YouTube is planning to introduce paid subscriptions for some individual channels, and this will start a whole new era in the history of the global video sharing community in particular, and online video in general. With this move, YouTube aims to attract more professional content makers as well as advertisers and refined audience to make the video platform a stronger rival of television. The first paid subscriptions are said to be launched in the second quarter of this year.

Pic.: A list of categories of most popular channels on YouTube, www.youtube.com/channels/best_of_youtube

Ad Age reports that “YouTube has reached out to a small group of channel producers and asked them to submit applications to create channels that users would have to pay to access.” To be able to view the content on such channels, the audience will be asked to pay between $1 and $5 a month, according to insiders. Most probably, YouTube will charge not only for viewing episodes but also for content libraries and access to live streaming, pay-per-view, and will also ask to pay for watching self-help or financial advice shows.

So far, YouTube officials don’t say which channels will be in the first pack of the paid-subscription scheme, but it is expected that the platform will collaborate with the network companies that have already proved that can create compelling web content (Machinima, Maker Studios and Fullscreen to name a few). The company is also searching for potential creators of paid content among its current partners.

In fact, the introduction of paid subscriptions is quite a logical step for the platform, which is the major video-sharing website in the world now.

Advertising is a nice source of revenue, still there should be another way to generate money from the views. Google has been looking for the ways to monetize YouTube for years—in 2011, the tech giant made a $100m investment in original content created for YouTube to make the platform even more attractive to the global audience. The platform is planning to take about 45% from the subscription revenue, and this will be similar to the 45-55 split for ads.

“We have long maintained that different content requires different types of payment models. The important thing is that, regardless of the model, our creators succeed on the platform. There are a lot of our content creators that think they would benefit from subscriptions, so we’re looking at that,” commented a Google spokesman.