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Ads may be a necessary evil in many places on the internet, but there are a large portion of people who if given the opportunity, will bypass ads any way they can. This includes paying for subscription fees for services that don’t include them if you’re a paying customer. YouTube is not one of those sites, yet, but they are reportedly working on a subscription model of the popular video sharing website where users will be able to pay a monthly subscription fee to have the capability to view and stream content without ads injected into what they’re watching. The subscription based service is also said to be launching in the next few months, so that leads us up to potentially getting to see this subscription based YouTube model by the summer time.
As we’re ten days out from hitting the end of February, a “few months” puts that timing right around Google I/O which is slated to happen at the end of May this year, so there could be a chance we’ll see Google unveil this new subscription model for YouTube at the event. The details about YouTube bringing a subscription based service to users in the next few months is according to Robert Kyncl who is YouTube’s head of content and business operations, who was quoted during a talk at the Code/Media conference today. YouTube has up to this point been tinkering and trying to “fine tune” the subscription model which they tested back in 2013, and they view it as “very important part of the business” because of those users who don’t want to see ads while watching content on the site.
Although a number of YouTube content creators who make revenue from posting videos make their money from ads playing prior to their content, it’s not know just yet if or how YouTube’s plans to introduce the subscription model will affect those creators. It’s possible that the sub model could be set up on an individual channel basis just like during the pilot test a couple years ago, where those particular creators would get a cut from the sub fees being paid each month. No exact details are known just yet on how the subscription model will work, that includes what it will cost and when exactly we’ll see it.