YouTube may not be free for much longer, if new paid subscription rumors turn out to be true.
It appears that certain channels, particularly ones that provide professional services, will now require subscriptions to view their videos. But of course, this is far from the first time rumors like this have surfaced.
CNN speculates that it could be announced as early as this week, with roughly 50 YouTube channels starting out the process of subscriptions. The article claims that the price will likely be around $1.99 a month for one channel.
This comes right after the announcement that YouTube has defeated television in terms of viewer numbers.
"That's already happened. It's not a replacement for something that we know. It's a new thing that we have to think about, to program, to curate and build new platforms," Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said.
The site recently broke one billion unique users per month. The video that did it? Psy’s Gangnam Style. But the financial benefit of advertising on YouTube is still nowhere near that of television.
It is estimated that digital video advertising on all platforms, not just YouTube, will go from $2.93 billion to $4.14 billion in 2013 alone. However, that is only 2.4 percent of all ad spending.
YouTube still claims most of that revenue, with estimations that its ad revenues will rise from the 2012 number of $1.3 billion to $2 billion this year. If it keeps rising, as it is expected to in the next several years, YouTube’s revenue could hit $15 billion, putting it on the same level as Viacom. With these subscriptions as another possible source of income, that is not unforeseeable.
Rumors swirled back in January that YouTube might start paid subscription services.
"We have long maintained that different content requires different types of payment models," a spokesman from YouTube’s parent company Google said in January. It was also speculated back then that a pay-per-view status could be implemented for different types of content.
Could YouTube charge us for the endless amount of cat videos we watch in a given sitting? For now, we will just have to wait and see.
