Video publishing has been — and still remains— the largest and fastest-growing segment of the digital publishing industry. However, ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, the video publishing field has been experiencing a particularly volatile trend. The pandemic itself brought about a boom in audience sizes. However, it also kept a large portion of advertisers at bay. Now, several years later, and with the current geopolitical and economic climate in mind, many publishers are still facing the ever-changing challenges of staying in the business. One such challenge comes in the form of increased expenses in the video publishing industry.
Online Video Platforms Raising Prices
When we talk about the increasing expenses in the video publishing industry, we mainly mean the rising prices of hosting, streaming, and monetization solutions that publishers use. Beyond increased expenses, this also poses another problem. Different platforms are raising prices in different ways, making it difficult to notice and track these changes as a publisher.
What Is Causing the Rise in Prices?
It is impossible to know for certain the reason why a specific company has raised its prices. However, there are certain universal factors that, we can safely assume, play a role in these decisions. For instance, according to the New York Times, increased expenses, inflated costs of gas and electricity, and the overall geopolitical climate have had a major impact on the economy until recently. However, as these issues subsided, many companies maintained high prices or even increased them further, mainly because demand remained high.
How Are Platforms Raising Prices?
In the best-case scenario, a company will announce a price increase well in advance, ideally by having account managers inform publishers directly, and this increase will be manifested in the sum prices of their plans without a change to the offer included in those plans. However, some companies may choose to take more covert routes.
Offering Less for the Same Price
A platform may decide to keep the same pricing plans but shrink the included offer. In fact, some platforms may even lower the prices of their plans to make the cost increase less noticeable.
A good example of this strategy is SproutVideo’s price hike. For instance, until the last few months, their most affordable plan, Seed, was priced at $24 a month. Then, the company lowered its price to just $10, making it seem like publishers are getting the same offer for less than half the cost. However, taking a closer look at the offer reveals that the old Seed plan came with 500GB of storage, 500GB of bandwidth, and 60 minutes of live input. The new Seed plan includes 100GB of storage, 100GB of bandwidth, and no included live stream input. The situation is similar with the rest of SproutVideo’s plans.
Of course, SproutVideo is not alone in this. Another example is that of Veed.io’s price increase, whose Basic plan, priced at $12, used to include 20GB of storage, but now comes with only 5GB.
Restructuring the Pricing System
An alternative to the shrinkflation strategy described above is the complete restructuring of payment plans. For instance, Bitmovin recently got rid of fixed-price plans entirely and only offers a pay-as-you-go model now. Similarly, VdoCipher removed some plans from their offer, as did Uscreen. Dailymotion, on the other hand, gave up on the revenue-sharing model and now offers three fixed-price plans instead.
In general, platforms tend to do this when one or several of their payment plans don’t meet the expected profit margin. By getting rid of these less profitable plans, they leave potential clients only with those options that make platforms enough money.
However, it would be unfair to claim that this is a dishonest practice by default. That is, a platform may decide to only apply these changes to new clients, allowing existing publishers to keep their chosen payment plans. However, if the restructuring of plans affects existing clients, this strategy has the potential to drive them away.
What to Do When a Platform Raises Prices
Has your chosen video platform increased the cost of using its services or discontinued your chosen plan? Odds are, there are more affordable and just as good — if not better — solutions out there. Here at TargetVideo, we offer a Custom Plan, which is designed to meet each publisher’s specific needs and requirements. That way, our publishers only pay for what they actually need.
Our policy concerning price increases has always been clear — we try to avoid them overall. Any changes made to our pricing system are only applicable to future clients. In other words, our existing publishers never have to worry about their expenses rising unless they decide to expand the range of services they use.
Compare What You Pay With TargetVideo Prices
If you are no longer satisfied with what you pay and what you get from your existing provider in light of increased expenses in video publishing, don’t hesitate to reach out to our sales team and discuss your needs with them. The Custom Plan comes with a free one-month trial. Additionally, we don’t require our publishers to sign contracts, so if you’re not happy with what you get, you can cancel anytime. Get started with TargetVideo today!
