ANAHEIM, Calif. — YouTube Space New York will open its doors in 2014, company executives said Thursday during a keynote address at VidCon, the annual confab of online video makers and fans.
The studio, located in the neighborhood of Chelsea, will join existing Spaces in Los Angeles, London and Tokyo and will include a brand lab for content creators to meet and work with advertisers from nearby Madison Avenue.
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The company made a number of other announcements met with cheers and applause from the audience gathered for Industry Day, the creator-focused day that kicks off the event:
— In defiance of the lukewarm reception YouTube’s 60 inaugural paid channels have received since launching in May (channels include Laugh Factory VIP, National Geographic Kids and UFC Select) the company is allowing any account with more than 10,000 subscribers to become a paid subscription channel.
— Creators with more than 5,000 subscribers are now able to access a special Top Fans feature that allows them to see the viewing activity of their most engaged followers, add them to Google+ circles and contact them directly.
— Accounts with at least 100 subscribers can now use YouTube’s live-streaming function.
— The company has commissioned more than 100 instrumental tracks to build an audio library that creators can use for free in their content.
— YouTube also demonstrated its new mobile app, which includes a picture-in-picture feature that will allow users to watch and browse at the same time, as well as the ability to watch playlists.
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YouTube, which signed a two-year title sponsorship agreement with VidCon in April, receives 1 billion visitors a month. According to Nielsen, it is more popular among 18- to 34-year-olds than any cable network in the United States, and in the past year, the number of channels with more than 1 million subscribers grew from 78 to 325. Unique daily channel subscriptions have quadrupled over the same period.
