this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Well, if you don't mind losing all online content that's more than a couple mb in size then sure, what you're saying makes sense... Safely hosting over 1 billion videos costs money and people don't want to pay for it directly so...
Tens of millions of people can and do pay. This isn't about covering costs, this is about making line go up faster than last year, every year, no matter what.
And there's even more people that don't...
80m premium subscribers, 2.7b monthly users... Do you really think that's sustainable without having a secondary source of revenue? Because I don't know that many businesses that survive from 3% paying customers...
That's just for YouTube, but there are other websites that host content that wouldn't be sustainable without ads and that would need to switch to a paid subscription format.
Is it so hard to admit that there's something unusual about expecting websites to run out of the pocket of the owners/employees when we don't expect real world businesses to do so?
At $15 a month? Yeah totally. The vast majority of that 2.7 billion probably cost a few cents at most to offer service to. Very few people actually upload anything and streaming video is way cheaper than the various streaming services would have you believe. It's expensive to get off the ground, sure, but it scales well.
Repeat after me, Google isn't the only provider that hosts a lot of content.
Would you like it if the majority of websites became pay per use or subscription only?