YouTube has tried her hand in financing the original content more than once – with disappointing results.
Ten years ago, Youtube believed he had to compete more directly with Netflixes of the World. Robert Kyncl, then the leading business official on YouTube (who left to become CEO of Warner Music Group in 2023), in 2015 hired Susanne Daniels TV veteran to build an original programming list – available exclusively for YouTube Red (later re -enrolled YouTube Premium).
Daniels, who had been the MTV chief programming and a senior WB and Lifetime executor, led the Greenl series that presented Youtube creators such as Pewdiepie, Markiplier, Rhett & Link and Liza Koshy, as well as the originals written as “Karate Kid” offshoot “Cobra”.
However, the originals were not submitting the YouTube settlement executions provided by subscriptions. The platform was moved to make available YouTube originals with free ads, an attempt to make money for them. In 2019, YouTube began leaving the written game to focus on the unspoiled tariff. Some of her popular series found home elsewhere: in 2020 “Cobra Kai”, by Sony Pictures Television, was chosen after two seasons on Youtube from Netflix (where it would develop four more seasons). “Step Up”, based on the film series, lived on YouTube for two seasons and moved to Starz for a third and final season.
Then, at the beginning of 2022, Youtube overturned the originals initiative altogether. Daniels left youtube that spring.
Neal Mohan, who became CEO of YouTube in February 2023, says the one-thesis was that the platform could give an incentive to home creators by funding products with larger tickets-and then divided into overthrow. What happened, he says, is that popular YouTubers organically started producing premium level content that was as good as anything on TV or other broadcasting services.
Great creators on YouTube “are Hollywood -II new in this sense because they are producing the content people want to see,” says Mohan. “And so it eliminated the need for us to do anything about it because our creators were doing it themselves.”
Moreover, says Mohan, the original YouTube content strategy did not work because “we were not good at getting content”. As a technological platform, YouTube is good in building tools for creators and watching experiences for viewers, he says. So YouTube decided to get out of the originals to focus on it – “and let our creators make the rest,” Mohan says.
The Google -owned video giant had made an early attempt to throw money in the content produced for YouTube. The original Youtube channel initiative, launched in 2012, was given about $ 100 million in dozens of channels from partners including Madonna, Jay-Z, Amy Poehler, Sofia Vergara, Shaquille O’Neal and WWE. In addition, Google promised $ 200m more to trade them. Although many of the channels are now dormant, executions on YouTube have claimed that the initiative had the desired effect of developing the original dance content for the platform.
YouTube push to finance original programming and subsequent attraction asks a question: Does it give the traditional content produced in the studio better for creators and platforms?
The Netflix Based Model “generates higher returns for creators” compared to YouTube, claimed by Netflix Ted Sarando in the Q3 company profits interview in October 2024.
But in general, there is money to be made through the content created by users or professionally produced content-factor of success is large-scale, says Scott Purdy, leader of the US media industry in the ICMG. The benefit of YouTube’s UGC model, he says, is that the platform does not have to make money for content forward. On the contrary, it pays advertising revenue based on how popular videos are. “It’s a pattern without danger,” says Purdy.
In the picture above: Ralph Macchio in season 1 “Cobra Kai”