Will people pay to watch YouTube videos?

The internet is getting less free. That's not a political statement about state censorship or China's Great Firewall or the increasing surveillance of web browsing worldwide. It's just a studied observation: Newspapers are erecting paywalls, the Senate just voted to all but kill tax-free internet purchases, and people are abandoning music piracy for online stores like iTunes or subscription/ad-supported services like Spotify.

Now Google — perhaps the last bastion of good free stuff on the web — is reportedly going to add subscriptions to its ubiquitous video site YouTube. We're not talking about "the cats on skateboards," says Sabri Ben-Achour at Marketplace, "but high quality produced content," at as little as $1.99 a month per channel.

Several dozen channels will launch the service, with "paid channels for children's programming, entertainment, music, and many other topic areas," says Brian Stelter at The New York Times. "If the subscription option catches on, it could herald a huge change for the online video industry," ushering in paid content at YouTube's competitors and further challenging the cable industry, Stelter says. "For now, though, it is just a test, intended in part to mollify some of the most popular contributors to the sprawling website," including major media companies:

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Google is going out of its way to emphasize the experimental nature of the subscription model, says Christian Blauvelt at Hollywood. But this sure looks like YouTube's "Rubicon moment: The point of no return." Once the paywall is up, Blauvelt says, "it's hard to imagine YouTube going back. And ad-free paid content makes sense for children's programming, and companies that own the rights to old TV shows. "The real test for YouTube celebrities will be to see if users are willing not only to give them their time, but their money as well," he notes:

Regardless, this move is a no-brainer, says Cynthia Boris at Marketing Pilgrim. "Every content producer on the web is looking into paid subscriptions — but YouTube is one of the few with enough clout to make it work." In fact, along with old TV shows and YouTube-exclusive content, the site "could carve out a niche as the streaming site for instructional content": YouTube is a wealth of how-to videos on everything from how to use video-editing software to how to beat a level on Angry Birds. And YouTube stars? Let's not forget about them:

The real question with this experiment, says Billy Buntin at PolicyMic, is: "Can YouTube get people to pay for better content?" The real lesson from Netflix and Hulu is that original content is king, and YouTube's "subscription decision has the big upside of potentially improving the scale, budgets, and quality of YouTube videos produced, with not much downside beyond the sparse grumblings of some users," Buntin says. The real rock stars of YouTube are the essentially independent filmmakers who make great films on a shoestring budget. "I'd happily pony up a dollar each month to directly support and encourage more content from people like them," he adds.

As anybody in the newspaper or magazine business, or the music or software industry, will tell you, it's hard getting people to start paying for something they've grown used to getting at no cost. All types of media are still experimenting with what works and what just loses viewers. YouTube, with its huge international reach, can learn a lot from its paywall predecessors — and the media world will be eagerly watching Google's success or failure.