Every week the Opus team picks a news story or topic or idea that is relevant to the entrepreneurs and businesses we partner with.

RSS Feed

Archives

Video subscriptions on YouTube

Ajit Deshpande - - 0 Comments

Last week, Google’s YouTube announced that it was in talks to let video creators charge viewers. With more than 800 million monthly unique visitors and more than 4 billion hours of monthly viewing, YouTube is up there with the major content sharing networks. Pre-roll and banner advertising on videos has been YouTube’s main source of revenues, and as it turns out, YouTube faces significant competition especially in the online video ad segment. In this context, a subscription based approach would amount to a new revenue channel for YouTube.

Advertising (both for its own sites as well as for its partners’) is something Google does really well, and YouTube does too. But as Google itself admits, it is not the most appropriate monetization approach for everything. Pay-per-view or pay-per-channel type subscriptions are interesting alternative monetization approaches, and in fact these have been in the company’s mind for more than three years now. Three key trends have developed over this time frame which make a subscription approach more relevant for YouTube today – smart TVs are gradually gaining adoption, smartphones and tablets are becoming pervasive, and Google Play has been launched, consolidating music, movie and book offerings into the Android Market platform. Smart TVs offer YouTube the opportunity to deliver alternative rich broadcast content through subscription channels without affecting the end-consumer’s payment psyche. For smartphones, the challenge in itself that mobile ads are considered more interrupting and disruptive. Additionally, obtaining truly relevant metadata for video ads is not a simple task, making video ad targeting challenging in general. In that context a subscription approach offers a non-obtrusive way to monetize, with Google Play aiding with the back-office aspects of mobile content subscriptions.

Challenges clearly remain, in understanding opportunity costs from potentially lower video virality rates due to subscriptions, while at the same time keeping competition in online video advertising at bay. As for the consumer, all-in-all, what used to be mostly a free service from YouTube will now cost some money. Will YouTube subscriptions receive mainstream adoption against these challenges? We will see!

« Back to Blog
Also on the Opus Blog

New developments in the NoSQL world

September 17, 2013
Ajit Deshpande - Last week, the NoSQL database space saw a couple of interesting new announcements: First, Couchbase announced a new, mobile-focused database called Couchbase Lite. With Couchbase...

Login and Pay with Amazon

October 17, 2013
Ajit Deshpande - Last week, Amazon announced the launch of its ‘Login and Pay with Amazon’ service for ecommerce companies. Purported to be a mutually beneficial initiative for both sides, this...

A billion dollar acquisition for Oracle

February 11, 2013
Ajit Deshpande - Acme Packet, a pioneer in and a leading manufacturer of Session Border Controllers (SBC) for VoIP (as well as for broader Unified Communications applications), was acquired last...

Dropbox, the killer app!

February 20, 2013
Ajit Deshpande - Dropbox, one of today’s leaders in cloud-based file storage, syncing and backup, last week announced an update to its iOS app to provide easier PDF viewing capabilities, push...