foot. I already drastically decreased my YouTube usage in the past. I guess I will avoid it entirely in the future.

Now that ad free is premium feature, how will youtube treat ad blockers?

The better question is how will Google treat adblockers in the Chrome store (especially now that you can't install extensions from outside the store anymore)? Google has already banned adblockers on the Play Store. I don't think that will be an easy thing to do though, so I doubt they will actually try that, unless they can come up with a really "good reason" to do it (the NSA gets you through the adblocker!...or something).

There will always be ways to skip ads. I guess going premium will be the morally right way. Look at spotify: any day you want, you can download the mp3 from a million sites, but people prefer spotify (probably because of comfortability, but still I know a lot of people that are willing to pay back to the authors).

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