Comment by stcredzero
8 years ago
I don't think this analysis is valid. There are far more viewer entities than there are advertisers. In the current market, one party is trying to sell eyeballs to advertisers through a middleman. In a micropayment content market, it would be creators selling directly to audience. I think you're making the same kind of mistake when early computer pioneers thought there would be no more than hundreds of computers and no one would ever want one in their home. I both cases, the conceit is that both markets are the same, when in reality, the two markets are entirely different.
I'm sure you could have used the same conceit with cable TV to prove that something like YouTube would never work.
> In a micropayment content market, it would be creators selling directly to audience.
It doesn't matter, you'd still need to generate the same level of revenue than the ad-supported business, or even more, to justify the switch.
If you didn't, content creators would just stay in the ad-supported business.
> I'm sure you could have used the same conceit with cable TV to prove that something like YouTube would never work.
That doesn't apply here. We're talking about providing the same content with a different monetization strategy. YT wasn't about the monetization strategy, but about a different type of content.