Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

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When YouTube was primarily cat videos, it made sense as an ad-supported platform. Now that it's dominated by medium-to-high-production-value content creator stars, a subscription business model would be a much better fit.

It's actually amazing that Google has let Patreon eat its lunch on this front, the latter becoming the predominant platform for direct monetization while YouTube continues playing the chump's game of seeing how much advertising they can inflict on users before they revolt.

[edit] I'm well aware of YouTube Premium, but Google's insistence on bundling it exclusively with YouTube Music greatly limits its appeal. If they offered a standalone subscription (as they are piloting in some European markets), they could probably expand their subscriber base by a significant factor.

Put another way, if Netflix were only available as part of a bundle with a cable subscription, do you imagine they'd have more or fewer subscribers than they do right now?

But Youtube does have a subscription business model? You can pay for Youtube Premium ( https://www.youtube.com/premium ) and see it without ads, with downloads for offline viewing and listening, and so on. Almost exactly like Spotify.

People just ignore the ads instead.

They suggesting a model where you subscribe to individual YouTube channels rather than the platform.

You can do that too.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7491256?hl=en

Sounds like you ignore that YT has a subscription business model along side the ad-based one..

Subscribing to what amounts to a search+CDN video w/ads service wholesale isn't even in the same ballpark as throwing money directly at the creators you want to support.

The salient point is YouTube/Alphabet has completely missed the opportunity of facilitating Patreon-style commerce, despite being best positioned to do so.

But instead of enabling creators to receive money directly from audiences, an advertising juggernaut like Alphabet would probably rather keep their volunteer content creators incentivized to be shills desperate for advertising dollars.

I predict all the quality creators capable of garnering support via systems like Patreon will eventually abandon YouTube altogether, leaving YouTube to become even more of a raging dumpster fire of advertising upon advertising upon advertising masquerading as content from "influencers".

Youtube has a Patreon competitor service literally built into the platform, you can "Join" a channel and it behaves exactly like Patreon. They were just very late to the party and most creators promote their Patreon more heavily.

Is that something only available to paying subscribers?

I've never even had a YouTube login, but the few channels I access fully via the web interface only ever spam me with YouTube Premium offers for eliminating ads.

There's zero offering/marketing of direct-to-creator subscriptions, not that I've seen.

There's also zero chance of my buying YouTube Premium, but a non-zero chance of my giving money exclusively to the specific creators I value - even if YouTube took something along the lines of a haircut for making just those channels ad-free.

Hopefully the difference is clear.

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