YouTube to Make Originals Available for Ad-Supported Free Viewing – Variety

Source: YouTube to Make Originals Available for Ad-Supported Free Viewing – Variety

Does this mean that YouTube isn’t selling enough subscriptions to its Premium service?

In my house, we pay for the Family version of YouTube Premium because the ads on the platform were getting too irritating. Watching a two minute video of questionable value often meant having to sit through a thirty second video of even less value (meat ads to vegetarians? Really Google?).

But have we ever watched any of the YouTube Originals? No. Not even one. I started one just to see what content they’re creating and I wasn’t impressed and moved on.

YouTube also does a terrible job of highlighting these (or pushing these to paying customers, if you look at it another way) in their app. They created a crappy custom app for the Apple TV just so they could better show ads and have more control over the interface, and they didn’t even take the time to put in a special section to highlight originals.

But what’s more important than any of this is why Variety didn’t even bother to ask the question – does this mean YouTube’s Premium isn’t selling enough? It’s the first question that pops into your head while reading the headline, let alone the article, and they didn’t bother to ask it. Great reporting there.