Drive Channel Subscription YouTube – Biggest Mistake?
So Drive channel have decided to start charging people a subscription fee to get access to their full length videos on YouTube.
If you don’t pay Drive’s subscription fee you get a teaser videos instead.
If there was a way for a YouTube channel to have its minutes of video watched figure decimated it is this.
The internet and YouTube is free and if you want to make money you have to bolt a revenue stream onto your content.
This could be advertising or it could bolt your own business onto the videos which sells its own stuff.
Drive’s YouTube channel has reached a fork.
Either their end goal is to licence their videos to TV channels around the world or they want to make money from the YouTube videos. They cannot have both.
By charging a subscription fee Drive has decided to go down to the old route of licensing to TV channels and if this method works then good luck to them.
If Drive wants to make money from it’s YouTube activities then they need traffic, views and minutes watched and as much as possible.
Charging a subscription fee to see their channel is not going to do it.
But Drive are not idiots, the internet and online video maybe the future but at the moment the big bucks are still in TV.
So while you maybe hacked off and even offended that Drive has gone to a subscription model, you cannot blame them. They want as much success as possible and as the world stands at the moment, that means getting your show on the television.
At StrikeEngine we are huge fans of the Drive channel, it forms a key part of Car TV, the StrikeEngine channel, but we understand where they are coming from and to be honest, if we could get paid to syndicate our channel on mainstream TV instead of on YouTube, we would probably do it and I think you would to, so don’t be too down on their decision.
If there is one thing we find hard to excuse it is Drive’s price of a subscription. 3.99 USD a month they want, and this to my mind is excessive.
Can you imagine if every YouTube channel you liked decided to go down the same road as Drive channel and charge 3.99 a month? I am pretty sure this would be the end of YouTube as a serious entertainment platform. If you subscribe to 20 channels a month, that would be 80 dollars and that is cable pricing.
In short the 3.99 a month is excessive to say the least. A dollar max and maybe 50 cents would be something that would work.
The guys at drive must know this so the only explanation I can think of is that Drive’s contract with NBC Sports says that this is the price they have to charge if they want NBC to pay them for their show. The 3.99 decision smacks of, to me at least, NBC forcing the high price to drive people to their TV channel.
Again, Drive channel has got to go where the money is and if 3.99 is what NBC Sports is demanding they charge then this is what they have to do, it comes across as harsh to the people who have been following Drive channel from day one but at the end of the day it’s just business.
