Would you pay for YouTube Pro?

Forget YouTube Premium. What would happen if the video-sharing titan created a more aggressive yet affordable paid subscription service?

Anyone who has been interested in Moore’s Law and its basic tenets, or who has read Free: The future of a radical price, Chris Anderson’s influential book from 2009, is well aware that throughout history there were products and services that saw their prices dwindle to zero or something very close to zero. It happened with transistors, music, hard drives (the cost per byte of storage media) and a few others. At some point, their price tag simply dropped to a negligible value of $0.000… something.

In his book, Anderson mentions Google on countless occasions — including the classic “this is the Google Generation, and they’ve grown-up online simply assuming that everything digital is free” — and dedicates an entire chapter to examine the company’s free services, from cloud-based apps to YouTube. Probably because he was the editor-in-chief at Wired until 2012, Anderson, however, practically ignores all journalistic products. The New York Times’s business model, for example, is boiled down to two lines, and the rest of news media, don’t even get that far.