YouTube on Thursday announced a key milestone for YouTube Premium and Music, the Google-owned company’s paid services for ad-free access and music streaming: a combined 100 million subscribers.
Hitting the triple-digit millions means the company’s subscription business is slowly catching up to a number of well-established rivals. Amazon Prime, arguably the gold standard of digital subscription bundles, reportedly had more than. “We obviously are an ad-supported business. But we have also worked very hard to build up a subscription business. And that is a meaningful part of our business at this point.”
YouTube has worked hard to boost its numbers. The company aggressively markets the service with a popup ad at the corner of watch pages, sometimes partially obscuring the video screen and title, offering a month-long free trial. The ads are so prevalent that they’ve become ahe’s aware of the memes. “We clearly measure the impact of when we put something like this up,” he said.
YouTube also said it pays creators a portion of overall subscription revenue, but declined to share details about how that split works. Inside YouTube, the ad-free service wasn’t always a clear sell. Many were skeptical that the service would just be a “sideshow,” or worse: hurt YouTube’s relationship with advertisers worried that they were being driven out in favor of another model, said Smith.