YouTube’s Global Head of Music Lyor Cohen, during an interview at SXSW, announced that the online video platform will increase the number of ads. The reason? annoy the viewers enough to convince them to buy paid subscriptions.
Many users were taking advantage of the free website and treating it as a music service, listening to playlists for very long periods.
Cohen explained: “You’re not going to be happy after you are jamming ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and you get an ad right after that“, “There’s a lot more people in our funnel that we can frustrate and seduce to become subscribers, once we do that, trust me, all that noise will be gone and articles people write about that noise will be gone.”
This strategy has the aim to improve monetization for record labels and distributors by making people pay for music, but YouTube will earn from it too of course, Bloomberg indeed reported that “Youtube generated an estimated $10 billion in revenue last year, almost all from advertising“.
The company said: “Our top priority at YouTube is to deliver a great user experience, and that includes ensuring users do not encounter excessive ad loads, for a specific subset of users who use YouTube like a paid music service today – and would benefit most from additional features – we may show more ads or promotional prompts to upsell to our paid service.”
