The Continuing Rising Cost of Everything
The past few years have given rise to personal and even global changes that affect just about everyone. The cost of just about everything has gone up so much, it is driving many to take note of what they’re actually paying for. This, in a way, is a good thing. It provides us a measure to compare the quality of what we’re paying for to its perceived monetary value. There’s also another measure in which we have to compare can also be unhealthy as well.
The recent announcement of both Disney+ and Hulu rising their subscriber pricing caused me to actually spend some time recently and look at all of the subscription services I have. In the beginning, small micro-transactions seemed to be no big deal. It’s only $5 here or $7 here, eventually, they do add up and now many of them breaching the $10 ceiling, and there’s coming to a point in time where it’s just too damn high. When a company is resorting to raising the cost of access as more subscribers are leaving, that’s a sign of a model that is in trouble and on the verge of killing itself. To demand your remaining subscribers to subsidize those losses, you’re bleeding the stone that’s becoming quite dry. Add to the news of these companies' top executives gaining record-breaking salaries and bonuses, there’s a point at which late-stage capitalism will fail.
This also affects those of us in the content creation sphere, we have to find that thin line where we can provide a quality product to our community but also not go into financial ruin to do so. We have services that provide music we can use in our content. Many of these have not risen in cost but, we can only assume that the day will be here soon. When that day arrives do we continue to pay for it or remove those services and solely rely on tracks that are free? For many, this is the norm and the thought of actually paying for music services is out of their wheelhouse. Which to say is not a bad thing as there are creators all over the financial scale. True in that some of these services do offer an affiliate program that can help offset the cost but, for many it a nice to have but their community doesn’t have the need and so the benefit doesn’t apply.
We can’t blame these companies for what we can perceive as the cost of business. For example, there are those services that take your clips, does some advanced AI manipulation, and produce something you can upload to TikTok for bringing more content to your viewers and community. The backbone that powers these services are expensive. Hardware and maintenance costs have risen as well. We were used to how these same services were free only a few years ago, unfortunately for those free services they had to adopt the subscription model. It would be ideal for many if not all of the things we enjoy with creating our content to be free, and there are some alternatives but, the cost of labor and ease of use is quite large in some cases.
A solution for all of this is to try and work on creating the editing or producing it yourself. This might not be a viable option to many as the time sink is large for those already struggling to juggle real-life jobs and content creation mixed with family and friends. Ultimately as I mentioned previously, the choice is on the creator themselves. There will be a time when you reach a certain level of community that can provide you with the means in using the services you are wanting to bring on board. Until that time though, work with what you have and the means that will balance out your life.
