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YouTube announces ad-free version for a monthly fee

27 points by TazeTSchnitzel ↗ HN
Just got this email:

Dear YouTube Partner,

Your fans want choices. Not only do they want to watch what they want, whenever they want, anywhere and on any device they choose, they want YouTube features built specifically with their needs in mind. Over the past several months, we’ve taken bold new steps to bring these experiences to life. 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 2 million installations in less than a month.

We’re excited to build on this momentum by taking another big step in favour of choice: offering fans an ad-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.

So what’s next?

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 monetizing your content on mobile devices. Today, mobile represents over half of all watchtime and mobile revenue has increased by 200% in the last year. Just as with mobile, we’re confident that this latest contract update will excite your fans and generate a previously untapped, additional source of revenue for you. Please look out for our notification, review it and let us know your thoughts.

It’s an exciting year for YouTube, as we push ourselves into uncharted territories. But we continue to be guided by a desire to deliver the choices fans want and the revenue you need. By working closely with you, we know it’ll be a successful journey.

The YouTube Team

17 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 48.6 ms ] thread
allenbrunson
dang. i spend an inordinate amount of time on youtube. i'd spend even more time there if they didn't poison my experience so often with all the damned ads.

i am all for this. take my money, youtube.

DatRoyce
Get an ad-blocker...
S4M
This, or download your videos with youtube-dl.
ghrifter
Maybe hes supporting the content creators, by disabling AdBlock while on YouTube?

At least I do anyways...Wish more people would.

ocdtrekkie
So, the ad market is drying up. This is a thing we know. It seems pretty obvious, even predictable, that Google would need to figure out how to transition as many people as possible to paid customers before that market becomes unsustainable. Someday, YouTube ads will just be a way to annoy you into paying up.
lern_too_spel
Who are the "we" who kows this? According to their latest quarterly report, YouTube revenues are up more than 50% YoY, so "knowing" the opposite implies you have access to some serious insider information.

What's obvious to me is that ad revenue can't pay for top-tier content, which still prefers traditional distribution channels, and that YouTube wants to move upmarket.

philtar
Does this mean I can block all the annotations? (As I typed this it hit me that I hadn't even checked if that was possible from the settings)
frou_dh
What gets me is the "what to watch next" widget that invades the bottom of the frame while the current video is still fuckin playing. Very distracting and disrespectful to the content.
vegardx
You can do that without any subscription in the settings.

Source: I found out yesterday when trying to figure out if it was possible to make YouTube not choose 4K video by default. Something that you cannot do.

untog
Will be huge for YouTube Kids and the like - I doubt many parents appreciate their children being exposed to advertising in that way.
stevejalim
Absolutely - as much as I wish she wasn't, our toddler is currently hooked on the equivalent of 'unboxing' vids on YT ('surprise eggs', if you're curious). We limit her time watching, of course, but I still have to keep an ear open for ads kicking in. I'd certainly pay.
FooNull
One has to wonder if this will lead to a more aggressive policy of preventing ad-blocking users from viewing content without paying up. Several streaming websites already require you to disable your ad-blocker before they will stream content, it seems likely that youtube will follow in suit once they have implemented this method to remove ads.
pckspcks
If this goes through, I'll be super-excited. I don't want my kids on ads. I don't want me on ads either.
Cyreb
Why don't more online sites offer this? I have always hated ads with a vengeance and have wanted this kind of option for any website I visit. There are many websites I use every day that I would gladly pay a small monthly fee to visit without ads, so why is such an option so uncommon that places like Hulu ask for money and continue WITH ads?
Throwaway90283
It's easy to paste in a block of code to insert ads. Accepting payments, tracking them on user accounts, and hiding those ads is obviously a little more complicated.

If Google Contribute (https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/) doesn't pull a Google and remain invite only until death, it'll simplify the process and we might see this become a more common approach.

I really don't like the idea of every site attempting to roll out their own solution. It would be nice to have a system to manage subscriptions across a variety of websites. I log-in, and I can see all the sites I'm subscribed to at the moment. I can then toggle individual sites on or off with the push of a button, or I can change payment plans for individual sites (if I switch to the HN $2/mo plan, my username appears in blue). Sites could then query the payment info using some kind of API and user tokens, to see what user is currently subscribed to what plan.

Joona
It's about damn time. I hope the pricing will be reasonable, and that it will also remove all those "recommended for you" videos... Though, that sounds very unlikely.
feybay
Hopefully this doesn't turn into a revenue sharing deal like spotify.