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View Poll Results: Would you pay for access to a high quality YouTube channel?
I would not pay for anything on YouTube. 44 70.97%
I would pay less than $4/mo for quality video journalism. 5 8.06%
I would pay more than $4/mo for quality video journalism. 2 3.23%
I refuse to pay for any content. 11 17.74%
Voters: 62. You may not vote on this poll

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Old 08-17-2014, 10:47 PM   #1
Calamity Jesus
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Question /Drive+ a YouTube Automotive Show (subscription req.)




/Drive is now going to be showing only 3-4min teasers of their car reviews and features that will show on /Drive+, their subscription channel.

The channel will be $4/month or $40/year for a subscription.


If you don't subscribe to /Drive (they just hit 1M subscribers last month, btw), or just aren't familiar with the name, you've probably at least seen a few /Chris Harris on cars videos being posted all over automotive sites.




They also have a few other shows that you may or may not have seen such as:

/Tuned (Matt Farah)



They've had some interesting series features such as:

There are interview/talk shows that will remain free:


They're claiming that if not enough people subscribe they'll have to close up shop, but that if this is successful they should be able to do more than they are currently.

Many of us say that we'd be happy to only pay for the content we like when asked about cable TV and movies. Does that apply to YouTube content as well, even if it's produced at a TV-level quality and provided without commercials?
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Last edited by Calamity Jesus; 08-17-2014 at 10:56 PM. Reason: Thanks, Doug
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Old 08-17-2014, 10:55 PM   #2
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I paid for the annual membership for $40, which they then scrapped. I'm still willing to pay $4/mo because I watch the **** out of their videos and I know how much of a grinning idiot Chris Harris' videos make me.
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Old 08-17-2014, 10:56 PM   #3
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Doh, I missed where they dropped the $40/year.

Last edited by Calamity Jesus; 08-17-2014 at 11:25 PM. Reason: derp.. $40/mo
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Old 08-17-2014, 10:57 PM   #4
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I'm on the trial now.

I'm not sure I believe their crybaby financial troubles. YouTube partners make bank, and and the majority of vehicles and trips are provided to automotive journalists by manufacturers.
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Old 08-17-2014, 11:01 PM   #5
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Love /tuned but find Chris Harris a serious bore, everything is compared to a 911 zzzzzz.

I would not be able to justify $4 a month on drive, thats half the cost of a netflix account.
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Old 08-17-2014, 11:03 PM   #6
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I don't pay for cable because I don't want 50 channels of garbage I have no interest in. As someone who has always wanted to select and pay for individual channels or content, I see this as right up my alley.

Quote:
Originally Posted by skywaffles View Post
I'm on the trial now.

I'm not sure I believe their crybaby financial troubles. YouTube partners make bank, and and the majority of vehicles and trips are provided to automotive journalists by manufacturers.
Eh, they're not doing PRoN moneyshots on a green screen in their basement. They're racing hypercars on F1 circuits. Traveling and putting these together ain't too cheap.

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I would not be able to justify $4 a month on drive, thats half the cost of a netflix account.
I do agree that when you compare it to Netflix, it's a ripoff. Then when I remember it's $1/week for a channel, I forget to give a ****. People pay over $100 on Comcast and don't think twice about it. And don't tell me how much more content you get when you're using 1/100th of it.
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Old 08-17-2014, 11:04 PM   #7
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How long is the trial, sky?
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Old 08-17-2014, 11:16 PM   #8
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14 days.
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Old 08-17-2014, 11:46 PM   #9
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I have no idea what this even is.

Eurojax for president.
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Old 08-18-2014, 12:30 AM   #10
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I love the /Chris Harris on cars videos. Matt Farrah is a little too sensational for me. I especially enjoyed Chris Harris' review of the Morgan Three Wheeler.
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Old 08-18-2014, 12:32 AM   #11
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Matt Farrah is an idiot. His vocabulary consists of about 20 words.
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Old 08-18-2014, 02:22 AM   #12
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I pay more for cigarettes in a month, but $4/month for YouTube content is not agreeable by principle. I only really like Chris Harris - maybe if I liked some of the other 'shows' I'd consider paying for it.
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Old 08-18-2014, 02:26 AM   #13
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$4/month over a million subscribers, that serious dollar bucks. Something they didn't have before and still produced the shows.

Since they are monetizing the show, they might as well take on advertisers and offset the cost, which IMO isn't worth it as is. The yearly actually makes better financial sense to me. How many people will keep a full years subscription, vs a one time $40 bucks in the bank up front?

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Old 08-18-2014, 02:33 AM   #14
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I don't think the million subscribers was for the 4 dollar a month Drive plus. I think it is for the free version of drive.
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Old 08-18-2014, 02:59 AM   #15
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Calamity Jesus View Post
I don't know what all this ////++//++$$£¥+// junk is, but I just wanted to say I've been doing the Silver State Classic Challenge for 10 years now. You may all touch me now.
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Old 08-18-2014, 04:32 AM   #16
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if you want to kill some time

http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/t...+Blog#topicTop

and no, I´m not paying a ****ing dime. If they succeed in a year everything will cost a dollar, or ten.
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Old 08-18-2014, 08:36 AM   #17
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An article by Chris Harris on why they're doing this:

Quote:
In October 2011 an American chap called JF Musial called me and said he was about to get funding from YouTube for a motoring channel - and did I fancy being a part of it. Two weeks later we shook hands over a beer at the Nurburgring, and so began the most enjoyable period of my working life.

YouTube underwrote two years of DRIVE programming and I loved every minute of it. At the end of 2013 the funding ended and we had to look for ways to keep DRIVE alive.

All YouTube videos monetise through advertising, so it should have been easy to simply raise a production budget and then watch the advertising dollars roll in. The problem is, the dollars never really have rolled in and the revenue share with YouTube itself allows us to retain just 55 per cent of earnings. So it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that we need other revenue streams, one of which is a subscription service for longer-form videos.

Now I'm fully aware that just the notion of me and my colleagues attempting to charge for video content will cause much unrest. It's not greed; just basic mathematics.

Remember that rather lovely F40/F50 video we shot at Angelsey? It cost £9,000 to shoot, and despite amassing two million views, to date has grossed us just £4,800. The maths is pretty stark across the board - even the McLaren P1 video has racked up plenty of views, over 3.6 million in fact, but its total revenue is £9,200. That means we're in profit, but only because it was an official launch event and Woking paid for mine and Neil's flights, and JF who was second camera used his air miles to get from the US!

Don't misconstrue any of this as me moaning either - like I said, I've loved shooting DRIVE videos, but that was a two-year project and now we need to try something different. It's a pretty simple choice too: we either succeed in persuading a certain percentage of viewers that our content is worth some loose change every month. Or we don't, and we stop making films.
Of course I want it to work, and of course I feel pretty strongly that the sterling efforts of the entire DRIVE team are worth a small outlay each month on our new subscription channel called DRIVE+, but what I think doesn't really matter. We'll continue to air free content on the regular DRIVE YouTube channel, and shorter teaser edits of the long-form films will broadcast there too. [Chris will continue to introduce the vids here on PH too - Ed.]

Yes, there's lots of great free content already out there. But we'll be adding more with our films - going further with the tests and reviews and hopefully proving that content can be worth paying for.

Thanks to everyone who subscribed to DRIVE and shared the videos since 2012. I've no doubt this will generate some fairly potent rhetoric in the forums, but we've got to give it a go because the days of simply giving expensive content away for free are probably numbered.

The first subscription video goes live on Thursday. It's the LaFerrari. The car is stunning.

Chris
http://www.pistonheads.com/news/defa...?storyId=30564


Quote:
Originally Posted by JjSwee View Post
I don't think the million subscribers was for the 4 dollar a month Drive plus. I think it is for the free version of drive.
Yup. /Drive (free) has 1M subscribers after two years. /Drive+ just started at the beginning of the month and will likely never see 1M, or even close.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Vostok 7 View Post
I don't know what all this ////++//++$$£¥+// junk is, but I just wanted to say I've been doing the Silver State Classic Challenge for 10 years now. You may all touch me now.
Have you watched the whole video?
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Old 08-18-2014, 10:37 AM   #18
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Have you watched the whole video?
The lower speed classes are boring, yes, but I don't know why he says it takes 5 years to go faster, you can switch to a higher class the very next time you go provided you aren't a douchebag and get DQed for going too fast (or too slow), and have a car prepped for it.

I did the 110 class the very first time and ever since then I have been in higher classes (usually no faster than the 120 class because Evos and Subarus aren't very happy above 140mph).
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Old 08-18-2014, 10:49 AM   #19
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I will pay for web content but there is a fine line. I do have a hard time paying for a singular YouTube channel that I only, at best, infrequently watched...

Now if they were ofering a overall premium YouTube package that had other content for the 4 dollarbucks a month then we'd be talking.

[You'd think that someone would have thought of this already]

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Old 08-18-2014, 11:33 AM   #20
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I am a paying subscriber for Drive+ but I will say that the 1+ million subscribers to Drive are absolutely getting screwed. Now they just upload 2 min teasers to the channel with so many subs is now worthless.
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Old 08-18-2014, 12:25 PM   #21
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This is the groupon effect. One a retailer marks a product down to get people to try it, people will associate the product only being worthwhile at that price point. You were free for two years, not you want people to pay for the same content. That is just a hard sell, especially when the host are not unique to that platform. What are you really paying for then? Remember when HULU went from completely free to premium? People were pissed, viewership plummeted. They had to still supply good content for free to get people to subscribe down the line. You can't just do this overnight.

I have a feeling they will get a nice bump in subscribers about 4-5 months from now, but that content isn't even completely shot yet, so the value of + just isn't there. In my worthless opinion, they jumped the gun on launching the pay channel without fully understanding what the premium content is. They scrambled with what they had in the can and that just isn't the way to convince people the premium is worth it.

They will survive, if they are smart enough with the pitches they have
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Old 08-18-2014, 01:10 PM   #22
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Quote:
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In my worthless opinion, they jumped the gun on launching the pay channel without fully understanding what the premium content is. They scrambled with what they had in the can and that just isn't the way to convince people the premium is worth it.
I agree. What they did by cutting down the minutes for the free channel just doesn't work. Keep the show free, but give us cooler content to watch like behind the scenes, or car shows and stuff for $4 a month. Nowadays people don't really like to be 'forced' into paying for something, especially when it was once free. My worthless opinion, too

Oh BTW, i'd pay for it just because I support the cool stuff they do. Not really because of getting to see the full show.
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Old 08-18-2014, 01:32 PM   #23
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I've been watching their shows for a while now and they are really well done, good quality and some pretty great content. But I can't justify paying $4/month for one single show when a service like Netflix is $8/month and you get hundreds of thousands shows.
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Old 08-18-2014, 01:42 PM   #24
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Calamity Jesus View Post
An article by Chris Harris on why they're doing this:

http://www.pistonheads.com/news/defa...?storyId=30564

Yup. /Drive (free) has 1M subscribers after two years. /Drive+ just started at the beginning of the month and will likely never see 1M, or even close.
Meh it sounds like they are over reaching. I understand it takes $$$ to make the videos, maybe they spent too much $$$ in production to do it. The only segments I like on it are Matt Farah's. They should prolly balance it out, production costs > ad revenue = cancelled shows.
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Old 08-18-2014, 01:56 PM   #25
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Quote:
Originally Posted by goaters View Post
I agree. What they did by cutting down the minutes for the free channel just doesn't work. Keep the show free, but give us cooler content to watch like behind the scenes, or car shows and stuff for $4 a month. Nowadays people don't really like to be 'forced' into paying for something, especially when it was once free. My worthless opinion, too

Oh BTW, i'd pay for it just because I support the cool stuff they do. Not really because of getting to see the full show.
400k approaches! The day is near!
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