I’m still in amazement that YouTube has failed to successfully monetise their site and seem to be plucking all the wrong ideas out of the hat. Recently they are trying to leverage some sort of revenue stream by tapping in to social media and still try to keep advertising revenue flowing with little effect on cost.

I wonder how many publishers would benefit though from a subscription model? Flickr has successfully applied this to their picture sharing site and I see no reason why YouTube cannot offer a similar or even more complex cost model. As a YouTube ‘Pro’ account member you would be able to upload longer videos, customise the player in depth and add more widgets to your channel or host it on your site via enhanced tools. There is so much scope for YouTube to ramp up revenue here, make it’s online position stronger as a more advanced media player and also offer groundbreaking features to publishers and digital marketeers.

I’d love a YouTube ‘Pro’ account and would gladly pay for it. There are other online video solutions of course such as Brightcove, Ooyala and many more but full implementation is costly and way beyond the means of SMEs or individual publishers wishing to host or encode client content. A YouTube ‘Pro’ account could be a halfway house between the free and corporate video services offering longer videos, thumbnail generation and editing and easy widget creation and embedding / publishing options. 

I’m surprised YouTube haven’t offered this yet but I was talking about HD YouTube videos a while back so this may only be a matter of time.