YouTube Launches YouTube Premium Service

YouTube Premium is YouTube's new premium service that allows for full viewing with no ads, as well as access to exclusive original content.


Published: April 8, 2015 5:49 PM /

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YouTube Premium Logo on Money Backdrop

According to an email sent to YouTube Partners, as well as a message visible in the Creator Studio, YouTube has updated their monetization policies and has begun implementing a system that would allow users to not see advertisements in exchange for a monthly fee. Below is the email sent to all YouTube Partners about the update as it appeared in my inbox.

YouTube Partner Update + YouTube Premium

Dear YouTube Partner,

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

The email is unclear as to whether or not the system is currently launching or when a launch will be, though a decent wading through the options and studio pages doesn't show any indication of its current existence. A brief look at the monetization permissions don't reveal any new information, and it's possible that YouTube has simply not yet been updated. What is also unclear is how this will affect the usage of ad blocking software on YouTube, or whether or not views by users with these permissions will still contribute to the pay of that creator.


You can learn more about YouTube Premium at the service's official website

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