But as YouTube audiences grew, creators in the most niche of genres and topics discovered that even they could find viewers that would eagerly consume their content. The first famous YouTubers, like NigaHiga, Fred, and Shane Dawson, built their audiences with a widely appealing genre: comedy. In the early days, network effects quickly cemented YouTube’s dominance as the premier platform in both quantity and quality of content. YouTube was so revolutionary because it democratized the distribution of video content: creators post for free, and viewers watch for free. Being a YouTube personality has become a full-time profession, and accruing a dedicated viewer base can be done by anyone with a video-creation tool, a personality, and a bit of luck. 14 years later, YouTube has become a huge subsection of the entertainment industry in its own right, earning parent company Google billions of dollars in ad revenue annually.

Founded in 2005, it was initially an intimate video sharing website, where users could post unstructured content mostly for their friends and family. If there’s one company that’s revolutionized the way humans have consumed video content, it’s YouTube. So where did YTP go wrong? Why has it failed to convert YouTube’s enormous cache of 1.5 billion monthly active users into fully paid monthly subscribers? The YouTube Value Proposition The market has clearly grown rapidly, yet YTP remains a minor player. At the end of 2016, it had only accrued 1.5 million subscribers (current subscriber levels are unknown.)Ĭompare this with Netflix, which grew from about 80 million subscribers at the end of 2016, to over 120 million at the end of 2018. Since then it has undergone a rebranding, renamed simply to YouTube Premium (YTP for brevity) in 2018. The first iteration of YouTube’s premium service debuted in 2015 with YouTube Red. Yet one company that seemed poised to easily move into subscription-based streaming has tried and failed for several years now: YouTube. The current major players, Netflix, Hulu, and HBO, are getting ready to face the onslaught of new offerings from Disney, ABC, Amazon, Apple, and others. It’s 2019, and it seems like everyone and their mother is trying to get into the subscription-based streaming market.

Youtube premium unlocked