How does the future of YouTube look? We’ve voiced our opinion on video as a content marketing tool, and reports from Google say that YouTube is ‘roughly breaking even’. They clearly need to make a move, and it’s going to be a big one.
Earlier this month, YouTube announced that they plan to launch an ad-free, subscription-based service. This raises SO many questions: When will this rollout? Will they do it in phases? How much will it cost? And of course, will it actually help boost the bottom line? Although we don’t know the details of when this hits Canada, we can speculate how well it will go over. So answer me this…
How many people would actually pay to use YouTube?
The value of the service (as it has been vaguely described) will be the ability to never see an ad on YouTube again. We can all agree that we despise sitting through an ad before getting to our favourite cat video, but is it annoying enough to want to pay a monthly fee? We also love to click the ‘skip ad’ button as soon as that countdown ends, which is usually in 5 seconds, and 85% of them are skippable. Last but not least, there are plenty of adblocking plugins that make this entire conversation obsolete. Oh, and most of them are FREE.
With this new subscription model, YouTube will feel even more pressure to balance the desire for profits with the user experience. They could make us hate ads more so that we cave and end up paying, but that could also lead to some of their 1 billion user base migrating to other video platforms.
Perhaps I sound pessimistic, but I am not a heavy YouTube user. Let me know would you be willing to pay for an ad-free YouTube? And if so, how much $$$ a month is that worth to you?
