Youtube’s boss in Europe has revealed it is working on allowing publishers to combine their own paywalls with subscriptions on the video platform.
Pedro Pina, vice president of Youtube EMEA, told the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress on Wednesday that he expected this functionality to arrive “very soon”.
He said: “Having a paywall that has a conversation between Youtube and the current paywall of publishers is something that has not yet been developed but we have product and engineers working on it, thanks to great partners such as Le Monde, who pushed us to start developing that solution,” referring to the French publisher as they were also represented on stage.
Allowing publishers to combine their own subscriptions with Youtube could mean users who want to watch a paywalled video on the platform are invited to sign up for the brand’s overall subscription including unlimited access to their website and other content.
But Pina said the challenge on doing this is around privacy.
He said: “We are eager to share the ads money with you, and we are eager to share the subscription money as well.
“It’s just a question of how to handle the data, and how to be incredibly careful and thoughtful about how that data is exchanged, and how to be, of course, law-abiding and privacy-safe, which is a crucial concern that we have.”
Google-owned Youtube shares advertising revenue with creators, giving them 55% and keeping 45%.
Pina said news content generated 15 billion views on Youtube last year.
Lou Grasser, chief digital operations officer at Le Monde, said they felt it would be a “strong opportunity” if people could “subscribe more efficiently” to their brand via video content they are producing for Youtube.
Grasser said Le Monde has about 700,000 subscribers, of which 90% are digital. And she said the brand receives about four million video views a day, compared to six million website visits.
She cited a video titled “How Northern Europe is preparing for war with Russia” published in March 2025 and said that behind the website it generated 300-400 subscription conversions within a few days.
“We are not able to put them [videos] under a paywall on Youtube so we have to put it online on Youtube a few weeks later, but we believe there is a strong opportunity there to have subscriptions,” Grasser said.
Youtube’s Pina noted that the platform had started with an ad-based model “which was already the legacy publishing model as well. So we are we are following the different steps and phases of the evolution of the industry, and of course we put all the priority on ads, because the ads is where typically this industry, generally speaking, monetises both entertainment as well as news, so by starting with the ads, we have a very sophisticated and very successful ads model, which we do the revenue share for.”
He added that there are “more than ten” ways to make money on Youtube.
One is via paid memberships which is being trialled by publishers including The Daily Beast and ITN.
Pina’s hope for the news industry in five years was “for all the traditional – literally all the traditional – journalistic brands to be video first, not because it’s good for Youtube, but it’s because I think it’s good for viewers and it’s good for society”.
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