14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube may soon start offering that subscription version that’s been rumored for months, but that no one had any real details about.
“YouTube right now is ad-supported, which is great because it has enabled us to scale to a billion users; but there’s going to be a point where people don’t want to see the ads,” Susan Wojcicki, YouTube CEO, told Re/code during the Code/Mobile conference.
She believes that consumers will either choose ads, or pay a few, which is an interesting business model in the end. She said that they were trying to figure out how to give users options.
Indeed, this is an interesting point to make, because she’s comparing YouTube to products such as Pandora and Spotify, where people can choose to see ads or to pay a fee to have them removed. While Wojcicki refused to offer many details regarding on when subscriptions might get added to YouTube.
There’s some tremor in the market that we might see even more YouTube ads in the coming months as the company prepares to implement this new subscription package. That’s because what could possibly convince you to pay up for YouTube access other than way too many ads that you hope to never see again?
Last year YouTube added a way for content creators to sell subscriptions so users could access their content. Some took the company up for it, for things like full episodes of fight shows and so on, but it hasn’t exactly spread beyond that because content creators want as many people as possible to have access to their products, to generate views and get known all over the world.
The ever-growing YouTube
Wojcicki took over as YouTube CEO last February after joining Google back in 1999, where she held various leading positions, including AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick and Google Analytics.
She explained that YouTube being a part of Google has its benefits, outside of the free food, which she joked about. In fact, she states that having the ad sales has been one big benefit. Wojcicki believes it’s important to point out that when YouTube was acquired, it was still in the early stages and most of the people were hobbyists. Now, YouTube has a long-term consistent investment from Google.
YouTube continues to grow all the time, attracting more and more new users and having people spend increasing amounts of time on the platform, watching more and more videos.