One of the most universally used streaming channels of all, YouTube is as popular as ever, and continues to go from strength to strength. It’s fun, it’s often nostalgic and it allows us to share videos across the board, and as such it is also a powerful and very usable online marketing tool.
Famously, watching videos on YouTube – whether they are business related, your favourite movie clips or chosen music stars – is free. This does, however, come with a sort of price: YouTube is peppered with adverts. You get used to it, but as with all online pop-ups it can get annoying.
That’s why YouTube has introduced its Premium service. YouTube Premium is a paid-for version of the original with many apparent improvements. At the time of writing it carries a fee of $11.99 per month. That’s no small fee when you consider that the standard model costs nothing at all. So is it worth it, and will it work? Let’s have a closer look at what you get.
What Does YouTube Premium Offer?
Let’s say you want to pay the monthly fee for YouTube Premium; what exactly do you get for your money? Here’s a list of the benefits:
- No Ads – there are no adverts on YouTube Premium. This may be attractive to business users who don’t have the time to sit through the ubiquitous ads on the standard version. Note that ads inserted by the video owner will still show.
- Offline Viewing – pay for the Premium version and you can download videos for viewing offline, any time, on your computer, tablet or phone, and they will stay their for 30 days.
- Background – with Premium, when you switch to a different screen on your iPad, for example, the YouTube video you have running will continue playing in the background.
- Originals – jumping in where other streaming channels have already made a mark, notably Netflix, YouTube Premium offers some original content made for Premium viewers only, which is an area that will certainly grow over the years.
There is also the added bonus of being able to access YouTube Music at the Premium level, which is Google’s recently upgraded streaming channel. Is this all enough to justify the monthly outlay?
Our Conclusion
The question we ask in the title is ‘will it work?’ The answer is undoubtedly yes as there will always be people willing to pay a premium price, especially when it means doing away with annoying adverts. However, whether it will work for you is another question entirely. There is no doubt that many social media agency services will advise its use for small businesses, but can you afford it?
Over a year, YouTube Premium will cost you around $140; that’s quite a chunk of money just to get rid of a few seconds of adverts and download videos, but for some, it’s worth it to be able to access streamlined, uninterrupted viewing, and the draw of the YouTube Originals may be worth looking out for in the future.