 "Photo: Alfredo Linares")
| Staff Editorial |
Viral videos, Tweeting and Facebook status updates. Social media slowly but surely are taking over our lives.
We all are plugged in constantly to all our sites instead of doing what we need to get done. What would life be like without the instant gratification of being able to post exactly what is happening in your life every second of every day? How did we get through work and school without YouTube to pass the time during lectures or staff meetings? People might actually pay attention. The horror.
But a series of rumors have been circulating around the Internet that sites such as Facebook, YouTube and even Hulu are considering charging for their services. What has made those sites so successful as opposed to their competitors is partially due to their not charging to use the sites. Would so many people continue using Facebook if it had a fee?
Certainly it would cause a substantial number of members to switch to less popular sites that don’t charge. How many people would go back to using Myspace as their primary social networking site? While it has not been verified if YouTube will start to charge, there is speculation that it would start off charging for premium content such as full movies and HBO standup. One question about that is: By adding “premium content,” would users be able to bypass ads on YouTube?
How long will it be before everything can be classified as “premium”? Videos that have more than a million hits could be labeled as premium to make YouTube more money.
Facebook already charges a fee for some of its applications; for some “premium” content on certain applications, you need to add “coins” to your account. How much would be a reasonable amount to charge that would keep current account holders still subscribing to these sites?
The Ranger posts the video stories that we run on YouTube to reach a larger audience base and to allow us to easily place them on ac-ranger.com. But if our subscribers were forced to pay to watch our videos, then we would need to find another Web site.
We know that as poor college kids, many of us can’t afford another expense. We hope adding fees doesn’t happen, or if it does, it happens once all of us have “grown-up” jobs that don’t cause us to have to eat SpaghettiO’s and Easy Mac. If these two giant sites do charge to have accounts, there is no doubt at all that 50 other sites will pop up to take over for people who don’t want to or can’t pay for an account.
A future without social networking is not going to happen, and soon, we might have to pay to be entertained.
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