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Monday, February 5, 2024

YouTube Becoming UsTube


YouTube on Thursday announced a key milestone for YouTube Premium and Music, the Google-owned company’s paid services for ad-free access and music streaming: a combined 100 million subscribers.

The new subscriber figure is still small compared to YouTube’s overall user base of 2.5 billion people, but YouTube CEO Neal Mohan told Forbes that the site’s subscription business is part of a “twin engine growth” plan with its advertising business.

“We obviously are an ad-supported business,” he said. “But we have also worked very hard to build up a subscription business. And that is a meaningful part of our business at this point.”

According to a newly released Pew Research Center survey, which ran from May through September last year, the video-sharing platform is the most widely used social media for every generation surveyed. Indeed, a staggering 93% of US adults aged 18-29 said that they use YouTube’s site or app, as well as 92% of 30-44 year-olds and a still substantial 60% of over 65s admitting the same.

More generally, there are few signs of anyone becoming less addicted to their phones.

Indeed, most platforms saw significant rises in reported use amongst adults of all ages since the last time Pew Research ran a similar survey in 2021. TikTok, perhaps unsurprisingly, has jumped furthest in that time frame, with 33% of US adults now reporting using the platform, compared to 21% just 3 years ago. Interestingly, Facebook and X (or Twitter, as it was then) were the only platforms to show declines across the surveys.

The Pew update comes as the CEOs of 5 large social media companies, including X’s Linda Yaccarino, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Snap’s Evan Spiegel, testified in Congress earlier this week, pressed with questions on how they’re tackling child safety issues on their platforms.

Hitting the triple-digit millions means the company’s subscription business is slowly catching up to a number of well-established rivals. Amazon Prime, arguably the gold standard of digital subscription bundles, reportedly had more than 200 million subscribers last year, while Spotify premium, another ad-free service, has 226 million subscribers. (YouTube Premium’s 100 million subscribers also includes people currently on one-month free trials, the company said, though YouTube declined to say how many.)

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