YouTube stars are garnering huge followings and tidy sums of money from lifestyle footage shot by themselves in their bedrooms. But is this a source of talent for linear TV or a threat to its existence? Clive Whittingham reports.

Michael Cascio best summed up the unease in the unscripted television market when he compared the situation to that faced by now-bankrupt Tower Records a decade ago.

The experienced CEO and president of M&C Media said: “We need an innovator to disrupt the marketplace. Tower Records didn’t understand why CDs weren’t selling, so they moved the rock to the back of the store and hip-hop to the front. Meanwhile, two kids in California were creating Napster.

“Are we missing something outside our sphere that is going to eat us, or change the way we watch and the way we produce?”

That disruptor may well be already here in the form of young independent talent making its own content on YouTube. Web monitor Social Blade says YouTube channel DisneyCollectorBR, which does little more than unwrap Disney toys and talk about them, earns between US$1.2m and US$19.6m a year. In the UK, Zoe Sugg – aka Zoella – has 7.5 million subscribers to her fashion channel on the same platform.

Lisa Gabriele, director of development at Canadian factual producer Proper Television, says she is constantly scouring Twitter and Instagram for talent that can cut through on linear. “I find the gold of Twitter and Instagram stars are the ones who don’t know they’re stars and don’t have a complete grasp of the technology,” she says. “They’ve just accidentally found new ways to tell stories, so we come in and give them the means to expand on that.”

Proper is currently pitching projects featuring Roseanne Barr’s daughter, after discovering her Twitter and Instagram account charting her life on a farm in Hawaii.

But given the sums of money being earned online, why would digital stars want to move to traditional TV where they potentially lose the direct contact with their audience, and acquire a whole load of directors, producers, exec producers and editors who want to have a say on the content?

Sam Barcroft, founder and CEO of UK online specialist prodco Barcroft Media, says YouTube talents often turn down linear TV opportunities. “It’s possible for talent to emerge online because there’s no barrier to entry,” he says. “There are lots of people who have gone online and created their own audiences. Previously, you needed to get yourself a gig on QVC before you could graduate to other forms of television.

“But a lot of the YouTubers would prefer to stay there as they have complete control of everything. If they’re earning decent money why would they jeopardise that by getting involved in a world that’s out of their control?”

Barcroft believes there is potential to move content from YouTube to linear TV, but not the talent-led stuff. Barcroft Media has just shy of a million subscribers to its YouTube channel and has self-funded a 6×30’ show titled Original Docs, telling extraordinary stories, which he hopes will subsequently make the jump.

The idea that web talent isn’t interested in moving to linear is echoed by vegan chef Yovana Mendoza, known to her 182,000 subscribers as Rawvana.

“I interact with my audience a lot,” Mendoza says. “I answer comments and emails. It helps me to know what they like and don’t like, what their questions are and that way I can produce the videos they ask for.

“This is now my day job – I have an app and I want to do e-books in the future. Linear TV is not the dream. It depends if I would have the freedom to produce what I like to produce. I like the close contact with the audience. I like to show them the real me, not just something that’s produced.”

And if the Rawvanas and Zoellas of this world do want to move to linear TV, are their skills necessarily transferrable?

Peter Cowley, CEO of the UK’s Spirit Digital, which works with some of the country’s biggest YouTube stars, such as FleurDeForce (1.2 million subscribers) through relationships with StyleHaul and others, has his doubts about YouTubers moving to TV en masse. “It’s to do with the different formats, rather than the length of the content,” he says.

“YouTubers look at you down the lens from their bedroom and they’re talking to you on your screen. That doesn’t work on TV, apart from news reading. Their skill is talking one-on-one to their audience rather than a factual entertainment programme about fashion or gaming.

“Food, comedy, particularly pranks – the format can work but the ones who look down the lens at you don’t work on TV and they have to be retrained. It’s a different skill and the crossover is tiny.”

The same applies to TV stars looking to build their presence on YouTube. Cowley was involved with the launch of Jamie Oliver’s Food Tube channel (1.3 million subscribers) – a rare success story.

“It’s about what those people bring to the two platforms,” he says. “Some YouTubers can bring an audience, so it’s partly marketing for a TV programme. TV talent brings an audience the other way because they’re known and a celebrity. But you have to find the correct format to put them in.”

Will Keenan, president of digital studio Endemol Beyond USA and a former exec at Maker Studios, says linear and YouTube will come together, rather than one destroying the other. “We have broadcasters becoming producers online, we have producers like Endemol Shine becoming broadcasters online. It’s a really exciting time and what took YouTube almost six years to create, it took Vine six months and has now taken SnapChat six weeks,” he says.

Endemol Beyond aims to attract talent by taking the production, editing, filming and equipment costs away from the talent, but leaving the creative control with them. Each deal the company has struck with the likes of Michelle Phan or Pitbull, who signed a development deal with the promise of a YouTube channel in January last year, has been tailored to them.

From there, the prodco operates channels on YouTube, Vine and SnapChat, and can offer a route into linear television through the prodcos in the Endemol Shine Group. It’s this model that Keenan believes is best placed to capitalise on a fast-converging marketplace.

“What we can provide is a team so they can concentrate on being creative,” he says. “Our team does a lot of what they used to do on their own so the turnaround is a lot faster and we can up the production values. If traditional TV is where they want to go we’re smoothing that process. Endemol Shine Beyond has become the quickest path to traditional TV for digital stars. I want us on every online video platform known to man, even one that starts tomorrow.

“Sometimes it does depend on their age. A lot of them, even millennials, still grew up on TV and have become digital first and natives. YouTube stars want to be big on Vine, some want to be big in TV, and the TV and movie stars want to be big online. It’s all happening at the same time.

“It’s all going to co-exist, at least for a little while. A few years ago at Maker I used to be able to predict a few things that came true but everything is moving so fast I stopped predicting. In six months there might be another platform.”

So perhaps the weight of well-viewed content on YouTube isn’t a threat to linear after all. According to Cowley, the formats are too different, and according to Keenan the whole thing will converge rather than pose a threat to one another.

But there’s no denying the younger audience that isn’t watching TV as much is consuming YouTube content voraciously. Surely that’s a problem for an unscripted industry struggling for innovative ideas?

Gabriele at Proper Television, so enthusiastic about the potential of Twitter and Instagram, sees the problem, but is sceptical that YouTube stars are coming to eat linear TV.

“I ask my nieces and nephews what TV they’re watching at the moment and they say they don’t watch it any more,” she says. “They download and watch it when they want to. But they’re still committed to traditional storytelling. That hasn’t been replaced by the zip-de-doo of something cool that went viral.

“The depth of storytelling in reality, drama and comedy is still something that draws people in droves. Until you can transplant that quality into these viral moments, we’re still going to have traditional production companies and broadcasters for a while.”

So everybody breathe.