WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services?

I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as content gets curated by those who extract money by giving us the "free" services.

It's simply very inefficient. IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use, this can't go on forever. There must be way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy.

I can say from experience and from others who have been in this position (not email, but general services); its around 1-2% of people.

Nebula, the answer to the tyranny of Youtube (who works for advertisers), has a <1% conversion rate despite tons of huge Youtubers pushing it. Vid.me, the previous answer to youtubes tyranny, went bankrupt because people hate ads and also hate subscriptions, nor do they donate.

I could write pages about this, but I wish I could violently shake all the children (many who are now in their 40's) that so deeply feel entitled to free content on the internet, and scream "If you are not paying directly for the product, you have no right to complain about the product".

In reality the ad model is not going anywhere. Given the choice, people overwhelmingly chose to let the advertisers steer the ship if it means "free" entry.

Video is impossible to break into because of how expensive it is. Even YouTube by all accounts is just breaking even. And that is with Google's entire infrastructure and advertising machinery behind it. A new entrant simply doesn't stand a chance.

Hold on... A ton of broadcasters, production companies, and individuals have done it and are doing it.

YouTube have many competitors and some of them are enormous, such as Netflix and cable TV. Production companies are popping up all the time and are making some of the world's highest quality material. The same for individuals who are making videos.

Or do you mean that YouTube needs a competitor that does exactly the same thing as YouTube?

All of them are based on the traditional media production model. The companies were all well established in the industry (minus Netflix) and the only change was to go from broadcast/cable/theater to streaming. YouTube pioneered user generated videos and independent content creators. Its only competitor is probably Twitch, but that itself is owned by Amazon and losing a ton of money.

All of them have the technical infrastructure to host user uploaded videos, so it's not impossible to compete with YouTube.

No one does video even remotely close to the scale YT does it. YT has by far the deepest market penetration (close to 3 billion monthly users), and has by far the most hosted content, and critically, youtube adds over a half-million hours of video a day.

Essentially, youtube adds more video every single day than the entirety of every other streaming service offers combined.

Youtube is in it's own category, and it's unsurprising no else wants to touch it.

Counted in number of hours watched, I'm pretty sure that Netflix, cable TV and satellite TV, can compete with YouTube.

But everybody has to start somewhere. Would it be impossible for Netflix to start adding for example 100 000 hours of user generated video per day?