MIAMI — YouTube continues to inch toward a paid subscription option for some of the professionally produced channels, employees of the online video Web site said this week.
“It’s a good time to start experimenting,” Jamie Byrne, the director of content strategy for YouTube, said at a television conference here on Monday. Mr. Byrne didn’t elaborate on the timing, but Advertising Age reported on Tuesday that paid channels could be introduced as early as April.
Mr. Byrne’s use of the word “experiment” is important. YouTube is primarily an advertising-driven service, and no one expects that to change. But some of the companies that produce popular videos for YouTube would like to try charging a modest monthly fee for access to their channels. Ad Age said the subscription option would be tried first with a small group of channels, “likely about 25 at the outset.”
There’s been talk about YouTube creating a paid subscription option for more than a year, and it has gained momentum as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon have drawn in subscribers for their video offerings. A YouTube spokesman declined to comment on the report about a possible April introduction, but said: “We have long maintained that different content requires different types of payment models. The important thing is that, regardless of the model, our creators succeed on the platform. There are a lot of our content creators that think they would benefit from subscriptions, so we’re looking at that.”
At the conference here, Mr. Byrne suggested two ways YouTube could go about charging for content. Video creators, he said, could have standalone paid channels “and be accountable for all the content there,” much like Glenn Beck’s subscription service The Blaze. Or, he said, YouTube could create bundles of subscription channels, charge one price for all of them and share the revenue with the channel creators, much like traditional cable and satellite services.
He was careful to add, though, “I wouldn’t count the ad model out.”
The interest in paid subscriptions comes as YouTube continues to invests heavily in original programming. Last fall its parent, Google, announced a plan to invest $200 million to market the new channels on the service.
“These channels, we think of them as the next wave of potential networks,” Mr. Byrne said. “We think it’s going great.”
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/youtube-expected-to-experiment-with-paid-subscriptions-for-some-channels/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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