During the month of September, YouTube’s Premium subscription began to be requested for 4K video playback. Although the requirement was not imposed on all users, those who saw it left negative comments on social networks or platforms. Everything seems to indicate that the experiment has been discontinued; although it was annoying, it did not have much life.
Everything indicates that the renunciation of this idea is only for now, and was reflected in social networks. In response to a recent tweet criticizing the feature, YouTube’s official account made it clear that the firm “has completely disabled this experiment.” To further expand that “viewers should now be able to access 4K quality resolutions without premium membership,” expressed a second part of the tweet. It is not yet known whether the “experiment”, as the company called it, has been successful or whether it proposes to reinstate this requirement at a later date.
With Premium subscription and benefits
YouTube is currently a free service with advertising. However, a Premium option is also available. It is an ad-free experience for just over ten dollars a month. Advantages include the ability to download videos for offline viewing, as well as to watch them in the background.
During the last few months, the YouTube platform has launched a more aggressive advertising campaign to its users offering Premium service. Advertisements have been seen more and more frequently and, in some cases, with advertisements that cannot be omitted from the free service. A year ago, in September, the company announced that it had 50 million subscribers to its YouTube Premium service.
Trial and error
It is very common for large platforms to decide to test new functionalities through experiments. Generally, these initiatives tend to affect a small number of users. To such an extent that most of the people who use them do not find out about the novelty until it is confirmed or not. In this case, YouTube’s refusal to move forward with the paid service, to watch 4K videos, is the news.
To this reality of adding more revenue, the cause that explains it is the explosion of TikTok during the pandemic. In order not to lose its users and content creators, last September, the company offered 45 percent of advertising revenue to Shorts creators. Vertical videos became the new trend, particularly because they are oriented to be viewed on mobile devices.
One of the first differences with the Chinese application is that they cannot be downloaded, so to see them you must be inside the platform. This 45% contrasts with what YouTube distributes, as advertising revenue, for its “long” videos. In this case, the amount received by the creators is 55% of all advertising revenue generated by their content. For Shorts generators, this is an important change, since initially Google’s idea was not to provide any kind of profit for these mini videos.
