I believe this is a fair question. I've been hearing talk about this.

On one hand, Google has thousands of videos posted on YouTube. If one dollar was paid for every time someone watched every clip, Google would have millions of dollars just roll in.

On the other hand, that begs the question of how the customers will be able to pay.

So, I guess the question is...should this be considered a good thing or a bad thing?

Should we have to pay for YouTube?

I think that if you had to pay to watch YouTube, people would quickly migrate to another video-sharing service. Besides, isn't YouTube already rolling in cash through advertising revenue?

edited 17th Jun '12 5:03:59 AM by Talby

There's really no need for it, is there? There's nothing to suggest that Google need MOAR PROFIT from it and in any event it'll just turn away users.

Also, 64p per video is daylight robbery.

edited 17th Jun '12 5:07:29 AM by TheBatPencil

One dollar per video is far too much: it would vastly, vastly exceeds Google's costs. And since youtube is certainly not the only video streaming and uploading service, although it is the most popular, if Google did that it would find itself outcompeted very quickly.

This said, I am not a fan of advertising-based services, and I am not opposed in principle to paying for something like youtube. It would have to be something subscription-based, though — you pay a (reasonable) sum, and then you watch what you want for a whole year.

edited 17th Jun '12 5:11:25 AM by Carciofus

Youtube would quickly die if they did that.

YouTube would die amazingly fast and be forever be known for having made the worst possible business decision in decades.

When something is free, you attract the largest audience possible: people who don't want to pay but want entertainment. Even if it's a dollar per video, that is ridiculous. Think of how many videos you watch in a day - Let's Plays, TV episodes, "hey check this out" friendly suggestions, educational videos, etc. Imagine paying a dollar for every video you saw.

A dollar per vid is just a generally dumb value. Even a dime per video would be dumb, and a penny might get away with it. Google has plenty of profits as it is, and they would only lose money to unhappy internet folk if they put a price on video watching.

If Google wanted to be hated by the planet Earth, then sure, go for it.

While I have no doubt that YouTube would die a terrible death if it tried to make people pay to use it, it may be running out of options in that regard. Apparently the exponential growth of content on the site is unfathomably large—something like sixty hours of video added every minute, last I heard—so they'll either be forced to make people pay to retain server capacity or they'll simply need to start purging the servers of old videos with few views.

I use youtube a lot. If it costed me money, I would stop using it.

What if it cost you something along the lines of "pay five dollars, and you can use youtube for a year"?

Nope. Not a dime. Google is rolling in advertising money.

Google makes jillions of dollars in their other countless services. To charge people to watch videos online would mean Google was in DEEP financial trouble....or just want more money.

edited 17th Jun '12 10:30:55 AM by Steven

Even so, if they make no money with youtube, why should they offer that service? It's not like they are under any obligation to do so...

I'm actually vaguely socialistic: but as things stand now, "we just want to make more money" is a perfectly legitimate reason for a company to axe a product or to increase its price.

edited 17th Jun '12 10:33:45 AM by Carciofus

Have you ever seen one of Google's server farms? Basically warehouses full of rigs.

Storage is no problem for them, only maybe the energy costs.

Isn't the fact that we have to often watch a 15-30 second (or more, though we can usually skip the longer ads) enough of a cost to watch a YouTube video?

I'm sure Google is making far more than 1 cent on video ads.

Do we? I cannot say that I ever found an ad on a youtube video. Perhaps it's a matter of different regions?

@Carciofus

It's also a good way to piss off the consumers and have them flock elsewhere for the same service. You forget Google does more than just searches and videos. They have many other things they offer and they do make money elsewhere that allows them to offer many services to people for free.

Hell, just look at Team Fortress 2. It became a free to play game because Valve made so much money from their in game store that they are able to support the game without having to charge people to buy the game.

I'm an Eaglelander. Perhaps it's different elsewhere?

Seems like any vid with more than 200K views has at least a popup ad, and possibly a video ad as well.

I also know some people whose videos are popular enough can choose to enable ads on their videos.

Yes, but the exponential growth of YouTube is obscene. I think they really do have a long-term hosting problem in terms of space.

EDIT: Original post that was here was supposed to be for a different thread, obviously. My apologies.

edited 17th Jun '12 11:18:54 AM by DerelictVessel

Probably. Hell, I've seen ads longer than the actual video, and when they were doing the whole "pick one of these three ads before we show you your video", there was a point where two of them were half-hour infomercials.

We get YouTube adverts in Britain.

Although Google occasionally seems to suffer from Everywhere Is America and give me adverts for things I cannot buy because they're impossible to get here.

But anyway, IIRC, YouTube is a loss-maker for Google. However, like mentioned, Google make shit-tonnes from everywhere else that they can afford to subsidise it. Plus, they pay video uploaders too, IIRC.

Well, if you're thinking long-term then you also have to take the decreasing costs of storage media and their increasing capacity into account.

Indeed. 320 GB of hard drive cost me £70 in 2009. 1 TB of hard drive costs me £50 last week. Obviously, that's a basic level, but if portable hard drives increase in capacity by 6 times, and yet have such a low comparative price, then the only problem with servers is finding the physical spaces.

Can the expansion of storage device capacity relative to size come into par with upwards of sixty hours of video a minute?

EDIT: I mean, I just think the sheer enormity of YouTube is being ignored here.

edited 17th Jun '12 11:59:00 AM by DerelictVessel