Google Will Give Me Money if you Sign up for YouTube Red Using This Link

With a headline like that, you’ll definitely trust my enthusiastic support of the YouTube Red subscription service! I really do like it though.

I make and watch and think about YouTube for a living. So, when YouTube is launching a new feature I might have any emotion ranging from Christmas-morning enthusiasm to utter terror. I like new products, I like when YouTube changes, I like when people have big ideas and try things out.

Of course, there’s also a remarkably good chance that it will be an absolute disaster. No one has forgotten (though we eventually will) what happened when Google forced the unpopular Google+ platform on all YouTube users. It was a long-term debacle that resulted in YouTube losing a lot of credibility with creators and users of the site.

YouTube Red is the biggest new product YouTube has launched since then and I have to say…so far, it’s pretty great.

Look how happy these attractive young people are! You should really get YouTube Red.

For $10 a month, I don’t have ads on YouTube anymore. I can play YouTube videos in the background (which is useful for listening to music and treating YouTube videos like podcasts). I can download videos to watch when I’m out of cell reception on or a plane. And I get Google Play Music thrown in for free. (If you have Google Play Music, you also automatically get YouTube Red…they are now the same product with two different names.)

Google Play Music seems to be more designed for me than Spotify. I feel like maybe I’m not cool enough for Spotify sometimes.

Now, I thought Google Play was going to be the part of this I was least interested in…I was wrong. Google Play Music is superior to Spotify in several ways (and of course inferior in others) but it is by far good enough to be preferable if it’s frikkin’ free. Here’s the best and most recent comparison I found of their various strengths and weaknesses.

The un-subscription process from Spotify was pleasant though.

Not only that, but all by itself if Google Play Music replaces the $10 per month I’m paying for Spotify (which it has…I cancelled my Spotify subscription earlier this month) YouTube Red is a revenue-neutral addition to my household.

Rooster Teeth’s “Lazer Team” premiered at Sundance.

The final perk of YouTube Red is access to original content that YouTube is producing with top creators and placing behind the YouTube Red paywall. I’m a bit ambivalent about this whole thing. I don’t think YouTube should become Netflix, and I worry about the cultural affects of having YouTub content behind a paywall, but I am interested to see what high-budget content designed for YouTube by YouTubers looks like, but I suspect it will take a while before it figures out exactly what it is.

We will see.

Anyway, as a user, it’s a slam dunk. YouTube is much more pleasant without ads, I have found myself enthusiastically using all of Red’s features, and it doesn’t add to my monthly media budget.

But none of that would matter one lick to me if Red was bad for creators, and it’s not.

YouTube has been quiet on statistics for Red so far, but I can tell you from my own data that, since the launch, Red has been responsible for between 2% and 9% of our YouTube channel revenue. It’s higher for channels with longer videos, and lower for channels with shorter videos (Red revenue distribution is based on watch-time) but for all of our channels it’s a significant bump. The number also appears to be going up as more people sign up for the service.

OOOO yeah…SPREADSHEETS! This sexy table shows how much more I make per view and per minute with YouTube Red vs non-YTR users across a bunch of different channels. It is universally more, but some channels do much better than others…particularly the channels with longer content. If you have a channel and you’d like to test for yourself, I’ve made the spreadsheet public (removing some of the more sensitive data.)

Between 1% and 3% of channel views are YouTube Red supported right now. That seems like the kind of thing I shouldn’t technically be allowed to tell you, but no one has called me to tell me to stop yet. While, at the same time, 2% to 14% of my revenue is YouTube Red. The percentage is much higher for channels with longer episodes, and smaller for channels with shorter content.

I also asked creators of all kinds of video to put their data into my spreadsheet and saw similar patterns from them. Indeed, channels with smaller audiences appear to benefit more from YouTube Red, mostly because their ad rates are lower. Smaller channels don’t get packaged the same way as large channels for ad deals, while Red shares revenue evenly per minute watched by Red subscribers. Smaller channels have reported to me that Red views worth two to ten times more than ad-supported views on their videos.

It’s definitely true that creators who specialize in shorter videos are getting shafted a bit here, but YouTube needs to pick a way to distribute revenue, and watch time makes sense. In any case, across the board, creators are making more from Red subscribers than the average viewer. This was always very likely to be the case, but it is nice to see that it has played out.

It’s very difficult to know this for sure, but I think these are all things I would have said even if YouTube hadn’t reached out to ask me if I wanted to participate in an affiliate program marketing Red and getting paid if people sign up.

I was conflicted about this. I want to be an unbiased source of information about YouTube Red…I want people to trust what I say and not know that I’m just doing this for the money. Then, on the other hand, I benefit significantly from having people (especially people who tend to spend time watching my videos) sign up for YouTube Red no matter what.

I was never going to be unbiased, and I also have nothing against taking Google’s money to promote a thing they’re doing that I’m actually excited about.

So, click on this link if you want to try out Red for free for one month. If you keep using Red after that month, Google will pay me money. This is clearly a win/win/win/win/win for me. But I hope it will be a win for you as well. If you don’t like it, cancel (cancellation is a two-click process) before the first month and your card won’t be charged.

This is how you cancel from your YouTube Red Management page, which (once you sign up) will be at youtube.com/manage_red

Hank Green and his brother John have been making YouTube videos for about 10 years. They have started, or helped start, a dozen or so YouTube channels with about 1.5 billion total combined views. Hank is also the CEO of VidCon, the world’s largest conference for online video creators.