YouTube Is Swallowing TV Whole, and It’s Coming for the Sitcom
Creators are making longer shows to meet viewers where they are: increasingly, in front of their TVs.
Alan Chikin Chow on the set of his YouTube show Alan’s Universe in Burbank, California.
Photographer: Ryan Young for Bloomberg BusinessweekFor two decades, YouTube has tried to convince advertisers that it’s the future of entertainment. The pitch has always been simple enough: “Young people don’t watch cable; they watch YouTube.” It doesn’t exactly require a PowerPoint presentation.
But YouTube has had problems making its case. The first is that the vast majority of videos on the site aren’t filmed to Scorsese-like standards. “The biggest knock against creator content is that it’s low quality, s---, crap, slop, garbage,” Doug Shapiro, a former executive at Time Warner, wrote in December. That’s sort of inconsequential, he argued, since most people aren’t watching random YouTube slop—they’re watching the most popular slop. Which leads to YouTube’s second issue: The most watched channels haven’t always been hospitable to advertisers.