YouTube allows subscription fees and sale of fan merchandise
YouTube is giving video providers on its platform opportunities to earn additional money with subscription fees and the sale of fan merchandise. In future, operators of YouTube channels with more than 100,000 subscribers will be able to sell memberships for 4.99 dollars or euros in Europe per month.
Paying viewers can then gain access to additional content such as live streams. Initially in the USA, video providers will also be able to sell merchandise directly on YouTube. The Google video service is cooperating with the online retail platform Teespring for this purpose. With more than one billion users, YouTube is the number one online video service, but competes for authors with Instagram, among others. The Facebook-owned service also cracked the one billion user mark and this week announced IGTV, its first platform for longer videos. Videos can have a duration of up to one hour. They are intended for viewing on smartphones in a vertical format. Instagram is not initially placing any advertising on IGTV, but sees ads as a source of income for authors in the future.
At the beginning of the year, YouTube raised the hurdles for video creators to earn money on the platform. Previously, a YouTube channel could place ads after 10,000 video views, but now you need at least 1,000 subscribers and the videos must have been viewed for at least 4,000 hours in the past twelve months. The move was also a reaction to the dissatisfaction of advertisers whose ads sometimes appeared next to dubious or extremist videos. (SDA)
