Would you pay to skip ads on YouTube?
Advertisements are the necessary evil of free content streaming. On YouTube, you pay with patience. But soon, you might be able to set the patience aside and pay with dollars for instant gratification.
The video site may soon offer a subscription service that would allow viewers to cough up money to skip ads.
There's been no official word from YouTube on the move, but Bloomberg got its hands on a letter to some of the site's top content creators asking them to sign onto a new deal that would cut them in on the pay-to-not-play-ads revenue.
The letter said that YouTube wanted to build on the momentum of its paid music streaming service Music Key and its family-friendly YouTube Kids app (which, somewhat ironically, is dogged by complaints about rampant advertising) "by taking another big step in favor of choice: offering fans an ads-free version of YouTube for a monthly fee."
The correspondence alerted content producers that this would require changes to their agreement terms, but assured that, "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."
Bloomberg's source, who asked not to be named, said the service may debut by the end of the year.
The company hinted at a subscription service that would let viewers watch videos without ads last fall.
"YouTube right now is ad-supported, which is great because it has enabled us to scale to a billion users," YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said at a Re/Code conference in October. "But there's going to be a point where people don't want to see the ads."
If we're being honest here, no one ever wants to see ads. It's really just a matter of how much they'll pay to get around it. YouTube hasn't said anything yet, but the Verge reports that ad-free videos, along with the ability to store videos offline, could cost $10 a month.