Who will pay to watch YouTube? | Dan Gillmor

It's good that Google and Adobe are experimenting with business models, but that doesn't mean their plans will succeed

YouTube and Adobe don't have a great deal in common, apart from being key players in the media-technology ecosystem. But their evolving strategies demonstrate a shift that more and more companies in the media and tech worlds see as a key part of their futures: subscriptions. They highlight the fundamental reality for everyone in this business and related ones: in a world where we are almost always online, change happens at an accelerating rate.

First, YouTube: Google's huge video unit is planning to turn on its head, at least in a small way, the very basis of its existence until now. It's going to create subscription-based "channels" – that is, collections of content that it hopes people will pay for directly, as opposed to being supported by advertising.

This should be surprising to no one. YouTube, which has turned itself into the default video upload-and-display site, has been experimenting with premium services based on advertising as a business model. This hasn't worked out well, so far, as Peter Kafka recently reported at All Things Digital. So it's a logical experiment to try a model that pay-video channels like HBO and, more recently, Netflix have done: getting people send money on a regular basis in return for content they don't mind supporting.

For many video producers, YouTube could become a source of ancillary revenue, just as newspapers are trying to restore some of their lost (paper) subscriptions online via paywalls. Or, even better, this might become the first step in an overdue process of unbundling cable and satellite TV, which force customers to pay for all kinds of channels they don't want in order to get the ones they do watch.

The obvious question is whether YouTube can offer anything people actually want to support this way, and whether creators of online content will see enough upside as well. I'd expect Google to pump some serious money into the operation, at least at the outset. But a generation of video watchers has become accustomed to YouTube as a free or ad-supported service. I'm agnostic, verging on skeptical, about the prospects, but I'm also glad to see this kind of experimentation.

Likewise, I'm intrigued – and more skeptical – about Adobe's strategy shift. The company said it would stop selling almost all of its retail (boxed and downloaded) software, and move its major products – PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign, AfterEffects and Dreamweaver – into a "cloud-based" model where customers would work in a blended desktop/online platform, for a monthly fee. What had been known as the "Creative Suite" will henceforth be called the "Creative Cloud" – a software platform that will require a broadband connection and will cost about $50 a month for individual users ($70 for corporate sites that need administrative tools), and $20 a month for a single application.

For people who absolutely must use these products and routinely upgrade to the latest versions, $600 a year will be a good deal. But I wonder what people who've been doing fine with older versions of Adobe's desktop software will decide when it becomes necessary to upgrade. My bet is that a lot of them will look for alternatives.

I asked my Google+ and Twitter followers what they'd recommend, and got some useful responses. (As a Linux user my options have always been more limited, since Adobe treats Linux like a poor stepchild, at best.) Meanwhile, LifeHacker helpfully suggests ways to "build your own adobe creative suite with free and cheap software." Again, for some Adobe users, there are no serious alternatives to the originals; for the rest of us, there are plenty.

Adobe's move isn't unique, of course. Gaming companies have been trying to urge, if not coerce, their players in