It’s not official, but YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar recently stated that the company may soon allow original content creators to create subscription-based channels on the site.This is quite an about-face for the Google-owned company. Google’s Eric Schmidt has previously praised the virtues of free content, an easy stance to take when your business Model is wholly based on user-generated content. Then YouTube started funding its own original content to the tune of $100 million, and suddenly realized that, maybe, artists and writers should get paid for their work.It also raises some questions about how they’ll index their subscription content. Right now, Google preferences free content in its search and Google News rankings, and tells content creators to make their videos free-to-view on YouTube, frustrating publishers trying to make a dime off their video content (it’s possible to index content behind a paywall, but it takes a careful reading of Google’s instructions).However, given the companies recent move to preference Google+ information over other social media data, any decision to create YouTube subscription channels will likely preference that content over any other video subscription platform. It’s a bit like Apple’s move to control the content and distribution of iBooks.Old-school journalism used to believe in the separation of church and state when it came to editorial content and advertising. In the digital age, perhaps we need to create a separation of content creation tools/platforms (YouTube, iBooks, Kindle) and their distribution systems (Google, Apple stores, Amazon.com)?