I think we’ve passed the point where any non-free service could compete with a free one. The short term gains of shoving ads in everyone’s face is in full force.

I do think in the future when these companies have burned through every ounce of investor money we’ll go back to paid services, but I think that’s a decade out or more. There already exists a few paid services similar to YouTube such as diet quibi Dropout, Nebula, and Floatplane (I think it’s premium), and I think those will serve as the models for future services.

They’re all rather affordable and their models are setup for people that want to follow creators (nebula and Floatplane) or for people that want to follow specific shows (dropout). They don’t advertise to you, there are no sponsor spots, and they’re always working to improve their platforms for the user. Hell, in a recent episode on dropout, the CEO admitted that their player had issues that they wanted to fix completely unprompted.

Hopefully future services will model themselves in a similar way, of not an improved formula, but again I think it’s a long way out