It's a braindead solution to a problem that they should've solved by other means ages ago.
Let me quote my comments to the announcement video.
It's a pretty simple choice too: we either succeed in persuading a certain percentage of viewers that our content is worth some loose change every month. Or we don't, and we stop making films.
How about you take the third option and go back to making cheaper videos. You'll still get your ?2.50 per 1k views.?
To elaborate on that, Chris Harris said that at worst they've spent 9 grand to shoot one video. A million views nets them 2,5 grand in ad revenue. Meanwhile, IMHO the "production value" has only made /DRIVE worse. It's the Top Gear effect. They spend their money on slowmo and air footage, epic music and so on, while shooting astronomically expensive cars (read: cars irrelevant to most watchers) in exotic locations. It's showy and entertaining to some, but to me, Top Gear already exists if I want that crap, and I don't. The meat of /DRIVE was in the cheap stuff, like the M550d or whatever that Chris Harris drove for a day and made a really fun (and human) video about it. Similarly, Tuned and Big Muscle started out great and low production value, and got worse as they spent more money. The shows drift further from their roots the more money they spend, and the original "spark" is lost.
What I'm trying to say is that I would prefer they spend half a grand making a 500k hit video that nets a grand in ad revenue, than spend 9 grand making a showy video that they need an absolute subscription model to support.
It's not only that:
I'd like to add that I'd gladly pay like 10 eurocents per /DRIVE video of my choice in a store like iTunes. That would amount to roughly your blanket yearly sub cost, assuming 1 video per day. But I won't pay the full and pretty expensive blanket subscription that gets me 1 video that I care about, for every 5 videos that I don't. So to get money from me directly you'll have to expand your business model a little.?
I didn't, and don't, foresee many people opening their wallets for a maximum of 15-20 minutes of content 5 days a week. The value proposition is just bad. 36 euros a year will actually buy real things, like 4 games on Steam, which can net a lot more than 80 hours of entertainment over a year.
Furthermore, there's the problem that I described about blanket subscriptions. To make a game analogy again, I don't buy publisher packs from Steam. Usually 95% of the stuff in there is irrelevant to me. I also don't buy Humble Bundles for the same reason. In the case of /DRIVE+, I wouldn't be paying 36 euros a year for all of their stuff, I'd be paying it for Chris Harris, Tuned, Big Muscle, and maybe some currently unknown interesting content in the future. That takes it even further into the "terrible value" range.
Like I said there, I'd gladly pay a micropayment for a specific episode, which I know I find interesting and would probably enjoy. Just like a pay for a game that I find interesting.
If they insist on making their stuff a product with a price, I wish they at least had the decency of giving me the choice of what to pay for. And not in the traditional way of overpricing individual episodes either. That's where the "old media" companies have failed so far - multiple euros per episode are not micropayments. I'll pay the correct fraction of the subscription cost, plus some reasonable transaction cost. That's all you're getting. But I think it would be better for them than not getting anything, which is the current situation.
As for how many other people feel this way, there's no hard data. Obviously they're getting 1-2 % of the views they were previously getting. But views aren't their revenue source any more, so it's irrelevant. It's sub numbers and that information is not public (hi!).
I can only speculate on the like/dislike ratio of the announcement and the amount of views there. It's at ~80k views now, which I assume is the size their hardcore audience (the ones who would consider floating the channel with their wallets instead of just stumbling on videos). Initially, the like ratio for the announcement hovered at 17% or thereabouts. Now, a week later it's at 13,8 %. If we assume optimistically that everyone who liked the announcement, subscribed, they got 11k subs. So 33 000 eur in revenue per month. Assuming three major shows per season, that leaves them less than 3 grand per episode in production funding. So no, I don't think that's what they wanted.
Lastly, /DRIVE has catastrophic problems with PR and crowd handling. Just the way they handle their season breaks is appalling. They just stop transmitting and start radio silence in social media. That is ridiculous for a "new media" outlet. They had this problem in 2013, and now again in 2014. People rummage through their Youtube, Facebook and Twitter and wonder in the comments why there is no content and no word about anything. Every time there's a season break, a part of their audience assumes that the channel has gone bust and leaves. Worse, they make their production-related decisions (like this one) without
any audience involvement.
I've already said my goodbyes to /DRIVE. The price is low but the attraction is even lower. My problem is that I can already see what happened to /DRIVE happening to Roadkill. Also, I can see the same thing happening to other channels funded by the Youtube content kickoff program. If the braindead monetization schemes and blanket subscriptions become the norm for the other channels as well, I as a consumer will have major problems with Youtube going forward.