Would You Pay for an Ad-Free YouTube?

You know what’s by far one of my favorite things about the Internet? It’s free. Well, a lot of it is free. I can use Gmail for free. I can use Twitter for free. I can use Dropbox for free. And I can waste away countless hours on end watching inane cat videos on YouTube for free. But that’s not completely true. Because these “free” services are ad-supported.

That’s a part of the reason why you can go ahead and enjoy all the videos on the MEGATechNews YouTube channel without having to spend a dime. As it turns out, though, Google is seriously considering a paid model where you can get rid of all those advertisements, including not only the banner ads populating the site, but also the pre-roll (and post-roll) video ads.

Word on the virtual street is that customers willing to upgrade to the new paid tier will not only get an ad-free experience for all the free videos that are already on YouTube, but they’ll also gain access to YouTube-exclusive content from some of the site’s top creators. The assumption is that this premium content won’t be available to use free-watching plebs.

The price for this new YouTube subscription service is yet to be determined, but I imagine they’d want to keep it competitive with something like Netflix or Hulu Plus, even though those are completely different. An announcement could come before the end of the month.

Via MobileSyrup