In a change of strategy, Google decided to make all of YouTube’s new original series and specialsavailable for free, with adsstarting this year. The move comes after speculation that YouTube wasstruggling to make its YouTube Premiumsubscription-only plan a viable way to pay for the ongoing development costs of its Originals content.
It’s not a complete teardown of the YouTube Premium paywall, but the company is promising more of its Originals will show up as ad-supported titles soon, including supernatural dramaImpulseand comedyLiza On Demand, starring Liza Koshy. “For today’s viewers, primetime is personal, and our content resonates so strongly due to the diversity and richness of our unmatched library and platform capabilities,” YouTube Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl said at the Brandcast event for ad executives on Thursday, May 2,Variety reports. “While every other media company is building a paywall, we are headed in the opposite direction.”
Hoping to bolster support for the move to an ad-supported model for its premier content, YouTube released the results of a survey, which purport to show thatCobra Kaiis the most “in-demand” digital series in the world right now. We’re not entirely sure what to make of this claim, as the concept of “in-demand” is hardly an industry standard. The stat is the result of Parrot Analytics using a combination of “video consumption (streaming and downloads), social media engagement (hashtags, liking, sharing) as well as research actions (reading about shows, writing about shows, etc.); the more consumer effort is required, the more importance the company attaches to each factor,” according to Samuel Stadler, Parrot Analytics’ vice president of marketing.
