YouTube has added monetization options to its live streaming platform which includes the ability ofr publishers to charge for live events. As written on YouTube’s publisher blog yesterday, “You can now monetize your live events with advertising or paid options. A live event can be claimed in the new video manager like any other video and monetized with instream ads or paid options where you can set price by country.” To ensure that the plan to offer pay-per-view style video streaming of live events goes well, YouTube has been experimenting with select sports-based publishers such as UFC.
By making the options more widely available, YouTube’s live streaming could be made more attractive to other sports and entertainment publishers. As of now though, charging for streams is limited to users in the US, UK, Canada, Japan and France. While YouTube isn’t the only company that offers paid live streaming, it might seem a positive change for them given the website’s popularity which is nearly synonymous with the term video.
This new feature is added on along with other new features in conjunction with YouTube Live’s first year anniversary and since it is only available to a few publishers for now, there are plans to make it more widely available according to a statement from the blog post which said, “If you’re one of the many people who’ve asked for YouTube Live but don’t have access yet, we want to thank you very much for your patience. We’ve developed these features with the expectation (that) many more of you will eventually use YouTube Live, and like we said last year, this process takes time to roll out broadly.”