How To Improve YouTube Premium to Bring In More Subscribers?
A grad project that I worked on.
Hey everyone, it’s been a long while since my previous post. Been a bit busy with things, but here’s to staying consistent.
Time was running out.
I didn’t know whether I could make it or not, but I still had to try my best.
This was what my thought process was for my last attempt at the PM Grad Project I was working for at NextLeap.
I didn’t know whether it’d be easy or not.
The products I had to choose were either Twitter Blue, or YouTube Premium.
Luckily for me, I use YouTube A LOT. And I don’t use YouTube Premium. So, this was right for me to try and figure out.
So, how’d I go about doing this?
Step 1:
Do secondary research. Find out what I could from secondary sources. What are the discussions people have about YouTube Premium? What do they think about the features of YouTube Premium? etc.
So, this was what I set out to do.
And I found a pretty interesting pattern. (Seen in the image below)
Users who use Premium do so to support creators they watch.
Users who don’t use Premium think that Premium does not provide enough value for what it’s worth.
So now, I had a path to follow.
Step 2:
Time to test this. I had to devise a survey to see whether users in India felt the same.
So, I designed a survey. (If you feel like going through it: https://tally.so/r/nW2YPN)
In parallel, I started interviewing people to get a direct experience from them.
From the interviews and survey, here’s what I found out:
94% of surveyors use YouTube at least one hour a day.
84% of surveyors also had other subscription services, which signaled to me that users don’t mind subscribing if they find value in a service.
55% of surveyors also used alternative solutions to YT Premiums such as Vanced, NewPipe, etc.
Step 3:
Now that I had confirmation about the problem statement, I had to justify whether if there was enough reason to solve this problem now.
I also came up with a few user personas that were a culmination of the interviews I took and the surveyors that gave detailed responses.
Step 4:
Now comes the fun part. Solutions!
I spent a couple of days coming up with these.
Some inspiration for the solution I ended up going for- YouTube Producer. I’m a Corridor Digital website subscriber, and they have a feature there that does something similar. You act as a producer for their shows, and help fund shows that YOU find interesting. I decided to use that concept, and make it work for YouTube Premium. This also works because users like to directly contribute to projects their favorite YouTubers create.
I tried my hand in creating a system diagram for this too, to showcase how this would work behind the scenes in a technical way. Link here.
That was fun!
Now, to show you in detail about what this solution can do.
If you want to have a look at how this would work, take a look at a working prototype here.
And finally, how would I measure if this solution ends up working or not?
That’s where metrics come into play.
I also had to add information on where things might go wrong here- so take a look at some “pitfalls” of this solution, and the ways I thought I could work around that.
That was my deck folks! Hope you liked it :)
If you want to go through my deck fully, take a look at it here!
One last thing I wanted to share, this deck made me a top fellow! Which means I’m one step closer to becoming an actual PM :D
I’m so excited for the upcoming months. It’s going to be a fun ride to share with all of y’all :)
Until then, Ciao!