Google-owned YouTube is looking for more ways to keep its content creators happy. The latest that the video sharing network is planning to roll out is an ad-free YouTube that charges users a certain fee to keep the advertisements out.
That is what YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki says at Re/code's Code/Mobile conference on Monday. Wojcicki, a long-time Google veteran famously known for lending her garage to founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page when Google used to be a fledgling startup, formerly headed Google's advertising and analytics units, including AdSense and AdWords. Therefore, it's no surprise that Wojcicki, who moved to YouTube this February, would think of serving an ad-based YouTube alongside one that is ad-free.
"There are going to be cases where people are going to say, 'I don't want to see the ads, or I want to have a different experience,'" she tells Re/code's Peter Kafka in her onstage interview. "We're always watching, always trying to innovate. It's similar to the ad market in a lot of ways: There are always new ad platforms coming out, but at the end of the day people say, I'm going to go to the one that generates the most revenue for me."
Wojcicki has declined to throw out specific details on what we can expect from a subscription-based YouTube, but a person familiar with YouTube plans tells The Wall Street Journal that the company has already approached certain partners about providing subscription-based content with a specific focus. News, for one thing, will be part of the subscription videos, according to the Journal's source.
The move is all part of YouTube's grander efforts to take care of its homegrown stars, who have been instrumental in expanding the video service's reach to more than 1 billion viewers every month, as other video platforms come up with new ways to attract these content creators and lure them away from YouTube. Facebook, for instance, is reportedly working with a number of YouTube content creators to test out the use of the social network as a video platform that relies on its advertising platform to earn revenue for video creators. Other video services, such as Vimeo and former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar's Vessel, are also looking into ad-free, subscription-based videos.
YouTube content creators currently make money by splitting ad revenues with Google, but YouTube has been testing limited subscriptions since over a year ago, when it allowed content providers to charge their viewers with a monthly subscription that starts at $0.99. However, the model has failed to gain traction and YouTube has not done much to promote the feature to its users.
"We've been thinking about other ways it might make sense [at YouTube]," Wojcicki says. "We're early in that process, but if you look at media over time, most of them have both ads and subscription services."
