There is some very good news for all our viewers who asked us to return to Youtube: We heard you, and we are coming back! And, there is more good news for those Explorers who’ve been waiting for an ad-free version of our channel.

On Friday, April 29th, both will become available. Advertising-free viewing of the full WildEarth Channel for our Explorer members (on our website only, for now) and advertising-supported viewing of full Safaris and Penguin Beach on YouTube (both LIVE and recorded) for everyone. 

Towards the end of last year, we had to make the decision to no longer make our full safaris available on YouTube as we did not have a way to properly serve advertising there. This was a difficult but – at that time – necessary decision to make in support of being able to continue to provide free-to-watch options for our broadcasts, which is not possible without revenue from advertising.

Since then, we’ve kept looking for ways to be able to serve advertising on YouTube in such a way that would make it possible to bring it back as a place to watch our Safaris and Penguin Beach. We believe we have found the solution for this by changing the frequency and duration of our ad breaks. Instead of two-and-half minute ad breaks four times per hour (or two times per hour on our own WildEarth apps and website) as we are doing now, we will move to one-minute ad breaks, either ten or five (on our own WildEarth apps and website) times per hour. This change will allow us to match this pattern and frequency on YouTube and thus bring it back as a viewing destination for both LIVE and recorded shows.

YouTube chat will also be available again during the LIVE broadcasts.

For our Explorers, you can now watch all of our channel ad-free! The long-promised version of the live Channel without ads or promos is now available, exclusively for our Explorers, on our website from this Friday. We are working on also making ad-free viewing possible for Explorers on the WildEarth apps, but this is still in its early stages. 

If you are not yet an Explorer, and also prefer to watch without advertising, you can find out about this and other benefits, and sign up by clicking here. 

Finally, for the time being, we will stop adding more recordings to our apps now that they are available on YouTube again. We are working on a better and faster way of providing these recordings in the WildEarth apps and we will relaunch this once this is completed, but we do not have a timeline for this yet.

WE are very excited to finally provide ad-free viewing to our Explorers and to bring back YouTube as a place where our LIVE broadcasts and recordings can be viewed and hope you will enjoy these options.