IBM recently reported the results of a survey they conducted called “End of Advertising” to see how people felt about current methods of marketing and advertising. One interesting finding from the survey was this – 11% of the 2400 consumers surveyed said they would be willing to pay a nominal fee to view online video content free of ads. They also found that people value their Internet time just as much as, or if not more than their TV time, and want a quality experience. This helps explain why consumers would be willing to pay for a video service that’s currently offered for free.
Given that YouTube is king of video content on the web, would you pay a monthly fee to watch user-submitted videos ad-free? What about other sites on the web? We know that users will tolerate a certain amount of advertising and certain forms if they can get free content, but some would rather pay to have ads removed like the good old days where you paid for the services that you received. YouTube is a service, Gmail is a service, Yahoo Messenger is a service, yet they’re all free thanks to ads.
Between Read/Write Web and E-Consultancy, they crunched the numbers to see if offering a paid-subscription could potentially turn into a good business model in the future for sites like YouTube. If YouTube were to charge $2 per month for each user, and 10% of their 50 million users participated in the subscription service, YouTube would receive $137 million annually. Looking at it from the other side, if those same 10% of users generated money via the advertisements that YouTube currently uses, at most, they would make $38 million in annual revenue. The bottom line? YouTube could potentially increase their profits quite a bit if they started to offer a premium subscription plan.
So, would any of you be willing to pay an amount to some of your favorite sites and services if they’d remove the ads? What’s the most you’d be willing to pay per month?
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No. Definitely not. I’m one of those people that tolerate most ads, and if I can’t tolerate them–popups, or the dreaded popunder, or the Geocities mix of popups, pupunders, sidebars, and inline ads, I just go away.
Nope. I am fine with watching a 15-sec ad before a YouTube video but I would never pay to watch.
No, Never. I would never pay for a site that plays back user submitted videos. Are they going to start paying the users that come up with the material? Absolutely not…
I WILL gladly play for copywrited content such as tv shows, movies , etc…
No Way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I would never pay a cent for watching YouTube. Quality is poor and most of the videos are just nonsense. Have you guys ever tried [stage6.divx.com]
Nope, keep the ads on YouTube. I’ll just block ‘em using Adblock. Google’s way too powerful anyway.
I would not pay for YouTube but I do pay for Flick so I guess it depends on the type of service.
Hell no there shouldn’t be ADs there in the first place, we are already paying these companies by buying there goods and services, we shouldn’t have to pay them to take off the ADs, the industry standard needs to change were NOT EVERY freakin site in the universe needs to have ADs all over the place… like buy.com we already pay them money to buy stuff there’s no need for ADs. [nbc.com] we already watch their TV thus paying for their commercials, no need for ADs on the website… What’s wrong with this world advertising on every little thing, there’s very few places you can’t go to hide form the ADs.
Seriously… even this site has ADs all over the place!
Erm, Andrew, I think that might be a little too much. After all, when you buy something from Buy.com, some, if not a lot, of the money goes toward the original cost of the product, and if they put all their profit into their website then they’d never make a REAL profit and would go out of business.
BinaryMuse: Yeah but what about brick and morter stores they don’t have advertisements all over the place… and yet they are all still in business advertisement free! you don’t see advertisements in their weekly sale flyer for other companies…
I think paying for storage space is quite OK, but not for viewing non-copyrighted content. The problem for the companies would be that as soon as people start charging, someone else brings out a free version and steals the audience. If Facebook started charging even 1 unit of currency per month I’m sure another social network would sound its bells and start stealing users. If people are truly willing to pay to not see ads then I see no reason for the websites not to start allowing this from members, but no site in their right mind will ever make it compulsory.
Oh, and to the person above saying sites shouldn’t even advertise – what have you bought of Google or Facebook to mean you shouldn’t need to see their ads? Or from CyberNet or any other blogs? Despite the freeness and openness of the internet people still need to pay rent, bills and buy food in the real world. If ads weren’t effective at generating revenue then they wouldn’t be there – go figure.
Would not pay.
If we didn’t have the number of ads that we do there would be no way for us to be doing this as a full time business. We have to make money somehow.
That’s actually not true. You walk into a store and you see signs with new movie releases, huge banners for products like Pepsi saying something like “Win tickets to the Super Bowl”, and all kinds of stuff like that. You think these stores aren’t bringing in a little extra money by putting up those ads?
There is also advertising in weekly sale flyers, but you just aren’t naturally aware of it. When you see a television screen in an electronics ad, it normally has a big movie release date plastered all over it. And coupons…yeah, those are a type of ad as well often paid for by the manufacturer. You may say “but the coupons save me money,” and my response would be that a lot of the website ads offer discounts on services and products as well.
Surely a weekly sales flyer is an advertisement for the store itself? Most large websites will only advertise products they sell, and smaller ones will advertise company websites – in the same way that an independant game shop might get some cash to stick a big EA sticker on their front window.
I know internet ads are regarded as different because the money comes from a click rather than a look (usually), but that’s only the way it is because its a much more certain sign that someone has taken note of the advert – in a store they just put it up and hope.
If you disagree with ads, then you should agree with paying for content. If you disagree with paying then you have to accept ads.
My thoughts exactly!
Wow! Sounds like the overall consensus is no here — so apparently none of you would be part of the 11%.
Short answer: hell no.
Long answer: I don’t think youtube should have ads or pay-to-watch content. The content just isn’t good enough, plus people would just find something different to upload their videos on.
Also, the majority of people on youtube are high school and college kids…they don’t exactly have tons of cash…therefore making it pay-to-watch would be the death of youtube.
*dkong= If youtube had neither, they’d make no money. This is America, and to come out on top you have to find a way to earn some capital. You’re not going to find many sites that are just there as a public service, w/out ads or fee, because there’s no incentive to run them.
Especially when their parent company company is the king of online advertising.
Frankly, I wouldn’t pay because I think it sets a bad precedent. If pay-per-view becomes the model then you’ll never be able to see anything without having to drop some cash. Every site that becomes the least bit popular will be bought by another, larger site as a way to increase income. Then you end up with what we have in radio today. Little selection, a template format model that’s applied all over the country because it brings in the most revenue. A continual dumbing down of content to reach the widest audience.
Once everyone is collecting revenue, then those that control the pipes will want a slice of that pie and that starts the cost spiraling. So what if millions won’t pay to see… they would rather service 100k paying $10/each than a million paying a dollar or ten million getting it free.
It’s a slippery slope and one I hope never to see on the internet, but the day is probably coming. I can understand the owners of websites wanting to make money from their hard work. I imagine that the owners of this site probably love what they do and if they can get rich doing it — they would be happy campers. Everyone would love to get paid for doing what they love to do.
But the basic premise behind this beautiful technology is to bring people together to share knowledge. The internet is the biggest library in the history of mankind and I don’t think it’s ever right to have to pay to use the library.
Fortunately, we live in a semi-free society, so those that want to charge admission have to face the forces of the market. You charge, you take your chances! You serve only a select few and you suffer the consequences (more money, but less desirable content and ‘buzz’). A large part of what makes sites like this and Lifehacker popular and useful is the content and thoughts and ideas of their users — you remove them from the equation and they suffer. And what compensation do they deserve for contributing to the content and popularity of a website… should they be compensated also?
Yea.. this is a slippery slope…
ps. I don’t mind the ads as long as they are not intrusive and loud and blinking and popping up all over the place. The problem is too many are like that. Then I block the adserver and don’t see any ads, even the ones that I don’t mind and that doesn’t help the website owners at all.
What do you think of the “Pay As You Go” model then rather than monthly subscriptions? For example, pay $2 for each 100 videos etc. Which way is more acceptable from your point of view?
I don’t think that would work too well because of all the sites that have embedded the videos. It would become really inconvenient to worry about watching a video that has been embedded.
You Tube should stay free! We have to pay for enough crap on-line and this is great entertainment and the search engine to find what movie\tv clips you want to watch is great. I would not pay one dime to access my account on there, because the videos I saved into my playlists and favorites lists are mine. It would be foolish for the company running this site to start charging people to view and access their own accounts.