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In the first three months of 2021, consumers across the world spent more on in-app purchases on YouTube than in any other smartphone app. Across the board, the first quarter of 2021 continued the surge of spending in the app market seen through 2020, with YouTube very much leading the way ahead of other equally famous apps such and Tinder and TikTok.

Globally, consumers spent $9 billion more in apps at the start of 2021 as they did in 2020, much of the growth being put down to the consequences of the pandemic and people being forced into staying at home. Streaming app downloads peaked in the second quarter of 2020, when much of the world was locked down and people were looking for new ways to access entertainment at home. Downloads are up on both the iOS and Android platforms, and the spend increase includes the initial cost to download an app, and any additional purchases which may be made within that app.

How Do You Spend Money on YouTube?

If you’re running a business with a YouTube channel, then it’s only natural to want to try to exploit this spending. But what are people buying on YouTube? For most people, YouTube is a video streaming service accessible to all and free to watch content. However, the brand has worked hard to offer content creators ways of monetising their content apart from the traditional way of having adverts play before a video, or appearing as a banner ad. Some of the main ways in deriving additional income for the app or for content creators are:

• Premium – for $12 per month, YouTube users can choose to be a Premium member. This allows them to watch videos without any advertising and allows for downloading of videos to watch later.
• Memberships – content creators might offer subscriptions or memberships to their individual channel, and offer a range of incentives or exclusives to their subscribers.
• Superchat – users can pay extra to have their comments highlighted to attract more attention on a creator’s live stream. Creators can set their own costs for the Superchat function.
• Super Stickers – similar to Superchat, these stickers appear on a creator’s live stream and cost money to send.

YouTube viewers watch an average of 38 hours of content per month, and so if you don’t have a YouTube channel for your company already, you could be missing out on a large chunk of the market. If you’re not sure about what sort of content you could put on a company YouTube channel then check out what the competition is doing – we’re not advising ripping off their ideas completely, but there’s nothing wrong with casting around for ideas. Upload videos regularly, and once you’ve got a large pool of loyal viewers, that’s the time to start thinking about ways of monetising your channel. Alternatively, you might just choose to use YouTube to drive visitors to your website, where hopefully they will buy something. Ignoring YouTube altogether though could be an expensive mistake.