It’s hard to believe that the website we’ve spent nearly a decade wasting our time on for free—the same place where you want to watch videos of cats, listen to music, watch people broadcast themselves doing smart and stupid things—wants you to pay to view its content all of a sudden. However, at the end of the day, content creators have bills to pay just like the rest of society, and the ultimate goal of any business is to make profit.
According to The Atlantic Wire, the new paid subscription platform is in the final stages of development and could apply to as many as 50 YouTube channels, so you might need to shell out some cash to keep viewing your favorite YouTube channels. Some of these channels are the same ones that YouTube is already heavily promoting. YouTube has spent over $200 million promoting this strategy in the past 18 months. The channels affected are ones that are hosted by major media companies such as The Onion, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and more.
“We have long maintained that different content requires different types of payment models,” a spokesman for YouTube said in January. “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.”
No news yet on whether or not we’ll be able to access the same content on our shores. However, due to licensing restrictions and other factors, many people either need a cable subscription or resort to piracy to catch their favorite TV shows.
Source: The Atlantic Wire