I’m a YouTube premium subscriber and I never watch any “original content”. I simply enjoy zero advertisements.<p>Paradoxically the target demographic willing to pay to be ad free is probably worth far more to advertisers than those who don’t— making it difficult to justify the product offering.<p>Though I’d certainly use YouTube significantly less if I had to sit through the ads.
I love YouTube and watch a ton of creative and technical content. I'm arguably the ideal customer for a product like YouTube premium. But I use an ad-blocker and pay creators directly via Patreon (whenever possible) instead.<p>So why didn't I bother signing up for YouTube premium, even though I was excited to the level of shouting, "This! This is what I wanted!" when it was first announced?<p>I have zero confidence that Google is willing to keep their experiments like this one alive for more than a year or two. This result seemed obvious and inevitable. Maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety, but I'm now far more likely to try out a random probably-not-going-to-be-around-next-year startup with a neat idea than an interesting looking Google experiment.<p>Google used to have a reputation for being clever and innovative. It was fun to try out their new products. They had features that were original and helpful rather than gimmicky and "me too." Product updates added features without throwing away old functionality that was obviously still important. Products lasted longer than one or two promotion cycles.<p>These days it's just frustrating.
I had YouTube Premium to avoid ads. Since the adpocalypse, more creators are adding sponsored content to their videos. So now I've got ads even though I'm paying.
The content creation space is extremely competitive and audiences are fickle.<p>On top of that, Hollywood is a very self-reinforcing system, where industry connection is super valuable at getting funding, securing talents, rights and other things needed to deliver a successful project. Outside funding will have a hard time competing against existing investors, and will end up either overpaying or settle with less promising projects with trouble securing funding otherwise.
>YouTube Originals was a big-swing idea that had to find out, definitively, if the immense online entity's user base would A) pay for something and B) be interested in scripted longform storytelling. Well, YouTube found out definitively that the answer was a resounding no.<p>It's not so much that the audience isn't interested in paying for long form storytelling (or at least myself), but maybe just not interested in paying YouTube for it. YouTube is a place for short videos, I go there when I want to watch tech reviews, recipes, or something silly. When I want longform storytelling, I go to Netflix or something else that I pay for.<p>I'm not sure what the solution is, but YouTube hasn't done a good job of advertising or raising awareness of Premium content at all. The most I see is a few thumbnails of things that I need to pay to watch on the homescreen. I would be happy to be proved wrong, but I have low expectations of drama or any longform content on YouTube - I expect it to be low budget and badly acted, so I may as well just go elsewhere.<p>Perhaps ad blockers are a double whammy against YouTube Premium. I don't see ads on YouTube anyway, so I don't need to pay to get rid of them. And maybe they're advertising Premium content on there, but I've not seen them anyway. I'm kind of surprised that YouTube doesn't put more effort into subverting adblockers, it surely wouldn't be that difficult to inject the ads into the video streams and make them unblockable.<p>Still, it wouldn't take much for them to draw more attention to Premium videos, whether it's from ads, creating more social media buzz around them, or just putting a larger section on the home page that at least gives me a description of the content that I'm missing. As always, YouTube relies too much on their algorithm of placing <i>more of the same</i> content in front of you. When the experience is designed to just keep you clicking on though the recommendations of videos like the ones you just watched, it's no wonder that they're not getting eyes on original content. And yet it should be so easy for them.
The biggest winners here are Google shareholders. There was no way Google was going to spend enough cash to successfully compete with the likes of Netflix and Disney. It's better that they pulled the plug early.
> <i>YouTube Originals was a big-swing idea that had to find out, definitively, if the immense online entity's user base would A) pay for something and B) be interested in scripted longform storytelling</i><p>I pay for YouTube content. YouTube just doesn’t get a cut of it. I pay for it on Patreon. There is so much great short-form educational content waiting to happen, but instead we get more long-firm scripted crap.
YouTube isn't taking any chances but still expecting to get big like Netflix just cuz.<p>I have a friend who makes original, scripted, television-length episodic content and he can't get noticed, despite having a whole season already up on YouTube, link below. This sort of serious production isn't really viable for the sponsorship model of most YouTube channels, which stick to 10-20 minute videos that can use what a TV crew would consider a barebones production staff.<p>YouTube should be reaching out to people like my friend like they reached out to my mom shortly after all the crafting TV shows started disappearing in the early 2000s. I think they just lost their nerve, but still don't have the resources to truly do what Netflix is doing.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEtE5FR2nQYh6vNMHtXfVYw/videos" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEtE5FR2nQYh6vNMHtXfVYw/vid...</a>
I don’t understand why YouTube hasn’t implemented Patreon as a feature.<p>That’s one model that’s clearly working at some scale, and it could be easy expanded to “subscriber only videos“