14 DAY TRIAL // Google is going to start paying YouTube stars to create content in a move that the company hopes will improve the quality of content on the site.
The world’s favorite video streaming site has gone through a lot of changes in the past four years, including the increase in video fidelity to 4K, as well as the popularity growth of its in-house stars that started blogging in their bedrooms.
Now, there are more than 1 billion viewers visiting YouTube every month and the daily watchtime continues to grow with 50 percent each year, indicating an increasing affinity for service.
The company states that it has done a lot to speed up the transformation and to reach such numbers. They’ve made investments in channels to jumpstart the creator ecosystem, they’ve created YouTube Spaces in LA, Tokyo, London and a new one will soon open in New York. These offer creators access to great equipment and sets.
After expanding the company’s support to full-scale marketing and advertising for some of its biggest stars, such as Bethany Mota, they’re now taking another step to help creators.
“We’ve decided to fund new content from some of our top creators, helping them not only fulfill their creative ambitions, but also deliver new material to their millions of fans on YouTube,” the company said.
Since making cool new content isn’t easy, YouTube will soon start experimenting with new formats and ideas. “We’ll get our hands dirty. We’ll make some mistakes. Together we’ll (hopefully) create some fantastic new content on YouTube. But one thing is certain: there’s no one we’d rather go on this adventure with than our creators,” states YouTube’s Alex Carloss who leads the YouTube Originals department.
Fan funding, another way to help content creators
The site has recently introduced some new options with the same purpose of helping people make more new content. The fan funding options encourage subscribers and visitors of various channels to donate money to their favorite YouTube stars.
Some of them were already accepting money via other services such as Patreon, which allow artists to receive donations. Giving visitors such an easy way to help these artists should help them create more quality content more frequently.
Many YouTube stars said over time that they couldn’t make more than, let’s say, one video per month because they couldn’t afford it. Now, they should be able not only to make more videos, but also to get to better locations, increase the video quality and so on.
The search giant is reportedly looking to invest millions of dollars in this new endeavor, which is great since they clearly have the funds for it.