In my experience, quite a few people say such things elsewhere as well, but if you actually give them the opportunity to do so (even if it's not "a lot", but actually a pretty small fee), such offers tend to perform badly, even among the people who initially requested such a tier, unless ads are very, very intrusive (Youtube of late might be such a case) or it's bundled with other, actually useful functionality, more content etc., or rolled out as an increase of existing pricing instead of a separate offer people have to actively pick (risky in itself).
People in general appear to be much more price-conscious when it comes to such things than they themselves seem to realize.
Side note, Youtube Premium includes music that I wouldn't have used, so maybe the cost of the service makes sense for people who use that.
The average YouTube user (>18yo) spends 41 minutes per day on YouTube. Let's guess that an average view duration is 10 minutes (~80% of an average video of 11.7 minutes). That gives us 4 video views per day.
The average per view is $0.18, so $0.72 per day. Multiply by 30 to get a month, and you end up with $21.60.
YouTube Premium is $11.99/month. So yes, there's a huge prize difference - the advertising revenue would be ~$10 more than the YouTube Premium price.
https://blog.hootsuite.com/youtube-stats-marketers/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1026923/youtube-video-ca...
https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-do-youtubers-mak...
"On Average the YouTube channel can receive $18 per 1,000 ad views. This equates to $3 - $5 per 1000 video views."
I.e. 0.3 to 0.5 cent per video of which Google pockets 68%:32% which gives about 0.2 cent per video for Google per video view.
The first stats site says about 9 views per visit and day, so 9 videos a day is about 1.8 cent, times 30 days is 54 cents.
A year would be 6.5USD for the average user - about half a month of Premium.
However, as far as I understand, Google pays out the ads for premium customers, so you shouldn't count just the "to Google" portion. That's off in your calculation, to a factor of about 3. Using $4 (the average in $3 to $5) and 9 videos per day, we get 0.4cents * 9 * 365 = $13.14/year - a bit over a month of premium. Still devastating to my argument, of course.
Newest public data I can find says there are 20 million YouTube Premium subscribers. There's 2 billion monthly actives on YouTube - ie, 99% are not YouTube Premium subscribers.
https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/youtube-tops-20-millio...
It's all about putting the price in context.
I also observe that I do get some free newsletters and my usual pattern is I read them regularly for a bit and then they go into being read less and less frequently. (Which was admittedly often my pattern with magazines as well.)
I used Blende and was ready to spend quite a bit more on it, but they changed their rules and also had do little relevant content that at some point I gave up.
Recently found out one of the linux magazines sell digital articles as well as full digital so I will be probably be spending some money there, both for usefulness, entertainment (yep) and to support a good cause.
True, and I did before. I had a subscription to Ars Technica and a few other sites like Tweakers in the Netherlands (a big local tech site).
But, what I found lately was that these tech platforms were alienating me. They're trying to reach a wider audience and as such are delivering much less of interest to me. Much less 'deep dives' than before and more 'phoned in' articles and press release copy/pastes. And in the case of Tweakers are still delivering trackers like Google Analytics and Scorecard Research even to paid subscribers. Both sites also changing their design to be more visual and thus reducing content on the screen, which forces even more scrolling to see everything.
So I actually dropped my subscriptions. I still have the lowest tier with Tweakers but they're dropping that soon so I won't renew. I still adblock anyway because I don't want to be tracked (and yes I know it's not fully effective).
It just feels like every site wants to grow too big and widen their audience. They're no longer happy with being a small niche outfit, which waters down their value to me.
I notice this especially because of Hacker News. Because it's still a niche site. Every day I find a few 'pearls' here that I don't see anywhere else. Whereas the other sites are forcing me to dredge through crap I'm not interested in with less and less interesting pieces in between.
The second one Scroll[2] is a centralised one. That has bigger names attached and removes ads from things like The Atlantic and Bloomberg. It shows you a breakdown of where your monthly fee is split.
I love not receiving ads, and I hope that this tech pans out, but I am only doing it as an experiment so far. Personally I would prefer Coil and its underlying protocol to succeed. But it is highly possible these all fail. At least I am avoiding ads, while still funding content. It shows promise.
- [1] https://coil.com/
- [2] https://scroll.com/
It is also filled with comments gist of which is “paywalled, didn’t read”.
I think both models have their strengths and ultimately are not meant for the same audiences. Which is also why mixing the two in the same product is tricky.
If there was a universal system where people could pay ~1$ in one click without having to fill in a form or provide any personal data (to reduce the risk of spam), I'm sure most people would happily pay.
On the other hand, for a single product that you use significantly (like a social network) it makes sense to pay a subscription as opposed to having your time, attention and privacy compromised by ads.
Cheap. Private. Low-friction. Pick two.
I don't mind someone having my details, I just don't want that someone to be a party incentivized to spam me.
At the core of both of them is an economic transaction (direct dollars vs. ad impression), both of which use personal data like web history (to know which article has been "bought").
The big difference is the ad supported model is not linked to your bank account, and has some pseudonymous properties, but there is still the classic three-party structure of reader, publisher and platform, and still the huge pressure to be profitable.
1) So you're still having your personal web history tracked by a technology company, possibly even worse because it's linked to your bank
2) Economic pressures and incentives are roughly the same
3) End result is your data will eventually get sold anyway, much the same way that cable companies always introduced ads
I also have a belief but no hard data that advertisers pay more per impression than consumers ever will, which leads to this cycle happening in the first place. People seem to forget that the internet wasn't really profitable until targeted advertising, cutting that would mean the end of most web technology companies.
Pay one subscription, visit sites. If those sites have a specific meta tag, add-on detects it, providing you with access to paywalled articles. The longer the site keeps my attention, the more of my subscription they get. They don't have to know a single thing about me other than "I'm using this service and I have a running subscription". Service aggregates those micropayments from their subscribers within a time frame and avoids transferring small transactions and fees associated to the website.
Yes, Brave has a mixed model for funding. If you don't opt in into Brave Rewards, you can still fund sites using your own money.
I'd never want to start/stop a subscription for a single article I randomly come across, and I have never stumbled upon a link that allows me to pay a buck or two to access this specific article I clicked on without starting a long term commitment with a site I've never heard of before.
edit: maybe this is what Apple News is? I can read lots of articles but have to go in through that portal, I can't click links on Reddit. Sometimes I do go into Apple News and find the same article but that is time consuming and inconvenient and often it isn't there.
I object mostly due to "free for me(FAANGS) but not for thee.
Said article is available to the Googlebot or to Facebook but not normal mortals.
If you want to be behind a wall, fine, be behind the wall--that is your prerogative. But the problem is that these articles clutter up my search results and I can't remove them.
They conclude that "we should recognize the trade we’ve made from ad-subsidized media to ad-subsidized search and social networking", which I guess is a well-intended statement but somewhat obvious, right?
Hacker News threads are filled with users arguing that they gladly pay a lot just to avoid advertising.
Their last sentence
> Perhaps now we can forge a better understanding of the value of content. It costs money to produce, so it should also cost money to consume.
I think is important, but maybe not for their reasons. Current paid services are sometimes very overpriced, which is partly caused by the lack of easy and scalable micro-transactions and a missing understanding of what a specific service might be worth. On the other hand there are some great services that get underused because users don't think the up-front cost are justified.
The turn to subscriptions that we see in random tiny auxiliary applications is a great example of that. The developers of a small CBT-App I used for a bit thought they were worth 8 euro a month. They tried it a few months and then gave up, largely because they apparently failed to find a shared understanding of their value with their users.