If you haven't heard already, YouTube Red is a subscription service that allows you some extra services within YouTube. For $10 a month you get access to offline video downloading, background play, and an ad free experience. These features are nice, and long awaited. Offline downloading and background play are the real prize out of YouTube Red though.
Many people do not have unlimited data on their phones or other devices, and watching videos starts to eat up data fast. Therefor, instead of watching a video on mobile data, you can simply download the video over wifi, and watch it later. I often use a service that downloads videos of YouTube so that I can watch them on a road trip. This application is not the best, and is hard to navigate in. A built-in YouTube downloader is really just what I could of ask for from Google.
Background play is a feature that many people have been asking for a long time, and now is available for videos. Some entertainers post podcast like videos on YouTube, of them talking about a subject, or taking to someone else. Before, to listen to this on a mobile platform, you would have to leave YouTube running on your phone or other device, and couldn't do anything else. With a YouTube Red subscription, you'll be able to listen to a YouTube video and browse a website, read a book, play a game, and many other things while the audio of the video plays in the background.
An ad free experience itself isn't worth the monthly subscription to me, luckily the other features are. For anyone, it is possible to watch YouTube videos ad free with an ad-blocker, but some people might feel better paying instead of watching ads. An ad-blocker would mean that content creators wouldn't get any revenue from you watching their videos.
YouTube Red in my eyes is a way for YouTube to generate more money. The problem is though this money that would of gone to content creators from ad views, is now partially going to YouTube instead. It's been discreetly noted in YouTube's Partner terms earlier this year that content creators would get only 55% of the revenue. Many content creators are expressing concerns that they will no-longer make as much money during the month of November, when Google is offering a free trial of YouTube Red for a month. We just don't know how Google entails on paying content creators.
Overall, we just don't know all the facts on YouTube Red. It seems like a good service for a few features, and it's up to you if it's worth $10 for. I'm sure that they're looking at adding more features in the future to make this seem more appealing. We don't know how well content creators will be payed with this change, but most content creators haven't put all their eggs in a basket. Many youtubers have online stores where you can buy merch to support them, twitch channels that you can subscribe and donate to, and other services. We'll figure out more as YouTube Red comes out in November.
522
No comments:
Post a Comment