[CydeWeys]

Yes, they would be within their rights to do all of those things. And ... ?

I can't even read Washington Post and New York Times articles without paying for a subscription. So what? They don't owe anything to me for free. Thus I have paid subscriptions with them, because I value their content enough to pay for it and that's the only compensation methodology they've found to be workable.

[causality0]

"and" that's the difference between Youtube and Quibi. Youtube was built as a free ad-supported platform for users to create content and present it to each other. Quibi was built as a paid streaming service where users watch professionally produced content for a fee. The track from non-user to paid user for Youtube is completely different than the one for Quibi. Youtube Premium targeted an audience that was already there. Quibi tried to get non-users to pay for the creation of the audience. It didn't work, and it will never work. Every successful paid-only streaming service has to target an already-existing audience. Netflix used licensing to target the fanbase of a broad swath of TV and movie viewership, fans who already existed. Disney did it by owning outright a broad swath of TV and movie material.

It generally doesn't even work in other media. CD sales were built on the back of free radio broadcasts. Pay cable and satellite subscriptions targeted an audience already exposed to television through free TV broadcasts. You have to offer a fundamentally better experience, on the order of "this new thing is the only way to experience non-live music" for people to pay for it sight-unseen.

[CydeWeys]

Your initial comment that I was responding to was:

> Nobody pays for Youtube Premium because they want the exclusive content. They pay because they hate ads and Youtube gatekeeps basic app functionality behind the paywall. It's not a service it's a hostage negotiation.

To which my response was that it's a commonly accepted business practice to create free and premium tiers (it's so common it even has a name: "freemium"), and that this doesn't remotely constitute "gatekeeping" or "hostage negotiation". And it is common for companies to switch models over time, starting out with free in order to spur quick growth and then figuring out monetization later. Make no mistake, YouTube was originally losing catastrophic amounts of money, and what has happened to it is the only path that was even viable. You either need a lot of advertising or a substantial paid subscriber base in order to not suffer huge ongoing losses and be forced to shutter. Just ask every newspaper ever.

I just don't see what YouTube has uniquely done differently vs any other company that has a paid tier or that has grown over time and needed to find additional ways to make money because it turns out that you can't turn around a loss by scaling it.

I don't live advertising either. But I accept that it pays for the vast majority of the content that I consume online.

[causality0]

Yes, but my comment was making the point that "Youtube Premium has 20 million subscribers" is not a valid defense of Quibi's business model. Quibi is a paid-only service that doesn't have the ability to draw on a massive active userbase for paid upgrades and bonuses. Whether Youtube's tactics are or are not fair isn't germane.

[CydeWeys]

To the extent that it's not germane, you're the one who brought it up, and it was fair game for me to reply to. I really thought that was the main thrust of your argument (turns out it's not).

[Dylan16807]

The ability to do something like run with the screen off is not "premium", but it is being sold that way. "Hostage negotiation" is obviously hyperbole, but it gets the point across that it is neither paying for content nor paying for actual premium features. It's paying for them to stop being purposefully annoying.

[CydeWeys]

Au contraire, screen-off playback is exactly the kind of feature that is and should be premium, because the value of advertising that can be sold in this situation is significantly reduced, hence it only needs to be available to premium users who are paying for access and thus aren't showed ads anyway.

"Premium" doesn't mean "fancy" or "hard to implement", it just means "We aren't making money giving this away for free, so you have to pay for it".

[Dylan16807]

I completely disagree with your definition of premium. Something has to go beyond basic functionality to be premium, entirely separate of how it's being sold or not sold.

And someone with the screen off is using far less bandwidth. I doubt it's hard to make money off them, even with reduced ad revenue.

[therealx]

I read it as "this feature is premium specifically because it is not free." Businesses are under no obligation to offer basic services for free, even if they did in the past. If this is good for business is different, but YouTube must have had good reason to push all those features to paid. It doesn't matter how much bandwidth is being used, its to block people from using it as a streaming music for free.

[CydeWeys]

In the concept of the freemium payment model, a premium feature is simply one that yo have to pay for. Maybe you should use a word like "advanced" or "deluxe" or something? Regardless, it's an orthogonal concern; it doesn't matter if it's the simplest damn feature in the world, it needs to be for paid users only. Call that what you will; many call it "premium".