ChannelFlip is producing YouTube’s first Comedy Week in the UK. Co-founder Wil Harris tells Jonathan Webdale how such initiatives are transforming the site.

YouTube celebrated its eighth birthday this week, trumpeting the fact that 100 hours of video are now uploaded to the site every minute, with more than one billion people logging in monthly.

The milestone coincided with the start of YouTube Comedy Week – the online video giant’s first foray into TV-like event programming, with a string of specially commissioned shows scheduled to run from May 20 to 25.

The company recruited everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger ^[1] to Sarah Silverman, Seth Rogan and Vince Vaughn to help it promote the event in the US, while in the UK, Ricky Gervais was among those enrolled.

The Office star has recently relaunched his YouTube channel with the site’s backing as part of the European roll-out of its original channels initiative.

Seven out of 10 of YouTube’s most popular channels are devoted to comedy, and so Gervais’s online revival of the character that shot him to fame seems like a no-brainer. Certainly, that’s how David Brent comes across in his new web series outing.

Learn Guitar With David Brent ^[2] is the latest in a string of online comedies to come from Gervais’s YouTube channel management partner ChannelFlip, which has collaborated with YouTube to produce the entire Comedy Week event in the UK (Sarah Silverman’s HaChaCha Productions has fulfilled this role stateside).

“Comedy Week has been a really interesting enterprise from YouTube; it’s their first really big consumer marketing push and by all accounts so far it’s been a fantastic success. We’ve had a lot of people watching,” says ChannelFlip co-founder and MD Wil Harris.

“It’s certainly something that everybody wants to be a part of and YouTube have done a very good job of making it into a real event. That kind of scheduled programming works brilliantly to give you more of what you love and also introduce you to stuff you didn’t know you liked.”

There was some pretty scathing criticism ^[4] of the live show that opened Comedy Week in the US, accusing YouTube of struggling to find a balance between traditional media talent and the comedians that have risen to stardom among the site’s core audience.

Not surprisingly, Harris counters this. “There are people who are popular on YouTube who are not popular on TV. There are people on TV who are not popular on YouTube. I think a lot of the people that have been assembled have managed to cross both.

“We know a lot of people that haven’t previously heard of Dan is Not on Fire ^[5], for example, watching him on the live stream in the states, whereas people who hadn’t previously seen David Mitchell’s Soapbox, having seen the special Comedy Week episodes, are now tuning in and going back through the entire library.”

ChannelFlip handles some 140 channels and David Mitchell’s Soapbox ^[6] is among its longest running. Set up by Harris and former QI producer Justin Gayner in 2008, the firm carved out a name for itself working with established talent like Mitchell (Peep Show), plus others such as Harry Hill and Richard Hammond.

The company was snapped up ^[7] in January last year by News Corp’s Shine Group and is among the UK’s leading ‘multi-channel content networks’ (MCNs) – specialists in helping established acts and rising stars to make the most out of YouTube, working with them to produce videos, set up and run the channels that host them and forge the advertiser relationships they rely on to make money.

ChannelFlip was among those that won pitches for the European leg of YouTube’s original channels initiative last year, launching HuHa ^[9] – an animated comedy network available in the UK, France and Germany – and The Multiverse ^[10], a scripted comedy and drama offering fronted by Warwick Davis, star of Gervais’s TV series Life’s Too Short.

“We’ve been known for a long time for doing comedy and so the ability to branch out into animation has been really exciting for us, particularly because it’s not a core competency of Shine Group. It gives an entirely new string to our bow,” says Harris.

Similarly, the firm has been able to involve traditional TV production companies within the Shine stable, such as Kudos Film & Television and Dragonfly, to help make shows for The Multiverse.

“There’s not a lot of high-quality scripted content being created for YouTube, so we thought it was a very interesting area to go into,” says Harris, adding that similar efforts across the industry have borne fruit.

“A year or 18 months ago, you’d be scrabbling round to find stuff that you wanted to watch on YouTube that wasn’t just Fenton ^[11] or Charlie Bit My Finger ^[12], whereas now the amount of recognisably TV-quality content could easily fill up anybody’s viewing schedule.”

Ricky Gervais has been the fastest growing hit for ChannelFlip to date. Though the comedian has had a presence on YouTube since 2006, the relaunch of his channel ^[13] in March came about with the site’s financial support as part of its originals initiative.

“It’s a milestone in terms of the talent that’s approaching YouTube,” says Harris. “We launched it alongside Comic Relief with the return of David Brent in Equality Street, and we’ve just had the launch of Learning Guitar with David Brent. There’s a lot more of that to come.

“In terms of the European-funded channel launches, it’s one of the fastest, if not the fastest growing in terms of subscribers. We’ve added 120,000 in the last six weeks, which is really staggering and just proves there is a massive appetite out there for that type of content from established personalities.”

The term ‘subscribers’ has taken on a different meaning for YouTube now with the addition of paid-for channels ^[14] in the US. Harris is keeping his cards close to his chest as to whether this is a model ChannelFlip might encourage its partners to adopt should the system be rolled out in Europe.

“YouTube is very much treating it as a soft launch and they’ve gone with a lot of very traditional partners in that sense – companies with big archives of stuff – and I think, in typical Google fashion, they’ll see how that performs before moving any further,” he says.

To sign up for any of these channels, YouTube users must first have a Google Wallet account. “That’s good for Google but not ideal for content producers because you’re not really getting access to that customer data,” says Harris, adding that a further challenge is the virtual payment mechanism’s relatively low popularity outside the US.

On the whole, however, he’s upbeat about the original channels push – as one might expect from a company whose business increasingly relies on it.

“What YouTube has successfully done is bring in the FremantleMedias, the Hat Tricks, the All3Medias of the world to actually start producing content for YouTube,” he says. “At the end of the day, we want to build bigger and better audiences for bigger and better content. The big competition all YouTube companies face is how to break down the TV doors and how to break the stranglehold that TV has on advertising dollars.”