Saving YouTube - Part 1
Lately TWIT keeps bringing up statistics about YouTube and the “thousands of Terabytes” it uses per day. They estimate the cost of running the site is $1 Million per month, and that at this rate, YouTube will be gone in 8 months or so without a strong source of revenue. Source
Should they make sweeping changes to YouTube to make it last? What would help?
First, I love the idea of free internet, free content, free everything. YouTube is extremely accessible for new viewers wanting to check it out. I pay for an internet connection, but once connected, I can receive the content for free. And I doubt anyone would pay to see most of the stuff people upload to the site anyway.
I also think that YouTube is about entertainment, not sharing (like Flickr). Nearly all video uploaded is intended to entertain and gain popularity (hence the rating systems being a part of the experience). If it was about sharing home movies with family, I’d have a different opinion, and it should be noted that it is possible for that type of sharing to occur now.
The main cost lies in sending out the packets, and YouTube pays for that bandwidth. One change would charge producers to upload content. Along with bringing in a portion of revenue, it would also have the effect of limiting submissions without censorship. It would hopefully pare down the 35,000 cellphone clips from the playground so we wouldn’t have to weed though as much to find the good stuff. Maybe people would think about the content before they upload it.
A charge of $1 US per uploladed clip would offset the $1 Million per month cost of operation with some leftover. A merit system might allow producers that prove themselves to upload content of value to the site (again, not the playground clips) to earn free upload status.
If people want to use the site as a means of sharing home movies or other personal content, that would be enabled for free but in a non-public area of the site. Users would need to register to a specific producer to view that content. Of course this might make a place for pron on Youtube, but is that necessarily a bad thing for them?
Having seen what YouTube is capable of and the easy interface for finding, viewing, and interacting with the videos on YouTube (compared to un-elegant Google video, for example), I would gladly pay to watch and upload videos. While a viewer subscription fee would admittedly kill the experience, a producer fee would help concentrate the content of Youtube and make it even more enjoyable.