YouTube Plans to Let News Publishers Sell Off-Platform Subscriptions Through Their Channels

YouTube is developing a tool for news publishers to sell subscriptions to their owned-and-operated digital properties through their YouTube channels. Apparently YouTube has told publishers that it plans to begin testing the subscription sales tool by the end of this year.

Publishers have been told that YouTube and Google have been working to tie the video platforms’ subscription sales tool to Subscribe With Google, a tool that Google rolled out in April 2018 for people to subscribe to publishers’ sites using their Google accounts.

YouTube is also working on a way for publishers’ existing subscribers to connect their subscriptions to the publishers’ YouTube channels so that a publisher could distribute videos on the channel that are only available to its paying subscribers, regardless of whether a person subscribed directly from the publisher or through YouTube.