Gamblejay There is a loss. Opportunity cost. I watch about a quarter as many ads as I did before the 3 most frequently updated novels I read went premium.
Even if those ads are worth 3 cents or something, that's still over $1 a week, just from me alone. And given most of the people who hate premium drop premium novels, I'm willing to bet there is a significant loss from that.
Moreover, reputation cost is significant. A few months ago, I was saying to my friends, "Qidian is nice because they are working out deals with the translators rather than just cease and desisting them or making them pay to read." Now I'm saying "Qidian has a badly designed system, don't start reading anything on there, cause you'll probably have to drop it." Previously, they might have gotten more income via my friends, but now they won't get any recommendations.
On top of that, most of the people talking about how they are reading premium books are talking about how they use free spirit stones from dailies or workarounds like creating fake emails. Very few actually say "I'm spending money to unlock chapters".
The translators say their income dropped substantially (as much as 40%), which is huge even considering the increased number of people getting paid. The SS cost per chapter is more than 2 times what it used to be. For translators to be making only 60% of what they used to, that means more than 70% of the income would have to be split among the other people for qidian to be increasing income compared to before.
Finally, in the short run it might benefit qidian, if it actually does create more income. But they lose massively in new readers, as a new reader sees "100 chapters locked, each costing 20 cents", they are gonna go "Nope" and leave. 100 chapters, mind you, is only the number locked after 14 weeks, so about 3 months. In 2 years, some novels will have 500+ locked chapters.
Say they lose 100 new readers they would have otherwise gained each year. Each of those new readers would have given qidian an average of $1 a week in ad revenue. That's $100 a week. $5200 in the first year. An additional $10400 in the second. In 5 years, they have lost a total of 78,000 dollars. And it keeps increasing exponentially.
