I don't think it's that companies want the ad model, it's that they know they cannot compete with it if they have a subscription model.
Nebula, the "answer" to the shittyness of youtube that creators have been falling over themselves to promote for the last 5 years, still has a conversion rate under 1%.
People hate ads, but they really really hate subscriptions.
A good approach would be that usage means you gotta offer storage or bandwidth in some way. Very very difficult to implement, but say for a PeerTube: wanna watch it? Offer a small percentage of storage for storing chunks. Be a part of the system you use. Of course, the more services you use, the more resources you give up. Or you subscribe.
I can understand if people can't pay for subscriptions. I am not talking from first world citizen and I understand that, this is very real.
If I can be honest, in an ideal world we would have something like patreon and the likes and people sharing their videos on something like peertube and other mechanisms.
I don't want to gatekeep content behind a subscription so that people would be unable to access a community or content when the economy might be out of their hands and they don't want to pay for a subscription but I just wish if more people who do have the means to help and wouldn't be financially impacted much by donating actually do that more often / more as that would be the ideal world but maybe the question is if we can ever reach that or would that always remain an ideal and that we are just stuck with the things in current form.
Nebula just didn’t have enough content I cared about. I happily paid for it, but outside of one or two creators it was “meh.” Half of it felt like content specifically for elementary schoolers. So I, being childless, eventually canceled it. That said, I should probably give it another go, to see if that’s improved at all.
Personally, I really don’t think the problem is subscriptions at this point. I think it’s just having enough content to justify the subscription. Netflix probably costs 4x what Nebula does but certainly has at least that much more content.
I subscribe to Disney/Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube premium. I’ve tried others but there’s not enough content to justify the monthly expense unless I’m actively watching something. And Disney/Hulu is next on the chopping block because the content sort of sucks, there are large periods of time where nothing I want to watch is released, and the whole thing with Kimmel.
Nebula, the "answer" to the shittyness of youtube that creators have been falling over themselves to promote for the last 5 years, still has a conversion rate under 1%.
People hate ads, but they really really hate subscriptions.