I decided to subscribe to Youtube Premium this week. I told myself it would be coherent to pay for a platform that I use so often. It goes with a reflexion I've had for some time: the question of how to pay for content creation on the web.

Update March 29, 2026: I unsubscribed from Google Premium since the beginning of last year because I am firmly opposed to the odious support shown toward the Trump administration by American tech companies, foremost among them Google. I understand that the American political game almost necessarily requires contributing a certain amount to political campaigns, but there is a line between contribution and collaboration, between complacency and complicity. Of course their support is self-serving: they wanted to get rid of the anti-trust lawsuits targeting them... and in capitalism, all moves are permitted, "to the strongest go the spoils," as they say. They won't fool me again: the interest of a capitalist company will always be, fundamentally, opposed to the interest of the one and the many. Fortunately, the virtual world offers particular advantages that render any attempt at control useless and ineffective. I am once again sailing the virtual seas, armed with my VPN, my ad blocker, and my open-source software.

Considering the quantity of videos that I watch every week, I told myself that it was coherent to finance the platform in which I put so much of my time, even tough it is a Google company (that's for another debate). In general, I realize that the vast majority of contents that I consult are free. Being a fervent user of ad blockers, I contrevene, in a way, to the editors will.

It is my opinion that the question of paying for content creation on the web is not yet solved. Yes, the marginal cost of a digital content, as well as the support operating costs are practically null, compared to any other physical media or location. That technical reality, coupled with the novelty of the medium and the erroneous idea that it would consist in a minimal part of publication activities have, for a long time, let the belief grow that publicity was a viable economic model on the web. Indeed, it is a model that offers small returns but works well at a large scale. All content was therefore put on the Internet for free, the same content that was previously exclusive and paid for on any physical support and that would finance almost entirely the media activities. When, years later, the physical let the place to the digital, we realized that ad earnings could not, by themselves, finance writing rooms, recording studios or production teams.

Without advocating for the web's privatization or its transformation in a walled garden, that we must avoid at all costs, it remains that a form of retribution must be possible for web creators: all these authors, videographers, artists and other hackers that publish their creation on the Internet. It implies, unfortunately for us, the public, to not having access to all the content for free. A pregnant approach to that problem is the free publication of a shorter version, a summary in a way, the long version being accessible only to subscribers. A written publication for example would give the introduction and a technical summary for free, the full version being visible with the help of a code. This was of functioning can be applied to technologies like RSS at the condition that the software used to access it is able to handle a form of authentication, although a token in the URL might remain a simple and sufficient solution.

Until platforms like Youtube and Spotify are brought to the commons, collectivized, nationalized maybe, that is until they become public goods shared by all, an intermediate solution must be found. A form of subscription, a return to the operating mode of the pre-Internet era, is probably the way to go for the moment.