- Jan 1, 2018
- 18,647
- 4,016
- 81,540
I wonder how much market research went into the price, or if it was purely "what we need people to pay for our numbers to look a certain way".
100 dollars annually is not going to see many subscribers, especially not someone as value focused as I am. Even the promo $69.99 is far more than I would pay for a few minutes of reading news articles a day, I pay less than this for my music service I am listening to almost every hour I'm awake. Although I feel as though I should not say this being an "ambassador" for TH, the true reality I see is that many outlets with much higher quality and more investigative/through content are available completely free on other platforms.
I do agree with others, I forsee this taking away from free content. What draws the arbitrary line whether something is free or premium? Are you hiring entirely separate new journalists for this tier? Otherwise the current ones are going to have to divide their efforts between free and paid tier, which WILL deduct from the amount of free content available.
Many years ago Motortrends YouTube channel had a wide variety of excellent automotive related shows I watched regularly including engine masters, roadkill, dirt every day, etc. Motortrend came out with a premium subscription called motortrend on demand (MTOD) which was supposed to have exclusive content and all of the content on YouTube but ad free. It was explicitly mentioned that all of the shows on YouTube would continue and remain free perpetually. Maybe 1 or 2 years later they delisted every single one of the shows I loved from YouTube and said they now would be exclusively on their paid platform. Basically pay up or pound sand. I was not in a position to pay for this, so I stopped watching entirely.
Point being, the platform saying that existing content will never be moved behind a paywall is often meaningless. There are valid reasons for this, news outlets do have a hard time financially now and many other outlets have also gone fully paid online, but making information only available for the rich is NOT in societies best interest.
100 dollars annually is not going to see many subscribers, especially not someone as value focused as I am. Even the promo $69.99 is far more than I would pay for a few minutes of reading news articles a day, I pay less than this for my music service I am listening to almost every hour I'm awake. Although I feel as though I should not say this being an "ambassador" for TH, the true reality I see is that many outlets with much higher quality and more investigative/through content are available completely free on other platforms.
I do agree with others, I forsee this taking away from free content. What draws the arbitrary line whether something is free or premium? Are you hiring entirely separate new journalists for this tier? Otherwise the current ones are going to have to divide their efforts between free and paid tier, which WILL deduct from the amount of free content available.
Many years ago Motortrends YouTube channel had a wide variety of excellent automotive related shows I watched regularly including engine masters, roadkill, dirt every day, etc. Motortrend came out with a premium subscription called motortrend on demand (MTOD) which was supposed to have exclusive content and all of the content on YouTube but ad free. It was explicitly mentioned that all of the shows on YouTube would continue and remain free perpetually. Maybe 1 or 2 years later they delisted every single one of the shows I loved from YouTube and said they now would be exclusively on their paid platform. Basically pay up or pound sand. I was not in a position to pay for this, so I stopped watching entirely.
Point being, the platform saying that existing content will never be moved behind a paywall is often meaningless. There are valid reasons for this, news outlets do have a hard time financially now and many other outlets have also gone fully paid online, but making information only available for the rich is NOT in societies best interest.
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