The move would represent a significant change for the world's No. 1 online video website, whose free videos, often accompanied by short commercials, attract more than one billion users a month.

“There are going to be cases where people are going to say 'I don't want to see the ads or I want to have a different kind of experience',” Susan Wojcicki, a Google senior vice president who heads the YouTube business, said at the Code/Mobile technology conference in Half Moon Bay, California late on Monday.

Wojcicki, who became the head of YouTube in February after several years overseeing Google's multibillion-dollar advertising business, said a paid video service was “near-term” but provided few details, including how much a subscription would cost.

In May 2013, YouTube launched a pilot program that allowed individual content creators to charge consumers a subscription fee to access a particular “channel” of videos. Wojcicki on Monday described a broader subscription service in which consumers would pay to access an ad-free version of YouTube's vast collection of videos.