People are starting to pay their monthly subscriptions for YouTube Red, the new subscription tier to YouTube, and the early indications are that plenty have paid for at least one month.
The data comes from Apple’s US App Store, where at the time of writing YouTube’s main app is the fourth top-grossing iPhone app, behind only Game of War, Spotify and Clash of Clans, but ahead of Pandora.
It’s the first time that YouTube has appeared in the top-grossing chart, having previously been an entirely free app.
Like other subscription services, YouTube is having to charge more on iOS to cover Apple’s 30% cut of in-app subscriptions: whereas YouTube Red costs $9.99 a month normally, via in-app purchase on iOS it’s $12.99 a month.
TechCrunch, which first noticed the chart performance, has been canvassing opinions from app developers, who suggest that YouTube Red is making anywhere between $100k and $300k per day at this point from iOS subscriptions alone.
As with Apple Music, it remains to be seen how much of that early performance is people forgetting to cancel their automatic subscriptions after a free trial.
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