3 Reasons Most Internet Video Should Be Free

Lessons from a recent YouTuber misstep

Watcher is a YouTube channel run by a few guys who left Buzzfeed to start their own project in 2020. In the last couple of weeks, they made an announcement on their YouTube channel that elicited a pretty negative response from their viewers and fans.

Watcher announced that because of declining ad revenues, despite increasing views, and a desire to do more audacious, TV-network-level content, they decided to launch their own streaming service and leave YouTube. The video announcing the change was a bit awkward, and you can watch it here if you want.

They announced the May 31 launch of WatcherTV, a streaming service of all of their content, for $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year. They shared plans to pull all of their past content from YouTube and release all new content on their own streaming platform. This would help them retain and not layoff any of their 25 staff members, create new, TV-network-level shows, and not have to worry about if their content was good for advertisers or the often-fickle YouTube recommendation engine.

Their audience revolted for a handful of reasons, based on how the creators communicated in their update/apology video here.

I’ve never watched Watcher’s content, but I correctly predicted why their audience revolted before I watched their update and apology video because it’s a sequence of events that’s happened a number of times on YouTube recently:

• YouTube channel grows to be successful.

• YouTube channel overextends itself to make more audacious, “impressive” content—like what could work on traditional TV.

• YouTube channel realizes it isn’t really profitable anymore.

• YouTube channel passes burden of profitability on to audience instead of cutting back staff or production costs.

I think part of the sad reality of this is that YouTube simply doesn’t reward high-quality, TV-network-level content in the same way that it rewards high-energy, clickbaity content. The kind of content that is most technically “impressive” costs a lot of money and doesn’t perform as well as content that is technically unimpressive and is more cost-efficient to create.

Historically-speaking, the highest ROI YouTube strategy has almost certainly been, without knowing the hard data, “Let’s Play” gamers (Pewdiepie, Jacksepticeye, Markiplier, etc.) and vloggers (Jake Paul, Logan Paul, Casey Neistat, etc.) because their content is cheap to make and has historically appeased the YouTube algorithm. Consider also MrBeast who, though he makes expensive videos today, rose to prominence by making relatively cheap, sensational content. And, when he did create videos that cost a lot of money in the early years, he set up ad deals that resulted in the advertisers funding an idea, rather than just paying him for conversions/sales.

All of that is to say: YouTube really isn’t the place for high-quality, TV-network-level content to thrive (at least in most cases). The financials just really don’t support it, at least today.

This newsletter is pretty impromptu and stream-of-consciousness, so please keep that in mind as you read. Much of this is half-baked, which will be pretty clear at times. But let me give three brief reasons why I think that, practically-speaking, most internet video should be free¹:

1) Too much good, free content exists.

I watch probably five times as much free content on YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, and elsewhere than I do on a streaming service I actually pay money to use—including to watch sports year-round.

Just last week I recommended a free documentary I watched on YouTube about the origin of the video game The Oregon Trail. The video is expertly created and about 90 minutes long. I watched it while eating my lunch over the course of a week, and it cost me nothing but my time.

image created in DALL-E

Every morning I watch Good Mythical Morning while I’m eating breakfast and going through my inbox. Rhett and Link have been creating a daily morning show for over a decade that is produced nearly at the level of a TV-network program, and I’ve never paid a dime. I’ve bought plenty of merch and certainly contributed to their ad revenue, but I haven’t paid to watch the content.

When there is so much free, high-quality video content available for free on the internet, making a case to get people to pay for new content gets tough. Of course there is still a place for TV shows and movies on streaming services because some major IPs would never make their content freely available.

Consider that some of the most popular video content in the last decade has been based within long-standing intellectual property that people are used to paying for. Consider also how difficult it is for entirely new properties to gain traction in theaters or on paid streaming services. Consumers and creators alike have been bemoaning for years that film production companies only want to make re-makes of previously successful brands like Marvel movies or Star Wars content, etc. The reason production companies go back to old ideas is because that content is more likely to succeed than brand new ideas.

I think that’s in part because we’re used to paying to get access to Star Wars or Marvel content, but if you want to try to get me to pay to watch some new cooking show, I’ll just pull up one of the dozens of awesome free ones on YouTube instead.

Anyway, I’m just sort of ranting here. But I hope the point is clear: there is so much that is good enough², and free, that getting people to pay for content that they’ve never had to pay for before is a tough sell (literally).

2) Time is scarce.

This point is a bit derivative of the one above, so I’ll be quick about it.

Why would I subscribe to a TV service (or bother with an antenna) to watch Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show when I could just watch the best two or three segments for free on my own time on YouTube the next day?

Why would I bother paying $5.99 for a new streaming service to access a handful of shows I would need to make time to watch when I could just keep watching good YouTube content instead?

Most people are watching video content to learn or be entertained, or some combination of both. Educational and entertaining content can be produced and provided at low cost via YouTube in such a way that the appeal of a streaming service begins to dim.

If I only have one or two hours one or two nights a week to watch a show, on what basis would I pay $15.49 per month for the ad-free version of Netflix when I could pick one of my favorite YouTube channels to watch for free? And maybe that’s part of it—maybe paid streaming services are more popular among people that generally have more free time—because they need more content to fill their time.

Obviously there are exceptions to this idea that “video content is generally not worth paying for,” and that is when you have a piece of video content that is truly exceptional and is differentiated from all kinds of other content out there. Such that you’re willing to pay some amount of money per month to access it on a paid service.

3) Content is often a commodity, not a differentiated product.

This is my layman’s definition of a commodity: a commodity is a category of goods (or services) in which one brand’s product is virtually indistinguishable from another’s product. Corn is a commodity—in fact, corn from different farms is often mixed together in bushels. Oil is a commodity—you don’t go to a gas station based on which oil company your gas came from.

There is a technical definition of what a commodity is (like corn and oil), but in your everyday life you could identify what you personally consider commodities based on what products you gladly buy the generic version of rather than the brand-name version of. Trash bags are a commodity in our house. Band-aids, too. (Just as a couple of examples.)

Video content is a commodity in a lot of ways, and in some ways it’s not, of course. There is obviously some glaring differences between all of the TikTokers and YouTubers out there—at a base level, they’re different people—but when it comes down to it, a lot of content is simply a commodity product at this point. There is just so much being created by so many people that truly differentiated products (the opposite of a commodity) are harder to come by.

People don’t have a set aside time for Christian video content and a set aside time for current events video content and a set aside time for humorous video content. That’s not how people consume content today.

People have some period of time they consume all genres of video content in a given day, and increasingly one of the qualifications for which video content people choose to consume is “How much does this video content cost me outside of my time?”

So if, for example, you’re creating a Christian interview YouTube-based podcast/vodcast, you better have a way to distinguish yourself from the other hundred of those out there, and oh by the way also a way to pull someone’s attention away from one of the thousands of other kinds of video content they may consume in that same 30-minute window.

All content competes with other content for the same amount of free time. One content genre doesn’t compete with other players in only its genre. If I spend 20 minutes watching a stand-up comedy bit on YouTube, that’s 20 minutes I could have spent reading a couple of articles about improving my prayer life or listening to a podcast about the best way to attract hummingbirds to my backyard. All of that content is competing for the same 20-minute window, regardless of genre or medium.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

Anyway, I could keep rambling about this for much longer, but I’m just going to go ahead and leave it here. Also I’m not editing this at all, so I apologize in advance if you had to step around some grammatical potholes on your way down here to the end.

In short and in sum: if you’re creating internet video content today and you want to put it behind a paywall, you’re probably not going to have many viewers. The quality and quantity of free video content is increasing at such a rate that people are simply becoming exhausted with paying for yet another streaming service, and they’ll likely just opt for whatever’s free instead, even if it’s just good enough and not great.

K cya

-Chris

1. FWIW, I think much of this could apply to internet content in general, not just video content, but to explain my thought on that would have required much longer explanation than I care to write at the moment. So we’ll stick with video. :-)

2. As an aside, the enough is important here. Our general expectations for video production quality have decreased over time—one could make this case for all of media, not just video (see above footnote). So it’s important that much of YouTube video is good enough because most of us don’t need great cinematography, amazing storytelling, etc. in our video today. We just need video that’s good enough. That is, as long as we’re not paying for it.