YouTube, the popular online video service owned by Google Inc, is planning to offer a paid, ad-free version, the head of the site said.<\/p>\n
The move would represent a significant change for the world\u2019s No. 1 online video website, whose free videos, often accompanied by short commercials, attract more than 1 billion users a month.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are going to be cases where people are going to say \u2018I don\u2019t want to see the ads or I want to have a different kind of experience\u2019,\u201d Susan Wojcicki, a Google senior vice president who heads the YouTube business, said at the Code\/Mobile technology conference in Half Moon Bay, California late on Monday.<\/p>\n
Wojcicki, who became the head of YouTube in February after several years overseeing Google\u2019s multibillion-dollar advertising business, said a paid video service was \u201cnear-term\u201d but provided few details, including how much a subscription would cost.<\/p>\n
In May 2013, YouTube launched a pilot program that allowed individual content creators to charge consumers a subscription fee to access a particular \u201cchannel\u201d of videos. Wojcicki on Monday described a broader subscription service in which consumers would pay to access an ad-free version of YouTube\u2019s vast collection of videos.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re early in that process. But if you look at media over time, most of them have both ads and subscription,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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