YouTube Red is another "product" that is being rolled out by a major company in hopes of being able to produce even more money that they already are, similar to how Facebook started adding some features that resembled a popular video chatting service called Skype that allows users to voice call and video chat with other Facebook users. YouTube Red, in its simplest form, is making people pay $9.99 a month to watch YouTube without advertisements. This may not seem like a very big problem, or even a problem at all, because after all, it is just paying some money every month to be able to watch some videos without advertisements, right? Well, contrary to popular belief, I believe that YouTube Red has actually impacted many content creators across the entire site of YouTube, and will even drive some people to quitting YouTube.

To begin with, like I said earlier, YouTube Red is a program that you can pay for to get ad free YouTube videos as well as some movies and TV shows created by many different YouTubers, such as TheFineBros, RoosterTeeth, and many more. The main reason why I am interested in searching about for information about this topic, is because it affects a bunch of the YouTubers that are lower in the food chain of YouTube, as compared to the "YouTube Royalty". I also am interested on researching such a topic, because I watch a lot of YouTube in a week, and hopefully one day, I might start my own YouTube channel and post content on it in hopes that people will want to watch it. One thing that I believe YouTube Red will end up doing to the YouTube community is having more people support the lesser known YouTube content creators, and have less people watch the more well-known content creators. Not to completely stop watching the well-known people, but rather just watch their content less. I say this because the main way that most content creators generate revenue is through advertisements, because the content creators are asked by YouTube themselves to put an ad on their video, and in return, they will receive a portion of what is earned from the ad. One problem with this is that some people have things such as ad blockers installed, or some (most) people end up skipping the advertisements, so they only see 5 seconds or so if it. So all in all, the lesser-known content creators are going to make less, where the "YouTube Royalty" are going to make more, because they are going to post content to YouTube Red because they know that they can get people to pay for the subscription to see their content, which generates a revenue both from the subscription fee as well as the views.

In boogie2988's YouTube video "What is YouTube Red? What do you get?" he talks about what exactly YouTube Red does, and he says that YouTube Red is "similar to what Netflix offers with their originals. We're talking real money and real budgets producing real content," which he continues to describe as a reality show including YouTubers that is being directed by the same person who directed The Walking Dead. Essentially, he describes YouTube Red as not just regular YouTube videos, but more like Netflix or Hulu, where you can go to watch directed and budgeted films or TV shows, which means that only people who are really into YouTube, and who have been content creators for a while are actually going to want to become part of YouTube Red, to try to expand their horizons. Boogie2988 also claims that paying for YouTube Red is a valid idea, because you're paying for quality content, such as when you pay for your Netflix subscription, or your Hulu subscription. Another interesting idea he puts out is that the "YouTube Royalty" is going to make more money than ever, simply due to the fact that you have to pay for YouTube Red to access their content, so they will be getting a portion of that, as well as money from the views on the content that they produce on YouTube Red. He continues to say that for the average content creators, he isn't quite sure as to what will happen, but my guess is that they will end up making less money. I say this because I believe that people are going to start paying for YouTube Red once they see the cool stuff on there, that isn't on regular YouTube. This is going to take money away from the average YouTubers because I feel like people won't be viewing their content as much.

YouTube Red, as the Trefis Team explains in their article "Is YouTube Red A Real Threat To Netflix?" will now "directly compete with the streaming giant Netflix, which currently has more than 40 million subscribers in the U.S." To me, that is an incredibly high number, seeing as in 2011, Netflix had around 23 million subscribers, which means in 5 years, they almost doubled their amount of subscribers. The Trefis Team describes in their article on YouTube Red versus Netflix that YouTube Red differs from Netflix in the fact that it will be original, ad free content that you can access offline. However, the subscription rates for YouTube Red are slightly higher than that of Netflix, and with the releases of TV shows and movies on YouTube Red in the near future, YouTube Red will be able to attract young users, which in turn could take a toll on Netflix's market share. The Trefis Team argues that YouTube Red will have everything that Netflix currently offers once they start to add movies and television shows to their program, except they will be at a slight advantage, simply due to the fact that YouTube Red features original content. I believe that this website is a credible source, simply due to that fact that this is a website that revolves around the stock market, and they see what kind of trends effect certain stocks, so with their prior experience, I believe that they could foresee the future of both companies based on their decisions now. 

Lastly, in the article titled "YouTube Red...It's Actually a Very Good Thing" by John Gelardi of LinkedIn, he summarizes what YouTube Red actually is, and then he describes how YouTube Red will affect many content creators. He talks about how the content creators are going to lose money because a majority of YouTube Users will begin using YouTube Red, which lets them view videos without advertisements, leading to a loss of revenue for the content creators. Another bad thing about this program is the free trial period that they had through the month of November. This was not very good timing on YouTube's part, because asides from December, November is one of the busiest YouTube months, simply because it's holiday season. John continues with why this ended up in the content creator's favor, because Google and YouTube decided to pay the creators for the trial month of November. I would say that this author is credible due to the site being a rather popular site among professional businessmen and women, seeing as over 100 million individuals visit this site each month. 

In conclusion, I would say that this is a rather arguable topic, seeing as you can be on the side of this program being a beneficial program to content creators, or the side that says this program isn't very beneficial for them after all. I would say that the different perspectives that I've come across haven't affected me too much, but just shed a light on some ideas and concepts that I didn't quite think of before or know much about. One way I could revise this question is to make it appeal to not just YouTube users, but social media users in general by changing the research question to talk about how many social media services attempt to enroll these programs to try to convince people to pay for the "upper hand" against other people, whether it be an ad-free service, or a service that allows you to make phone calls for free, or something of the sorts.

