YouTube will soon let you pay to remove ads, but content creators can’t opt-out

YouTube is launching a paid service later this year for users of the site who don’t want to see advertising. It’s good news for those that hate ads, but might be bad news for those that upload videos.

Today, the company sent out an email to YouTube partners giving the heads up about the impending launch of a new subscription.

According to Bloomberg, it’ll cost $10 a month to rid the site of advertising, but content creators on YouTube have no choice but to accept the new terms. If you disagree, all your videos will be set to private.

The terms offer a convoluted explanation for what content creators will actually get from the company, saying:

YouTube will pay you 55% of the total net revenues recognized by YouTube from subscription fees that are attributable to the monthly views or watchtime of your Content as a percentage of the monthly views or watchtime of all or a subset of participating content in the relevant subscription offering

Basically, if someone pays for a subscription and watches your video, you’ll get a percentage of that fee paid to you as decided by YouTube, just like with advertising. It’s not clear if that’ll be a smaller amount of money or not at this stage.

The new subscription service will live alongside YouTube’s paid music service, YouTube Music Key, as a separate offering.

We don’t know when the subscription will launch — the terms go into effect during June, so probably around then — but it is a great option for those that are sick of the pre-roll video ads and banners on the site.

That said, it seems unlikely that most viewers will be willing to pay, in my opinion. They simply don’t care. Paying $10 per month just to remove advertising seems like a big ask, unless there are other features that sweeten the deal too.

➤ Google Plots New YouTube Subscription Service as Soon as This Year [Bloomberg]