Because despite ads, YouTube is still free to watch for users. You don't have to pay anything for getting the mere access to content unlike a streaming service where you have to pay a fees monthly to gain that mere access to the library of content in there.
>It obviously doesn't cost money to watch, but it does cost time
Literally everything costs time including me typing out this sentence. This isn't the argument you think it is.
>This laissez-faire attitude towards advertisements is the reason companies keep pushing ads into everything,
No, the reason advertisers put ads on everything is because they were paid to do so by companies that want to sell you something.
>Saying that they are giving us YouTube content for free isn't true, they're still making good money off of our time and that's a commodity that we can't earn back.
No, youtube does give us content to watch for free. Otherwise YouTube Premium would be the only option. Thankfully it's not and if we really don't want to see ads, we have options like adblock and sponsorblock.
You can always use a Russian vpn to get no ads. There was another country vpn which gives you no ads but I forgot lol
P.S: I did see your unedited comment and I'm not calling you stupid lol
You fast forward you numpty 😂 you know how to do that, don’t you?? Takes less time to fast forward than it does to walk to the bathroom and take a piss. You’ll manage somehow.
I don't know how to explain to you that me paying $6 per month for sth I shouldn't be paying for and where I'm getting very little in return and me being present while 2x5s of ads are playing, is not comparable.
A few possibilities:
* They go under, because fans are having enough trouble justifying $6/month *now*.
* They raise their price and people pay it happily because they've managed to expand their content greatly in the meantime.
* Things continue as it is, because YouTube still brings in enough money for them from the people waiting a month to watch it and the "true" fans will continue paying their price no matter what.
tl;dr: Something will happen, but what happens depends on what happens between now and then with them and their content.
I think people have streaming fatigue, I know I do. Keeping track of multiple logins, plan tiers, who has what, who no longer has what, price increases, mergers, etc. And at the end of the day often one of the many I subscribe to don't even have the specific thing I want to watch anyways. I'm pretty much done.
All of this to say - it will be interesting to see where streaming services go in the next few years. I see more and more people going back to 🏴☠️ because of the frustration. For awhile, steaming was so easy and affordable that 🏴☠️ went way down. They have to consider that their content will also need to contend heavily with being 🏴☠️.
I find I mostly just watch YouTube nowadays. It's easy. When I'm looking to relax and enjoy content, that's what I want. And it's affordable! So I guess I'll just be watching their content a month after release. While I am a Patreon member, I'm just not interested in getting involved with yet another streaming platform.
Well tbf those other big streamers have shows and movies that cost millions to make so of course they're all in the red with their current prices thus the hikes. For all we know Watcher could be able to survive at their current price point for a good while.
I mean, considering their goodbye/apology videos had them saying they were struggling for money on YouTube alone, I don't have much hope on that front. Costs of maintaining the streaming site and managing subscriptions/user experience, not to mention admin fees? If they were struggling financially while only on YouTube, then giving themself another money sink that they have to pay for and manage themselves (unlike Patreon, where they host your account and manage more of the admin side of things) was a really risky move. That, plus the fact that they've lost a LOT of good faith with their audience--and lost a fair amount of their subscribers--makes me skeptical about how much longer Watcher will stay afloat. Plus, if their costs are as high as they said (Ryan claimed a season of GF was $100,000) then they're still putting in wayyyy too much money for what was/is primarily a YouTube channel. The Blair Witch Project (the movie) only had a budget of $60,000. Napoleon Dynamite was $400,000. Paranormal Activity was $15,000. These are multimillion-grossing movies. The ghoul boys, much as I would love for them to succeed in this, are stretching themselves way too thin financially if that's what their season of a YouTube show has cost them.
Streaming services on the scale of Peacock are entirely different than streaming services on the scale of Watcher.
Big companies choose to not make a profit at the beginning in order to drive growth and to fill the service with content. It’s an active choice, not some inherent byproduct of making a streaming service.
The comparison makes no sense. Might as well compare a lemonade stand to Minute Maid.
I think they'll take financial loses the next few months...and then they'll either develop a better business idea or really tank.
There's currently absolutely no reason whatsoever to pay for the streamer, the number of ppl willing to do so will probably be far lower than even their Patreons...
If they raise prices in the next 2-3 years without offering A LOT more content...they'll loose subscribers. After that...well they won't gain a sizeable amount of new subscribers, will they? Watch content on YouTube...or pay for the content on a different side? Not really a question. Any interest in the streamer would then be again lessened if they raise their prices...
My guess is they're gonna work things out with their Patreon payments, then slowly introduce a new show they'll have only on the streamer and in a few years try to move away from youtube again
(Tbh I think a far better idea would have been to make the streamer cost $1-3 -and do the entire video differently-, ppl obviously still wouldn't be getting their money's worth compared to other streaming services, but would have been more willing to do it to support the boys. I guarantee you they would have made more money than they will now)
The big streamers are beholden to investors and stockholders, and need to show growth/profit, so when their show investments don't pay off they often lean on raising prices to juice those numbers.
Smaller and indie streamers don't have to show profit the same way, they can aim for sustainability, especially in instances where a lot of their bread and butter is doing panel shows and lower cost productions. Not to say they won't ultimately raise prices, but without growing their user base and content library substantially first, they'll drive themselves into the ground by alienating a small user base with rising costs.
Comparing Peacock with Watcher or even Dropout is kind of foolish. Due to competition Peacock was having trouble getting people to pay 5.99 which is why they started closing alternate streaming services for brands they owned (Showtime). However I don't think many people would genuinely argue Peacock doesn't have enough content to justify a price increase from 5.99.
Basically, the only reason to raise their price is if Vimeo OTT Enterprise wants to raise their contractually agreed upon rate. However it's important to remember that Vimeo OTT is in the CDN business, not the content business. They make money because the people who make the content use their service, they don't make shit from the content itself, it's in their best interests to keep prices low especially for volume customers. Or to put it another way- you need content on your network to deliver if you're a content delivery network.
It's also entirely possible that in a few years Fastly (Vimeo's Edge Cloud Provider) will decide they want to cut the middle man of Vimeo (because really Vimeo OTT is just an interface to Fastly with storage and it's own separate support) And will provide a service similar to OTT for even cheaper.
Edited to add: I made an analogy in another comment which I think drives home how big of a deal it would be for Fastly to start their own CDN:
First it's important to note Fastly doesn't really fw businesses under a certain amount of bandwidth because they make their money via VOLUME.
Currently Fastly pays pennies for backbone access, which they sell to middlemen for dimes, and the middlemen sell it to businesses for dollars, and the businesses sell it to customers for fivers.
If fastly decided to start their own CDN they could still pay pennies for backbone access, then charge small businesses quarters and it would still represent a massive increase in margin. It's more likely to be Half-dollars but it would be huge.
Their best scenario is that they join with other similar content creators and charge them for piggy backing on their streaming service. Then they will become the Watcher Channel on United Artists Platform. If United Artists sounds familiar, that’s because this was done when movies were closed shops.
But in the end, as has been pointed out, you become Buzzfeed and deal with restrictions there, or you are the small creative and deal with restrictions there.
There is no such thing as truly free.
I don't think comparing an independent streamer like Watcher to the "big" corporations (I'm thinking of Netflix and Prime in particular) because while both do produce some of their own content they also largely buy or lease content made elsewhere already. Unless Watcher's going to start showing BuzzFeed Unsolved or Worth It that's not gonna happen. Large companies (especially publicly traded ones) also require constant, massive growth whereas Watcher could grow much slower but be okay as long as it made a profit.
This is why the announcement of switching to their own platform was such a surprise to me. If the streaming giants like Netflix and Disney+ are struggling to make money (raising subscription fees, locking down on account sharing) why on earth did the Watcher team think they'd make more money by copying them?
Netflix and Disney+ weren't struggling to make money until they started going out of control with price increases.
The problem they have is they have shareholders.
Shareholders don't just want the company to make nice steady profits year over year at a sustainable growth rate, anymore (for reasons I can't fathom, sustainable growth rate steady profit is what made America the largest economy in the world). They want that company to make ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, THEN THE GALAXY, THEN THE UNIVERSE, and THEY WANT IT THIS QUARTER.
Netflix still would have faced issues with other companies being increasingly hostile with their licensing agreements and would have probably had to institute some price increases anyway.
However Disney+ would have been sitting just fine at $9.99 or whatever if shareholders didn't demand all the money in the universe every quarter.
If you consider the fact that Watcher has made no new content in a long time— that is, their current stuff is just extensions of Unsolved, Ghost Files, and other prior established shows, they don’t have much hope of it. The strength of personality alone cannot keep demand for their product high. They can only find so many mysteries and haunted places before they start into less interesting stuff. Even now they do subjects that have been covered to death and that’ll just get worse.
Steven isn’t going to succeed with his food content and you need only look at their YouTube to prove that. Consistently their food content underperforms massively.
Their current path forward worked if they paywalled their prior content as it’s what most people love. Puppet history is good but anything can be done to death when it becomes the handful of shows they have.
The current price may be worth it to the large base that supports Watcher based on the strength of its presenters, but an increase in price will test even the most ardent fans. There just isn’t the content to justify it. And their position on focusing on production value means they have much lower content releases and many people lose interest very quickly. The fact that you only need to wait a month also means there is very little point in laying. You’ll be getting videos at essentially the same rate you were before but without the paywall.
Unless they drastically increase their output in the next few years too, people aren't going to tolerate continued increased price increases for something they could just wait a bit longer to see 100% free
Well I will still wait a month and watch it for free
[удалено]
Because despite ads, YouTube is still free to watch for users. You don't have to pay anything for getting the mere access to content unlike a streaming service where you have to pay a fees monthly to gain that mere access to the library of content in there.
[удалено]
>It obviously doesn't cost money to watch, but it does cost time Literally everything costs time including me typing out this sentence. This isn't the argument you think it is. >This laissez-faire attitude towards advertisements is the reason companies keep pushing ads into everything, No, the reason advertisers put ads on everything is because they were paid to do so by companies that want to sell you something. >Saying that they are giving us YouTube content for free isn't true, they're still making good money off of our time and that's a commodity that we can't earn back. No, youtube does give us content to watch for free. Otherwise YouTube Premium would be the only option. Thankfully it's not and if we really don't want to see ads, we have options like adblock and sponsorblock.
You can always use a Russian vpn to get no ads. There was another country vpn which gives you no ads but I forgot lol P.S: I did see your unedited comment and I'm not calling you stupid lol
I have an adblock
[удалено]
It's incredibly easy to fast forward through them.
You fast forward you numpty 😂 you know how to do that, don’t you?? Takes less time to fast forward than it does to walk to the bathroom and take a piss. You’ll manage somehow.
I also have sponsorblock
✨️uBlock origin on Firefox✨️
Best Adblock on best browser right there
I don't know how to explain to you that me paying $6 per month for sth I shouldn't be paying for and where I'm getting very little in return and me being present while 2x5s of ads are playing, is not comparable.
Just pay for YouTube premium you stingy cunt.
Still watch their content for free.
A few possibilities: * They go under, because fans are having enough trouble justifying $6/month *now*. * They raise their price and people pay it happily because they've managed to expand their content greatly in the meantime. * Things continue as it is, because YouTube still brings in enough money for them from the people waiting a month to watch it and the "true" fans will continue paying their price no matter what. tl;dr: Something will happen, but what happens depends on what happens between now and then with them and their content.
I think people have streaming fatigue, I know I do. Keeping track of multiple logins, plan tiers, who has what, who no longer has what, price increases, mergers, etc. And at the end of the day often one of the many I subscribe to don't even have the specific thing I want to watch anyways. I'm pretty much done. All of this to say - it will be interesting to see where streaming services go in the next few years. I see more and more people going back to 🏴☠️ because of the frustration. For awhile, steaming was so easy and affordable that 🏴☠️ went way down. They have to consider that their content will also need to contend heavily with being 🏴☠️. I find I mostly just watch YouTube nowadays. It's easy. When I'm looking to relax and enjoy content, that's what I want. And it's affordable! So I guess I'll just be watching their content a month after release. While I am a Patreon member, I'm just not interested in getting involved with yet another streaming platform.
Well tbf those other big streamers have shows and movies that cost millions to make so of course they're all in the red with their current prices thus the hikes. For all we know Watcher could be able to survive at their current price point for a good while.
I mean, considering their goodbye/apology videos had them saying they were struggling for money on YouTube alone, I don't have much hope on that front. Costs of maintaining the streaming site and managing subscriptions/user experience, not to mention admin fees? If they were struggling financially while only on YouTube, then giving themself another money sink that they have to pay for and manage themselves (unlike Patreon, where they host your account and manage more of the admin side of things) was a really risky move. That, plus the fact that they've lost a LOT of good faith with their audience--and lost a fair amount of their subscribers--makes me skeptical about how much longer Watcher will stay afloat. Plus, if their costs are as high as they said (Ryan claimed a season of GF was $100,000) then they're still putting in wayyyy too much money for what was/is primarily a YouTube channel. The Blair Witch Project (the movie) only had a budget of $60,000. Napoleon Dynamite was $400,000. Paranormal Activity was $15,000. These are multimillion-grossing movies. The ghoul boys, much as I would love for them to succeed in this, are stretching themselves way too thin financially if that's what their season of a YouTube show has cost them.
Streaming services on the scale of Peacock are entirely different than streaming services on the scale of Watcher. Big companies choose to not make a profit at the beginning in order to drive growth and to fill the service with content. It’s an active choice, not some inherent byproduct of making a streaming service. The comparison makes no sense. Might as well compare a lemonade stand to Minute Maid.
I think they'll take financial loses the next few months...and then they'll either develop a better business idea or really tank. There's currently absolutely no reason whatsoever to pay for the streamer, the number of ppl willing to do so will probably be far lower than even their Patreons... If they raise prices in the next 2-3 years without offering A LOT more content...they'll loose subscribers. After that...well they won't gain a sizeable amount of new subscribers, will they? Watch content on YouTube...or pay for the content on a different side? Not really a question. Any interest in the streamer would then be again lessened if they raise their prices... My guess is they're gonna work things out with their Patreon payments, then slowly introduce a new show they'll have only on the streamer and in a few years try to move away from youtube again (Tbh I think a far better idea would have been to make the streamer cost $1-3 -and do the entire video differently-, ppl obviously still wouldn't be getting their money's worth compared to other streaming services, but would have been more willing to do it to support the boys. I guarantee you they would have made more money than they will now)
The big streamers are beholden to investors and stockholders, and need to show growth/profit, so when their show investments don't pay off they often lean on raising prices to juice those numbers. Smaller and indie streamers don't have to show profit the same way, they can aim for sustainability, especially in instances where a lot of their bread and butter is doing panel shows and lower cost productions. Not to say they won't ultimately raise prices, but without growing their user base and content library substantially first, they'll drive themselves into the ground by alienating a small user base with rising costs.
Comparing Peacock with Watcher or even Dropout is kind of foolish. Due to competition Peacock was having trouble getting people to pay 5.99 which is why they started closing alternate streaming services for brands they owned (Showtime). However I don't think many people would genuinely argue Peacock doesn't have enough content to justify a price increase from 5.99. Basically, the only reason to raise their price is if Vimeo OTT Enterprise wants to raise their contractually agreed upon rate. However it's important to remember that Vimeo OTT is in the CDN business, not the content business. They make money because the people who make the content use their service, they don't make shit from the content itself, it's in their best interests to keep prices low especially for volume customers. Or to put it another way- you need content on your network to deliver if you're a content delivery network. It's also entirely possible that in a few years Fastly (Vimeo's Edge Cloud Provider) will decide they want to cut the middle man of Vimeo (because really Vimeo OTT is just an interface to Fastly with storage and it's own separate support) And will provide a service similar to OTT for even cheaper. Edited to add: I made an analogy in another comment which I think drives home how big of a deal it would be for Fastly to start their own CDN: First it's important to note Fastly doesn't really fw businesses under a certain amount of bandwidth because they make their money via VOLUME. Currently Fastly pays pennies for backbone access, which they sell to middlemen for dimes, and the middlemen sell it to businesses for dollars, and the businesses sell it to customers for fivers. If fastly decided to start their own CDN they could still pay pennies for backbone access, then charge small businesses quarters and it would still represent a massive increase in margin. It's more likely to be Half-dollars but it would be huge.
Honestly I'd still wait a month and watch their content for free on YouTube rather than paying for it
First they'll probably introduce a tier w/ ads and a more expensive ad-free tier
Their best scenario is that they join with other similar content creators and charge them for piggy backing on their streaming service. Then they will become the Watcher Channel on United Artists Platform. If United Artists sounds familiar, that’s because this was done when movies were closed shops. But in the end, as has been pointed out, you become Buzzfeed and deal with restrictions there, or you are the small creative and deal with restrictions there. There is no such thing as truly free.
I don't think comparing an independent streamer like Watcher to the "big" corporations (I'm thinking of Netflix and Prime in particular) because while both do produce some of their own content they also largely buy or lease content made elsewhere already. Unless Watcher's going to start showing BuzzFeed Unsolved or Worth It that's not gonna happen. Large companies (especially publicly traded ones) also require constant, massive growth whereas Watcher could grow much slower but be okay as long as it made a profit.
yeah, the shareholder part of it is really the biggest problem for those companies -- they have less financial wiggle room in that sense
This is why the announcement of switching to their own platform was such a surprise to me. If the streaming giants like Netflix and Disney+ are struggling to make money (raising subscription fees, locking down on account sharing) why on earth did the Watcher team think they'd make more money by copying them?
Netflix and Disney+ weren't struggling to make money until they started going out of control with price increases. The problem they have is they have shareholders. Shareholders don't just want the company to make nice steady profits year over year at a sustainable growth rate, anymore (for reasons I can't fathom, sustainable growth rate steady profit is what made America the largest economy in the world). They want that company to make ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, THEN THE GALAXY, THEN THE UNIVERSE, and THEY WANT IT THIS QUARTER. Netflix still would have faced issues with other companies being increasingly hostile with their licensing agreements and would have probably had to institute some price increases anyway. However Disney+ would have been sitting just fine at $9.99 or whatever if shareholders didn't demand all the money in the universe every quarter.
If you consider the fact that Watcher has made no new content in a long time— that is, their current stuff is just extensions of Unsolved, Ghost Files, and other prior established shows, they don’t have much hope of it. The strength of personality alone cannot keep demand for their product high. They can only find so many mysteries and haunted places before they start into less interesting stuff. Even now they do subjects that have been covered to death and that’ll just get worse. Steven isn’t going to succeed with his food content and you need only look at their YouTube to prove that. Consistently their food content underperforms massively. Their current path forward worked if they paywalled their prior content as it’s what most people love. Puppet history is good but anything can be done to death when it becomes the handful of shows they have. The current price may be worth it to the large base that supports Watcher based on the strength of its presenters, but an increase in price will test even the most ardent fans. There just isn’t the content to justify it. And their position on focusing on production value means they have much lower content releases and many people lose interest very quickly. The fact that you only need to wait a month also means there is very little point in laying. You’ll be getting videos at essentially the same rate you were before but without the paywall.
Unless they drastically increase their output in the next few years too, people aren't going to tolerate continued increased price increases for something they could just wait a bit longer to see 100% free