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YouTube to launch ad-free paid option

By | Published on Thursday 9 April 2015

YouTube

YouTube is set to launch a new paid subscription option – expanding on its Music Key experiment – which will allow users to remove adverts from other parts of the video platform.

In an email to YouTube Partner account holders yesterday, the Google-owned service noted its recent innovations, saying: “Since inviting hundreds of thousands of fans into our YouTube Music Key Beta, we’ve seen tremendous engagement. And we’ve seen an equally enthusiastic response for our new YouTube Kids app, designed to give families a simpler and safer video-viewing experience – it’s already crossed two million installations in less than one month”.

Then the big reveal: “We’re excited to build on this momentum by taking another big step in favour of choice: offering fans an ads-free version of YouTube for a monthly fee. By creating a new paid offering, we’ll generate a new source of revenue that will supplement your fast growing advertising revenue”.

Continuing it said: “Launching a new paid offering will require us to update your terms through your Creator Studio Dashboard – a process that should feel familiar to anyone who went through a similar process three years ago when we began distributing and monetising your content on mobile devices. Today, mobile represents over half of all watchtime and mobile revenue is up 200% in the last year. Just as with mobile, we’re confident this latest contract update will excite your fans and generate a previously untapped, additional source of revenue for you”.

Exactly how the new paid tier will work, or how much it will cost, is yet to be announced. It’s also not clear what “tremendous engagement” with the lacklustre Music Key really means, though seemingly enough to convince the company that applying a subscription model to the whole site is a goer.



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