I feel like YouTube as we knew it before is probably going to come to an end soon. Between youtube ads, ad reads, sponsors, patreon plugs and merch ads, it is either going to wind up looking like cable tv or it is going to die and make way for some paid service.
And would that really be a bad thing?
Social media sites and content hosting services like YouTube have become like the old book publishers and record labels. They provide a largely fungible middleman service to the creators who generate the real value by creating new material, yet somehow for a long time they've wound up keeping the lion's share of the financial benefits.
It's natural that creators will push back, whether through things like sponsored placements or through other revenue schemes like Patreon. But even if it's just providing storage, distribution and possibly discoverability to the creators, the host service still has bills to pay and needs to make enough revenue somewhere to be a viable business.
The ideal outcome, IMHO, would be to separate the hosting/distribution from the discoverability, have hosting services that charge real money for providing a real service and effectively compete for the best content creators, and have the equivalent of search engines or recommendation systems to help people find the content, whoever is hosting it. The latter could still operate on some sort of ad-based scheme, without interfering with delivery of the main content itself. In short, I'd like to see a return to a more decentralised system, where the content creators are the driving force, and the intermediaries have to provide their fungible services in a competitive market without becoming the de facto controlling entities for the whole system. See also: self-published writing, music, etc.
And would that really be a bad thing?
Social media sites and content hosting services like YouTube have become like the old book publishers and record labels. They provide a largely fungible middleman service to the creators who generate the real value by creating new material, yet somehow for a long time they've wound up keeping the lion's share of the financial benefits.
It's natural that creators will push back, whether through things like sponsored placements or through other revenue schemes like Patreon. But even if it's just providing storage, distribution and possibly discoverability to the creators, the host service still has bills to pay and needs to make enough revenue somewhere to be a viable business.
The ideal outcome, IMHO, would be to separate the hosting/distribution from the discoverability, have hosting services that charge real money for providing a real service and effectively compete for the best content creators, and have the equivalent of search engines or recommendation systems to help people find the content, whoever is hosting it. The latter could still operate on some sort of ad-based scheme, without interfering with delivery of the main content itself. In short, I'd like to see a return to a more decentralised system, where the content creators are the driving force, and the intermediaries have to provide their fungible services in a competitive market without becoming the de facto controlling entities for the whole system. See also: self-published writing, music, etc.