Oof, wow, what a mess. I bet the people selling the cards weren't too happy about that either, if they were making a profit on it. I'm not surprised that people aren't buying as much NC, that's a huge change. I hope that it was only the newly issued cards that were changed, and they didn't retroactively change the value of the cards that they'd already printed and distributed?
Also i went and watched the video again, and you're right! I totally missed that the first time because the auto captioning doesn't pick up the end of her sentence, but as best as I can hear it, she says, "And on that note as well, we'll have pet slots as well, in the NC Mall." That's...not great. Not surprising, I guess, but not great. I totally get that they need some form of monetization to keep the site running, but it is always a balancing act to keep the site from being pay-to-win. I mean I guess you could argue that there's some precedent for it, since premium members have always had an extra pet slot... but between the release of that 1 premium slot and now, both of the new pet slots have been free, so the precedent has been set that new base slots would be available to everyone.
And that's what's really awful about the UCs being in the NC mall: Up until now, painted pets, or rather that specific "UC" artwork, could be earned through NPs. And there hasn't ever been a change to the base artwork of the pet released through the mall before. They've taken something that was previously available to all players and retroactively put a price tag on it. I'm calling it now, they're going to start releasing new paint colours in the mall as well.
I imagine that the lack of NC sales isn't the only issue. I know that not everyone that claimed to quit or cancel their premium back in December actually followed through, but some definitely did, and I guess that number was substantial enough that jumpstart and their investors are getting desperate for more money. And of course, that's something that can easy spiral out of control. Lost revenue -> TNT makes radical changes to get more revenue -> people get mad and leave/cancel premium/buy less NC -> leading to more lost revenue -> TNT has to make more changes, etc, etc.