YouTube Premium & Music Reach 100 Million Subscribers 🎉

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.”

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.)

The $13.99 per month Premium service, which first debuted in 2015, includes access to YouTube Music Premium (which costs $10.99 per month on its own) and special features, like the ability to download videos for offline viewing. Premium users also get access to early or experimental YouTube features, like an artificial intelligence tool the company tested last year that uses generative AI to let people ask questions about a video.

Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2024/01/31/youtubes-premium-and-music-100-million-subscribers/?sh=582518a76d89

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