Load the Game

Youtube will allow those with a subscription to watch videos without ads

• Egon Kilin
• October 28th, 2014

Unless you’re using some type of third party software to block them, Youtube ads can be very annoying. Youtube is certainly well aware of that and is finally offering us a way of watching videos without the said ads. However, this benefit will not be available for free as interested users must opt in for a paid subscription first. Plans regarding the subscription model were revealed yesterday during the Recode Mobile conference by CEO Susan Wojcicki. She said that Youtube wants to give users more option and admitted that there are people out there who don’t want to see ads while watching videos. 

“YouTube right now is ad-supported, which is great because it has enabled us to scale to a billion users; but there’s going to be a point where people don’t want to see the ads,” Wojcicki said. She also added that Youtube users “will either choose ads, or pay a fee, which is an interesting model. … We’re thinking about how to give users options.” Youtube already has a subscription model, albeit only for content creators. This is the first time that plans regarding an ad-free subscription have been discussed publicly. The new model sounds to be pretty much a sure thing at this point and will likely be implemented sometime in the near future.

I’m very curious to see if such a model will actually work seeing as how there are already ways of watching Youtube videos without having to deal with ads. It’s no secret by now that free software like AdBlock exists and is used by billions of people. So, would users pay for a subscription when they can already get rid of ads for free? Youtube would have to offer more benefits to subscribers than just an ad-free experience if the model is to be successful. Naturally, there’s also the question of the price tag, of which we don’t know anything about at the moment. If a Youtube subscription is more than a few bucks a month and doesn’t offer any other benefits we’re not likely to see many subscribers I’m afraid, but we’ll just have to wait and see.