YouTube considers ad-free subs model
October 28, 2014
YouTube chief executive Susan Wojcicki, has said that YouTube is considering new ways to charge viewers for watching, as an alternative to seeing the advertising that has been YouTube’s main business model until now.
“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,” Wojcicki, a US mobile conference.
She described subscriptions as “an interesting model.” In May 2013 it introduced subscriptions as an option for some of its channel owners, enabling them to charge people to watch some videos, and keep 55 per cent of the proceeds.
“We rolled out the ability for an individual channel to do a subscription,” Wojcicki said. “We’ve also been thinking about other ways that it might make sense for us. If you look at media over time most of them have both ads and subscriptions.”
Wojcicki also confirmed half of all YouTube views are now coming from mobile devices, she added that YouTube’s overall watch time is still growing at a 50 per cent rate annually.