YouTube Red offers ad-free model with monthly subscription


YouTube Red lets you enjoy videos across all of YouTube without ads, while also letting you save videos to watch offline on your phone or tablet and play videos in the background, all for $9.99 a month. Your membership extends across devices and anywhere you sign into YouTube, including our recently launched Gaming app and a brand new YouTube Music app we're announcing today that will be available soon.

This has been long-rumored and finally happening. It will be interesting to see how this goes. I think the Music service might be the biggest draw for ad-free and perhaps gaming. Those viewers I suspect will be the heaviest users of YouTube and most willing to pay to avoid ads. With that said, I think it will be interesting how many of the typical YouTube viewers are willing to pay $10/mo just to not view ads on YouTube. Everyone hates pre-roll ads, especially long non-skippable ads, but are they willing to pay for the convenience?

In general ad-free premiums models I think have a major flaw. The same people who are willing to pay not to see ads are I think are probably likely to spend the most money on products being advertised. So, the sponsorship model will have to both supplant lost advertising views and likely also compensate for the diluted effectiveness of ads in general.