Personally, I find YouTube to be an awesome place for catching up with the latest music videos, TV shows, documentary. And I mean those with ads, not the ads-free ones that you have to pay for on YouTube Originals. By the look of things, it seems most YouTube fans are that way too, as the company’s ad-free (read premium) platform YouTube Originals has really been struggling to get subscribers.
So much so, that the company has decided that from next year, YouTube original content will be available to everyone for free. You will no longer need to subscribe to the YouTube Premium service, where you had to part with $12 per month.
I guess YouTube has not quite grabbed people’s mindset as a premium original video content platform like Netflix and Amazon. Since the same users who flock to these alternative platform, also come to YouTube; they simply won’t pay to watch YouTube contents.
Then again, it is not like YouTube is investing heavily in producing original content. As the Hollywood Reporter puts it, Netflix budget is in the “several billion” while that of YouTube is in “hundreds of millions.”
“As we look to 2019, we will begin making all our YouTube Originals ad-supported to meet the growing demand of a more global fan base. This next phase of our originals strategy will expand the audience of our YouTube Originals creators, and provide advertisers with incredible content that reaches the YouTube generation,” said a spokesperson from YouTube.
As per that statement, it is safe to assume that YouTube want to rely heavily on celebrity-produced content and the typical creator-based videos. Not the expensive scripted shows. Though users who wanted to watch YouTube original content could always turn to Cobra Kai, which means YouTube’s Paywall was in the long-run hurting the company’s bottom lines. So the company just decided it might as well do away with the Paywall and squeeze in a little extra ads money while at it.
