Please reconsider the freemium model!

[ThatOtherAndrew]

Crossposting from a long complaint I had written in the RYD Discord server:

Issues with the current freemium approach

Personally, while I can totally understand while this was a move that was made, I do not think it was planned out well.

If people use a simple product for a long time which individually gives them all a slight benefit, they will take any attempts to freemium-ise with hostility.

The bug with opening the new tab as a recurring interruption is unfortunate for public image, but not much to be said there as it was unintentional.

To make matters worse, the premium offerings seem to be of any utility to only a very specific demographic subset of the people using the extension (e.g. larger content creators). As such, it brings negatives to a lot of people but positives to very few!

Oh, and there's the data privacy issue; would everyone running the extension really be happy about their dislike information, geographic data, etc. being logged in a database for analytical purposes? Surely this also ramps up the hosting costs significantly?

Naive suggested solutions / approaches

I totally understand that running a service like this will get pricey, but imho examples of better plans of action are:

• Proactively pursue sponsorships/funding from large companies and organisations
  • Emergent Ventures may be interested from the angle of pushing for more peer-evaluation of information quality on the internet for example?
  • Simply having a "click here to sponsor" message at the bottom of the repo readme can go easily unnoticed, sometimes it's better to reach out to companies instead of waiting for them to reach out to you
• Ask for donations in subtle ways in place of freemium CTAs
  • A small ephemeral banner at the top or on the side, Wikipedia-style, politely requesting a donation will be better tolerated
  • Usage-based triggers for CTAs will be perceived as less invasive (e.g. small toast message on every 10th video disliked)
• If you do insist on having a freemium model, could it instead be advertised in a more applicable location for the target demographic? For instance, a banner on the YouTube Studio homepage, along with the official website and maybe even a blog post.
• Is switching providers an option?
  • I'm not too familiar with the details or difficulty of reimplementing, but e.g. Backblaze can do 15TB for $90/mo
  • This cost could be cut even further if you seek partnership/sponsorship with a hosting provider, which I think is genuinely feasible for this project

So um, yeah

RYD an awesome project which gets a lot of traffic, but that adds all the more weight to each decision you make, as the impact of them is significantly magnified at scale as well. However, having that scale also gives you additional credibility and weight in order to make change or get money rolling (mentioning 13.3k GitHub stars in a partnership email to a company will pack a punch for instsance)!

[Anarios]

I 'm not too familiar with the details or difficulty of reimplementing, but e.g. Backblaze can do 15TB for $90/mo

That is backup (i.e. very slow) storage. Now check prices for SSDs

But yeah - other than that - a completely fair message.

But in general - there isn't much to reconsider - i.e. the changelog will never appear again (it's supposed to be shown only once).

And the side panel - after you close it - will never be shown again as well.

It was very poorly implemented and executed by me, sorry, but the worst part is over for everyone.

[DSTradeNetwork]

I 'm not too familiar with the details or difficulty of reimplementing, but e.g. Backblaze can do 15TB for $90/mo

That is backup (i.e. very slow) storage. Now check prices for SSDs

But yeah - other than that - a completely fair message.

But in general - there isn't much to reconsider - i.e. the changelog will never appear again (it's supposed to be shown only once).

And the side panel - after you close it - will never be shown again as well.

It was very poorly implemented and executed by me, sorry, but the worst part is over for everyone.

I wonder how many people immediately uninstalled and will never come back now.
Any kind of popup was an awful idea, should never have been included in the first place. The only place it should have been was the changelog and if you click on the extension itself. While the new tab thing you say was unintentional, it still happened.

And concerning the side panel, the problem is, your extension NEVER had any kind of UI shown to a regular user besides the dislikes on the video. Now there is a side panel, while you can close it and never see it again, It's still there. IT's different than it was before. Users don't like that.

[Anarios]

Any kind of popup was an awful idea,

yeah, it was supposed to be shown on browser restart, as happens in other extensions, and is much less intrusive compared to how it turned out.

That wasn't perfect, but I though it would be okay.

I would never intentionally create a popup while users are busy doing something.