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Workaccount206/16/20256 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

928340923206/16/2025

Nebula just doesn't have a product I want. I don't care for early access to Youtube videos.

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benhurmarcel06/16/2025

I pay for Nebula and still use Youtube a ton. Nebula is nice but it doesn’t have all channels I watch.

paxys06/16/2025

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.

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tmtvl06/16/2025

I've got a Nebula lifetime membership and it's neat. I actually discovered channels through it (Not Just Bikes, WonderWhy, 12tone,...) which I hadn't heard of before. I also paid for YT Premium Lite in the past. The full YT Premium is too expensive for me, though.

But I feel a better example of paying for convenience is the Twitch subscriber system. They make it work in a way that others fail at by tying it in to various things like emotes and channel points and the general sense of supporting the creators. I know YT memberships exist, but I don't know how widely those are used and they just don't seem to get pushed as much.

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maplant06/16/2025

Vis a vis nebula, this is definitely a product issue. Dropout.tv seems to be extremely successful and has a similar value proposition

JCharante06/17/2025

re: rebula

I'm someone willing to shell out for SaaS and I don't see nebula being significantly better than just paying for youtube premium (which I do). They have some exclusive content but paying to watch a subset of content ad-free is just not going to work out (on a large scale, I know they're worth like $200m but that's much less than $1t)