There’s no shortage of subscription services. For TV you have services like Netflix, Hulu, Sling TV, PlayStation Vue and HBO Now. For music there’s Spotify, Pandora, Google Play Music and many others. If you subscribe to more than a few services the charges can really add up so naturally you probably wouldn’t want to pay for another service unless absolutely necessary. YouTube thinks it can convince you to pay $10 per month for an ad-free experience.
In an email sent to its partners yesterday the world’s biggest online video streaming service confirmed that soon it will launch a subscription service that will take away all of the ads.
I for one am irked by ads that play before a video I want to watch on YouTube fires up. Then there are ads that pop up during the video as well as the ones you see on the page itself.
Granted that this is a major source of revenue for YouTube partners but does it bring up the need for a paid service that offers a slightly better user experience?
Sources tell The Verge that YouTube’s ad-free service will cost $10 per month. Not only will they remove all ads for subscribers, the service will also allow YouTubers to hide videos behind a paywall.
This means that some YouTube partners can choose to keep content locked unless people who are even willing to put up with the ads pay the monthly subscription fee. That’s not all.
The sources say that YouTube partners have to take part in this program once it goes live otherwise all of their videos will automatically be set to private.