Will the internet become a pay-per-view service?

We will soon be at a point where the internet is such an intrinsic part of most people’s life that they believe they could not live without it.

For the past 20 odd years I have seen the growth, the potential realised, the opportunities taken. I’ve watched as the internet came along and made everything free, much cheaper and easier. All the companies involved had to do drive change and incentivise usage with ‘loss-making’ bargains which quickly did the trick. The short term losses were massive and many dotcom companies couldn’t take the hit and dropped as quickly as they had risen.

We are now at a stage where people’s habits to this ‘new’ medium are now almost set in tradition and it is the norm, for many they do not know life without the internet. I can certainly see the likes of Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp and Facebook soon becoming premium priced pay-per-view services because people are so reliant on what they provide. I understand they all currently make their money from direct advertising but all these platforms are fully aware that that is a drop in the ocean for what they could be getting, they are missing massive revenue streams.

Influencers like the Jenner girls, David Beckham and such like with big followings and subscriber numbers are seemingly get given stuff for free to ‘advertise’ for the company/brand. Product placement attached to celebrities is a massive thing so Kylie Jenner for example seems to generate huge publicity let’s just say the new Orange Vanilla coke for Coca-Cola, somewhere along the line this means she gets a load more dollars in her bank. She gets the drinks as a freebie, Coke are happy with her and reward her because she has promoted a product which will then sell out. The brands are benefitting greatly because they are getting huge amounts of easy publicity for their product, Beckham gets paid a fortune somehow in the same kind of scheme.

Instagram/twitter etc have created platforms which influencers use for free and are using it to generate millions of pounds for themselves.

If I was one of those platforms I’d want part of that cash. If these platforms took their service off the celebrities would suffer a significant loss of revenue stream, as would the brands that would have to pay another source for advertising/marketing feeds elsewhere.

The shift has already started, YouTube for example used to allow us to play vids for free, then it got that you had to watch 5 seconds of adverts with the option to skip after that, now i notice sometimes that option has gone and you have to watch the whole ad…sometimes two. Amazon only let you review purchases if you have spent a minimum of £40 a year with them. The novelty of 99p flights from the new website based travel companies disappeared quickly once their high street rivals were gone.

Signs are there, the squeeze is coming.