The rise of multichannel networks on YouTube

As we've known for a few years now, YouTube is turning into seriously big business, even for the little guys. The ability to have your own Channel, and make money from it, was the start. Now we have the rise of multichannel networks (MCNs). Bloomberg Business Week has a great article on the subject - here.

Are YouTubers Revolutionizing Entertainment?

Another interesting video from PBS Off Book:

Over the past 8 years, YouTube has given birth to an increasingly sophisticated entertainment culture that operates outside of the traditional television and film ecosystem. With humble roots in charismatic and creative people simply sharing their lives, thoughts, and humor to their webcams, YouTube entertainment has diversified and grown into tens of thousands of unique channels with millions of loyal fans and subscribers. With a new generation of viewers increasingly turning to YouTube instead of broadcast TV, a new industry is being built around personalities who have dissolved the barriers between on-screen talent and the audience, and who employ visual aesthetics that make the viewer feel as if they are a part of the creator's life. Truly, we are in a new era of entertainment, one being led by millions of young people who are equally happy to watch video on their laptop as they are on their TV.

Channels Featured in this video include:

1) Hannah Hart
2) PewDiePie
3) Elle Fowler
4) Sam Merrick
5) Sam Pepper
6) Wheezy Waiter
7) Charlie McDonnell
8) Magic of Rahat
9) AmazingPhil
10) Daily Grace
11) Dave Days
12) Community Channel
13) RealityChangers
14) Kevin's Channel
15) Ray William Johnson
16) Smosh
17) VlogBrothers
18) Joe Sugg
19) Ben Breedlove
20) Idea Channel
21) MyMusic: The Experience
22) Jenna Marbles
23) HotForWords
24) Cracked
25) VlogCandy
26) Vsauce
27) Vsauce2
28) Vsauce
29) CTFxC
30) DanIsNotOnFire
31) PointlessBlog
32) MeekaKitty
33) Ryan Higga
34) MemeMolly
35) Mitchell Davis
36) Shut Up! Cartoons
37) The Lizzie Bennet Diaries
38) Choose A Different Ending
39) Shane Dawson TV
40) The Philip DeFranco Show
41) Kassem G
42) The NoHo Girls
43) Luisito Rey
44) Rosanna Pansino
45) Swoozie
46) DSPGaming
47) KittiesMama Family Channel

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Lessons learned from YouTube's big push

In October 2011, YouTube announced plans to roll out 100 new "Original Channels," with content to be created by selected people/organizations, and funded by YouTube.

Two of the people who received funding were John Green and Hank Green. They set up channels called CrashCourse and SciShow. On March 25, 2013, Hank Green wrote a piece about the experience on his blog Hank's Tumblr, and gave his views on what did, and did not, work.

Extrapolating from Hank's report, some of the lessons learned from the experience are as follows:

Of the 114 channels that YouTube funded as part of this initiative, my educated guess is that exactly one earned back its advance… SourceFed, the four-times-daily news show from Phil DeFranco’s studio. (SourceFed is gritty, low-budget, written by its hosts, and edited by a tiny team.)

Most of the channels that did well had comparatively small budgets and were run by people who had made online video before.

SciShow and CrashCourse are not doing terribly. At this rate, we’ll earn out our advance in about three years.

Spending more money to produce the same number of minutes of content does not increase viewership.

Online video isn’t about how good it looks, it’s about how good it is.

People who make online video are much better at making online video than people who make TV shows. This probably seems obvious to you (it certainly is to me) but it apparently was not obvious to the people originally distributing this money.

When advertising agencies tell you they want something (higher quality content, long-form content, specific demographics, lean-back content, stuff that looks like TV), it’s not our job to attempt to deliver those things. In a world where the user really does get to choose, the content created to satisfy the needs and wants of viewers (not advertisers) will always reign supreme.

YouTube is now experimenting with much smaller grants (a tenth to a fifth of the size of the original grants) awarded largely to people who have experience making online video (the new MentalFloss channel is funded by one of these grants.)

You can read the original post here.

Your Film Festival

How would you like $500,000 to spend on your next short film?  And have Ridley Scott and his team to help you with any tricky bits?

That's on offer from YouTube. First you have to submit a short video (including live action shorts, animation shorts, documentaries, web-series episodes, or TV pilots, up to fifteen minutes long) to Your Film Festival. Submissions open on February 2, 2012, and close on March 31, 2012. 

In June 2012, members of Scott’s TV/film production company Scott Free Productions will select fifty videos for the rest of us to vote on. Those fifty films will become a Channel, part of YouTube's reach into the world of filmmaking. The idea is to establish YouTube as the foot-in-the-door into Hollywood.

The top 10 will screen at the Venice Film Festival, while the winner gets a $500,000 production grant to work with the Scott Free team on a new project.  How many talented, but unknown, filmmakers will create original story-driven content for YouTube, in exchange for a crack at a large audience and a job working with Scott’s production company? My guess is lots.

Ridley Scott said of the new venture:

Short filmmaking is exactly where I started my career 50 years ago, so to be helping new filmmakers find an entry point like this into the industry is fantastic.

Here's a couple of videos from YouTube. The first one tells you all the same stuff, but with pictures and music. The second features some interesting filmmakers, adding their comments.

    abc News    The Guardian    New York Times    Speakeasy    Time    YouTube   

The Seven Year Itch

In 1955, Marilyn Monroe blew up audience skirts in The Seven Year Itch. Fifty years later, in 2005, YouTube was founded and not much happened. At first. The pioneer video uploaded to the new service (on 23 April 2005) runs for 18 seconds. It features one of YouTube's founders, Jawed Karim, at the San Diego Zoo.  Watch this for an adrenaline burst of exhilaration (just kidding).

He finishes with the line, "And that's pretty much all there is to say." Maybe not.

Seven years later, YouTube is getting ready to blow up a few Hollywood skirts. There's an interesting article on what's afoot in the current issue of The New Yorker by John Seabrook, "Streaming Dreams." And another interesting write-up in PaidContent-dot-Org by Will Richmond, "What The Burst of Hollywood A-Listers Will Mean For Online Video."

The thrust of The New Yorker piece is that YouTube is gunning for the Netflix-style online-distribution-of-content business. Instead of trying to buy out the existing players, they will undercut them by building a subsidised range of online “YouTube Original Channels” for creative people to use in constructing entertainment-on-demand services. Some of the people who have leapt aboard this moving train include: Jay-Z, Madonna, Amy Poehler, Shaquille O’Neal, Tony Hawk, Brian Bedol, and Ken Lerer. Also The Onion, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, Hearst, Meredith and Disney have agreed to partner with the company.

The bottom line? High quality online entertainment is going to kill cable television, leaving the big boys nowhere to go, but online.

The Will Richmond article takes a wider view. It's not just YouTube, but Yahoo, AOL, Netflix and Hulu also leading the charge. "They are each doing their part to create an ecosystem of third-party production houses gaining expertise in digital, and therefore poised to help subsequent stars succeed in the online medium." 

These companies are poised to invest in original online video projects by people such as Tom Hanks, Louis C.K., Lisa Kudrow, Kevin Spacey, David Fincher, Bill Maher, Jennifer Lopez, Judy Greer, Steven Van Zandt, Morgan Spurlock, Ed Begley, Jr., and Heidi Klum. 

The result of this will be to help "upend the Hollywood ecosystem, legitimize the online medium and further fragment audiences." According to Richmond, "Hollywood is entering a brave new world, driven by audience changes, technology advancements and the shifting interests of its own biggest stars. How it adapts to all of this is yet to be determined."

Stay tuned...