Advertising will remain the core business model for YouTube despite the growing number of subscription services offered by the company.
Speaking at IBC 2018, Neal Mohan, chief product officer, YouTube, said that the subscription model gives users more choice and provides it with a second revenue stream.
Commenting on YouTube Premium, he added that it is already available in 21 countries around the world, with more to follow. The most recent to have received the service were Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Denmark, along with the UK, France and Germany.
Mohan also said that the service is now bundled with the YouTube Music app and expressed his belief that there is a huge interest in subscribing to music.
Mohan provided a large number of facts and figures on YouTube and its performance. There are over 340 channels in Germany and France, and over 400 in the UK, with over 1 million subscribers. Furthermore, 1.9 billion users worldwide log in to YouTube every single month.
In 2017, 268,000 years of content from the EU was watched on YouTube.
In the sports sector, Bundesliga has partnered with YouTube and has over 1 million subs, with 400 million views.
In the UK, BT Sport has shown the Champions League for the third year, securing over 1 million viewers.
In hardware, Google Assistant has already been adopted by broadcasters such as Channel 4 in the UK.
In VR, YouTube already has hundreds of thousands of hours of content in its library.
Seventy per cent of YouTube is watched on phones, but TV is important, accounting for over 180 million hours of YouTube viewing each day.
In the EU, TV viewing of YouTube is growing by 45% year-on-year.
