YouTube is one of the most interesting things to come out of the whole internet thing. It’s basically like community TV, but with a global reach. Anyone can upload content to YouTube, and it changes the whole balance of power when it comes to video content.
Even better, once YouTube allowed for monetization, talented content creators could make a living, or at least support their passion projects while offering us content that would never exist under traditional models. Yet, there seems to be a sentiment that no one should pay for YouTube, and that ads should not be on YouTube. Only one of these can be true at once without making YouTube unsustainable.
Why do people have this reaction? Do you feel YouTube should be free in all ways?
I Think YouTube Is the Most Important Streaming Service of Them All
If you told me that I could only keep one streaming service and had to drop the rest, YouTube would be the one I choose to keep every time. Not only is YouTube a streaming video pioneer, it’s the only place you can find the ultra-specific niche content that you care about. It’s one of the most important sources of information on the internet, and it’s a phenomenal learning tool. It’s as transformative as Wikipedia.
When I want to learn how to do something, YouTube is often the first place I turn. In the age of AI content, it’s especially important to know that you’re seeing the real-world experience of a real person. Of course, you need to evaluate the expertise of whoever puts themselves forward as an expert. However, you can’t deny that having access to people with skills and knowledge all over the world is a genuinely new and important thing platforms like YouTube bring to the table.
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That’s before we even get to entertainment, which, again, YouTube offers in a way that no one else really does. The creativity on display is endless, and new show formulas or ideas are constantly emerging. By its very nature, YouTube always feels fresh and creative compared to what a room full of TV executives would greenlight. Sometimes a little raw and unfltered,but far more authentic because of it.
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The Best Content Creators on YouTube Need Financial Support
The thing is, making even very basic content for YouTube is expensive. When I started out making tech videos we had to invest in lights, a good camera with a decent lens, microphones, a teleprompter, and more. I had to dedicate a room in the house I rented for recording, and then there’s the labor of actually editing the video together and putting it out there, and the price of the software.
Ultimately, that channel let us make our money back, but without monetization it simply wouldn’t have been sustainable. Your favorite Youtuber probably has even more expensive costs in order to create better quality content. As the standard for YouTube content goes up, so does the cost of making that content.
If you want a given content creator that you love to keep making that content, they need some way to cover their costs. That money has to come from somewhere.
YouTube Is Expensive to Run
It’s not just the content creators that need financial support to make the content, the platform provider has enormous expenditure as well. YouTube doesn’t run on magic; it consists of thousands of servers inside data centers that have to perform video conversions, and, of course, the actual streaming of content using massive amounts of bandwidth.
Obviously, YouTube is intended to be a for-profit business, but if no money comes in because of ad-blockers or a disinterest in paying for YouTube Premium, the service would fold virtually overnight. That’s not some fancy business analysis; it’s common sense.
People Seem to Object to Paying for YouTube in Principle
Which is why I’m so surprised to see a consistent attitude online that YouTube should be free, but that it should also have no advertising. My question is how that’s supposed to work? It’s almost as if people think of YouTube as a public service, but it’s not funded using taxpayer money.
A primary complaint is that the level of advertising on YouTube has reached unwatchable levels. I don’t disagree with that at all, but you have to ask why YouTube needs to push so many ads. It’s easy to assume that it’s just corporate greed at work, but if you think about it, heavy advertising is more an act of desperation than necessity.
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Making your customer experience worse is just as liable to decreasing your profits as people go elsewhere, but YouTube seems compelled to test our tolerance for ads, and that tells me they have no other choice. There’s probably a spiral of people circumventing advertising, leading to YouTube increasing ads, leading to more ad-blocking, etcetera, etcetera.
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Whenever someone mentions paying for YouTube Premium to be rid of ads, there’s a litany of replies vowing never to pay for YouTube. Even the cheaper YouTube Premium “Lite” with reduced ads for some money doesn’t seem to be swaying public opinion.
If You Want YouTube to Stay, You Need to Pay
My question then is that, if you enjoy YouTube content or find it valuable in any way, wouldn’t you want it to stick around? The money to make it all work has to come from somewhere. That means advertising or subscription money. These days, many YouTube creators are forced to take sponsorships because ad revenue just isn’t good enough anymore. Something I see as a negative in some cases, because it has the potential to make them less independent and impartial. So it’s in your best interest to keep your content free from commercial influence.
If you want to keep enjoying YouTube content, you need to pay for it. If you feel it isn’t worth anything, then you have no reason to consume it. You can pay with your time (i.e. watching an advert) or you can pay in cash. These days, you can even give cash to a specific YouTube channel without pushing that money into the general pool shared among all monetized channels.
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Make the best out of your watching.
There’s this strange situation where the same people who will happily pay to have an ad-free experience on services like Netflix or Hulu, won’t do the same thing on YouTube, even though most of their streaming time is spent watching YouTube content. What worries me is that if things keep going the way they are, there won’t be any YouTube content to watch.
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