What you're about to read, if not now, is probably at some point inevitable. As cable channels decentralize and cede to internet “Is This the Future of Technology?” streaming practices, this definitely seems to be a viable model for people to make money. At and at the end of the day, people tend to only do stuff if they end up making money.
Via the New York Times:
YouTube this week will announce a plan to let some video makers charge a monthly subscription, according to people with knowledge of the plan.
The overwhelming majority of videos on YouTube, a unit of Google, will remain free to all, but the plan will let the company’s partners try out a second source of revenue, analogous to the flexible pay walls that some newspapers and magazines have adopted.
There will be subscription channels for children’s programming, entertainment, music and many other topic areas, according to the people with knowledge of the plan, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they had been asked by YouTube not to comment publicly yet. Some channels will cost as little as $1.99 a month.
We'll see how this develops, but tough to downplay the magnitude of this domino falling. If not pandoras box, definitely that weird tape shit that, when ripped off, makes opening the box hella easier:
If the subscription option catches on, it could herald a huge change for online video, which has subsisted almost entirely on advertising revenue. Executives at YouTube, though, have sought to downplay the initial importance of the paid subscriptions; some have described the plan as a test, intended in part to mollify some of the most popular contributors to the Web site.
Indeed, some homegrown YouTube stars and start-ups have been frustrated by what they see as relatively low amounts of revenue coming from the ads that YouTube attaches to their videos. By enabling the subscription option, YouTube is giving them another way to get paid — if people are willing to pay, that is.
More to come on this if people end up clicking on this article. If not, there's a whole big, mean internet for you to get free information from.
[H/T: New York Times]
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