Google this evening has sent out an email to YouTube partners revealing details about the upcoming launch of a new subscription-based model for the service. The email states that YouTube viewers will soon have the ability to remove all advertising from the website for a flat monthly rate.
YouTube video makers, however, will not have the option to opt out of the new subscription-based model. Instead, YouTube says that it will offer a certain percentage of revenue from subscribers to video makers to make up for the lost advertising money. Should creators choose not to accept these terms, all of their videos will be set to private.
It’s unclear how the earnings for creators will be affected by this new ad-free service. YouTube explains it like this:
YouTube will pay you 55% of the total net revenues recognized by YouTube from subscription fees that are attributable to the monthly views or watchtime of your Content as a percentage of the monthly views or watchtime of all or a subset of participating content in the relevant subscription offering
A report from Bloomberg claims that the service will cost users $10/month and strip both image/text ads and pre-roll video ads from YouTube. The full email from YouTube to partners can be seen below:
Dear YouTube Partners,
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 one month.
We’re excited to build on this momentum by taking another big step in favor of choice: offering fans an ads-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 is up 200% in the last year. Just as with mobile, we’re confident 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
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