What really strikes me though is that even though the two companies are so fundamentally different, they use the same advertising/revenue generating model. In my opinion, this is less of a product of the state of the media than it is a product of our generation. The current generation has come to expect that certain things are, and must be, free. The fact is that with the widespread capabilities of the internet and the overall ease of access to music/video piracy, there is now a general consensus among people, particularly among young people, that certain things should not be paid for - that they are a right. No one wants to pay for music or video content anymore. And why should we, if we can get it for free? Even if it's illegal, we're probably not going to get caught. This reasoning can be applied not only to YouTube/Hulu, but even to the downfall of the newspaper industry as well (we can get our news for free from third party news sites, blogs, hyperlocal sources, etc., so if NYT and WSJ were to install a paywall, people wouldn't pay for it...thus resulting in another advertising model).
The fact is that this model is not generating enough revenue for these companies to stay afloat. For YouTube and Hulu, this seems like a temporary solution until another model is developed that gets consumers to pay for content and still be equally satisfied. As we've all learned in economics classes, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Viewers want content to be free, and don't care that somebody else is paying the price. We want advertising to be gone and still get our free content. But that's not how it works. Until it comes down to a choice between priced content and no content, we're just going to have to suck it up and watch a few minutes of advertising.
No comments:
Post a Comment