Making ads optional is often suggested, sometimes tried, and there aren't many success stories. Most successful combinations of ad/payment commercial strategies aren't customer choice scenarios.
Most subscription papers made more on ads than subscriptions, but subscribership made ads sell at a premium. The stable revenue is nice too. Ryanair clones use advertising as within their get-an-extra-penny ethos. Buses and such do the same.
A lot of people seem to like the theory of paid opt-out... but that doesn't seem to be a thing.
YouTube premium seems to be a counterexample. I wonder why it's managed to stick around (and be pushed so hard) when other pay-for-no-ads attempts have failed (either before or after they launched).
The thing that's interesting is that according to what I've heard, it seems that YouTubers do actually make more money off of YouTube Premium viewers than they would off of advertisements from free users, on average. Now this could be false or dependent on channel, but that I can't answer.
The fact that this even can be the case, though, I find interesting. It makes me wonder if YouTube is either subsidizing YouTube premium payouts, or simply waiting to squeeze the margins until there's more revenue. But if this is sustainable today, it seems promising.
Two things I've noticed is this:
- YouTubers pick up paid sponsorships in addition to advertisements presumably because today's viewership doesn't provide a good stable revenue, especially due to issues like demonetization. However, many videos that get demonetized are actually still eligible for revenue from YouTube Premium, according to LTT.
- Paid sponsors are much more likely to have no problems with edgier YouTubers and podcasters. I believe this to be a net good, especially since YouTube flourished as an edgy, scrappy alternative to traditional video content (maybe somewhat similar to how Flash games were a sort of edgy, scrappy alternative to conventional video games.)
I don't really want to pay Google more money, but I don't see serious alternatives to YouTube popping up, so I really hope the subscription model can work this way. Even if I have to skip or even sit through sponsor segments here and there, it feels like it's part of what could help save YouTube from just continuing to degrade into another version of TV that somehow is even more crappy and oversaturated. And some YouTubers even make the sponsor segments genuinely entertaining. (I think Internet Historian is a good example here, though as a warning his content is probably more crude than his name is evoking if you've never heard of the channel.)
I occasionally run into issues with the Android TV app where I have to kill and restart it for the premium subscription to kick back in. As far as I know, YouTube Premium really does get rid of all video ads, although they do offer a confusing "Free With Ads" benefit for movies. (Why anyone would want to watch movies on YouTube when there's so much great video native to the platform is beyond me, and it's a giant misstep by Google imo.)
Maybe you’re conflating in-video sponsorships with ads? If you’re signed into YouTube Premium the system won’t serve you ads in that browser/app, but obviously a video creator can still read a sponsorship message.
Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access)? As far as I know it still offers two subscription modes, ad and ad-free, and subscriber stats on Wikipedia seem to be trending in a positive direction.
But I think the real issue is this: aside from services that use ads as an explicit differentiator, there is really no reason for a service that charges customers not to also add ads. It's just extra revenue. The only reason I could see for services not wanting to do this is when they want to specifically cultivate a "premium" feel. Cable in the US was/is a classic example: people paid inordinate feels for access, and then also put up with ads on top of it all. And for a large segment of the population, cable was so ubiquitous as to be unthinkable not to subscribe to it.
Making ads optional is often suggested, sometimes tried, and there aren't many success stories. Most successful combinations of ad/payment commercial strategies aren't customer choice scenarios.
Most subscription papers made more on ads than subscriptions, but subscribership made ads sell at a premium. The stable revenue is nice too. Ryanair clones use advertising as within their get-an-extra-penny ethos. Buses and such do the same.
A lot of people seem to like the theory of paid opt-out... but that doesn't seem to be a thing.