Photo Credit: Sanket Mishra
YouTube now has 100 million subscribers across its Premium & Music tiers (including free trials). That’s an increase of around 20 million subscribers since 2022. Content ID claims are also up 25% year-over-year—with rights holders choosing to monetize rather than ripping down user-generated content (UGC).
YouTube says it paid more than $70 billion dollars to creators, artists, and media companies in the last three years prior to 2024. That’s up $20 billion from the $50B+ figure reported in 2022—highlighting how rights holders are choosing to monetize content.
YouTube now has over 100 million Premium and Music subscribers across 100 countries as of January 2024. It also touts more than $9 billion paid out to rights holders through its Content ID service, its most complex rights management tool that’s available to movie studios, record labels, and collecting societies. Here’s a quick reminder of how that service works.
YouTube and its Content ID partners enter into an agreement that allows YouTube to scan its network for ‘fingerprints’ it created of rights holder content. Partners provide YouTube with reference files for the works they own, metadata, and detailed ownership rights. Content ID then scans YouTube uploads and alerts rights holders in the YouTube Studio Content Manager. Rights holders can then choose to either block, monetize, or track matching content.
In the first half of 2023, rightsholders chose to monetize over 90% of all Content ID claims on the platform, with YouTube processing over 980 million claims. That’s a 25% increase compared to last year, with only 8,900 rightsholders issuing Content ID claims in that period.
In the first half of 2023, YouTube processed 826 million Content ID claims, showcasing that rights holders are choosing to monetize UGC content on YouTube rather than block it completely.
Of those nearly 9,000 Content ID rightsholders, 4,828 members were responsible for 99% of all claims activity—averaging 200,000 Content ID claims per rightsholder. UGC platforms offer a new way for rightsholders to monetize their works as evidenced by YouTube’s transparency report.
