There has been quite a few heated discussions since Mark and Scruffy revealed the soon to be $14.99 a month subscriptions plan. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and Joe Walsh certainly expressed his in no uncertain terms last night.
First off, from what i can gather, the monthly VIP plan will allow you an IRC chat and will get you an ad free site. This, in my opinion is going to be hard to run, as we know Mark bans VPN’s as he finds them, and would you honestly want to use an IRC chat with your real IP address? Also, very few people see adverts these days anyway, i’ve not seen a single webpage advert in years due to all the free browser apps like Adblock+
Secondly, there is talk of casters being able to charge Subscriptions for their casts. If this works, i’ll give up blogging. The most popular, most trusted online payment method is Paypal. Ok, here’s a scenario, caster charges say, $3 a month for subscriptions to his channel. You pay via Paypal, everyone happy.
Then a subscriber say’s something that channel owner doesn’t like, channel owner bans subscriber, subscriber want’s a refund, files a complaint to Paypal, Paypal freeze channel owners account and will 99% of the time, refund subscriber.
Then there is a more malice scenario. Gang of trolls subscribe to a channel, then all file complaints, Paypal close the channel owners account, channel owner loses all his/her funds, trolls target next victim.
I understand that Mark needs to make money from all this, i used to run a streaming site myself and had to keep on adding more and more Dedicated Servers, so i know how the costs soon pile up. But for me personally, i can see these changes becoming more trouble than they are worth.
Fingers crossed, it all goes to plan though, because all the other cam sites will be waiting to pounce on any caster dissent.
Be interesting to see if this does happen, and if it does those who decide to leave where will they go.