SAN FRANCISCO (CelebrityAccess) — Google’s YouTube video hosting website is considering a radical change to its advertising-based revenue model by offering paid, ad-free subscriptions.
According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, the push for change is being led by Susan Wojcicki, a Google ad exec who spent years in Google's advertising segment before taking over YouTube on behalf of Google earlier this year.
While YouTube has been allowing content creators to offer subscriptions, charging users a fee to view their content since earlier this year, those subscriptions were never free of the advertisements that make up the lion's share of Google's revenue from YouTube. Now, Wojcicki sees the enticement of ad-free videos as another possible source of revenue for the company.
“We rolled out the ability for an individual channel to do a subscription,” Ms. Wojcicki told the WSJ. “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.”
Included in Google's potential ad-free Youtube offerings may be their music service, similar to Spotify's current advertising-based free service and their ad-free premium subscription model. While Youtube has not released the much hinted-at service, Wojcicki told the WSJ that she was "optimistic about seeing it soon." – Staff Writers
