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THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

Smart thinking from the people running the content business.

Making YouTube work for you

YouTube’s head of TV partnerships Fede Goldenberg and UK strategic partner manager Neil Price reveal what producers, distributors and broadcasters need to know if they really want to succeed on the ever-growing platform.

Fede Goldenberg

What’s your YouTube strategy? It’s the question everyone leading a TV company – from the smallest producer to the biggest broadcaster – is asking themselves as it cements its position as the platform where the future of television will most likely play out.

LA-based Fede Goldenberg, head of TV and film ad-supported VoD partnerships at YouTube, is the exec at the Google-owned platform tasked with shepherding the traditional TV industry through this transition.

It’s a business Brazilian-born Goldenberg is familiar with, despite having spent the past 13 years at YouTube, initially in São Paulo before moving to California a decade ago. Before that, he worked at Fremantle, Terra Networks and Brazilian broadcasting giant Globo.

At the latter, Goldenberg spent a year as head of content distribution – precisely the kind of role currently disrupted by the runaway popularity of YouTube as the lines between “TV quality and digital creator quality” continue to blur, according to the exec.

“We see lots of creators in the US spending a lot of money on their episodes and it’s almost indistinguishable at a certain point,” Goldenberg says, while discussing the wave of unscripted formats inspired by traditional TV hits such as Survivor.

This chimes with the announcements that came out of YouTube’s recent #MadeOnYouTube event, where it unveiled a suite of products and features that highlight its keenness to be the first thing people see when they switch on their TV.

New products include artificial intelligence-powered automatic dubbing, which Goldenberg believes will help distributors “export” their content internationally at a fraction of the cost it would have been previously.

Rather than upload several versions of the same video to YouTube in different languages, content made in one language, such as English, can now automatically be heard in other languages, like Turkish or Spanish.

During our conversation, Goldenberg mentioned “funnelling awareness” in relation to doing away with exclusivity, where a show’s presence on one platform, which could be ad-supported, drives viewers to other platforms, which could be subscription.

MrBeast remains the most popular attraction on YouTube

Meanwhile, as more and more of us watch YouTube on our smart TVs, channel owners can now organise their content into seasons and episodes, as it would be presented on a SVoD service like Netflix. Michelle Khare’s Challenge Accepted was used at the event as an example of a YouTube show that could seamlessly transfer to ‘TV.’

This comes after YouTube became the first streaming platform ever to exceed 10% of total TV usage, according to US figures reported by Nielsen in July.

Having previously been viewed by the traditional TV industry simply as a promotional tool, YouTube is now being used by media companies in a variety of ways to engage effectively with audiences online, Goldenberg points out.

YouTube is still generally thought of as a marketing platform, as shown by Disney recently partnering with internet phenomenon Hot Ones to celebrate 90 years of Donald Duck with a special episode of the YouTube celebrity chatshow. However, the Mouse House is also making full episodes of library content available for free online, including National Geographic programming, while taking advantage of the addictiveness of YouTube Shorts.

“Nat Geo is a very prestigious documentary channel. But the way they use YouTube is very similar to how you see creators using YouTube: they upload shorts to reach broader audiences and upload full-length episodes, old and new,” says Goldenberg.

YouTube may have once had a reputation for shortform content, but that was many moons ago. People are now accustomed to watching longer and longer videos, with the algorithm looking favourably upon channel owners uploading longer videos – which mean more ads, after all.

“Nat Geo takes it a step further with mega compilation episodes, so a four-hour-and-40-minute compilation of The Story of Us with Morgan Freeman. They call it a ‘mega episode,'” says Goldenberg.

Meanwhile, YouTube has been billed as the new home of “independent TV,” creating and sustaining an entire ecosystem of video content separate to what is being created by US studios, whose power continues to wane.

Moreover, according to Rolling Stone, industry experts are seeing unedited content outperform well-edited videos all over Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. This doesn’t necessarily bode well for the millions of hours of repackaged, heavily edited TV content currently being eyed for monetisation online, but it does highlight how YouTube could impact the kind of content we see on TV, as the new form influences the old and vice versa.

But rather than the word ‘unedited,’ Goldenberg prefers to use a different term to describe the kind of videos that lend themselves to making money on YouTube. “It’s about authenticity and people enjoying watching content where the people on the screen are their authentic selves, whether it’s an artist, a creator or a TV host. What drives audiences on YouTube and how you develop fan bases is with authenticity,” the exec says.

Another example Goldenberg uses to illustrate how traditional media companies can grow their audience on YouTube is the Brazilian version of business reality series Shark Tank, after Sony Channel published a special ‘creators’ version of the show on YouTube featuring a panel of influencers. “I love that example because it shows the power of creators and TV talent combined. YouTube and TV work well and work better together,” he says.

Goldenberg encourages TV companies to take advantage of the different formats YouTube offers, from uploading clips of shows on Shorts for mobile to following Nat Geo’s lead and creating super-longform compilations for people to watch on TV, alongside experimenting with 24/7 live streams and video podcasts.

“Participate in the ecosystem, follow the best practices and understand the data and the trends for your audience. Once you’re doing that and you’re getting the views and the audience, the money flows. That is true for artists and music companies as much as it is for creators and media companies,” he advises.

Hot Ones host Sean Evans

YouTube claims to have returned US$70bn to creators, artists and partners in the past three years via its revenue-share model. One of the biggest beneficiaries of this has been Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, who knows more about how to succeed on YouTube than anyone.

Donaldson is well aware of how important the right thumbnail and video title is to a video’s success, having written in the alleged internal onboarding document for his production company, which leaked online in September, that the more “extreme” a title “the better.”

It’s revelations like these that mean public service broadcasters continue to wrestle with the extent to which they should engage with the platform.

In September, Goldenberg met with more than 30 executives from various European pubcasters eager to find out how they could improve their YouTube reach, as part of the UCLA Anderson School of Management and European Broadcasting Union’s executive programme.

“Public service broadcasters have a lot of other priorities, but they can’t ignore where the audience is consuming their content and similar content to theirs,” says Goldenberg.

For Goldenberg, YouTube can be additive to the other ways IP owners distribute their content in a digital world, with the platform providing “an additional window of opportunity” for them to reach and engage with fans. The exec also emphasises “the beauty” of a service like YouTube, given it covers “the full gamut of human expression in video form.”

Having previously been constricted by borders, pubcasters around the world can now lean into the two billion users who come to YouTube every month and use “the power of the algorithm” to put their content in front of new potential viewers.

“If someone likes DIY, then they may also enjoy another DIY clip, and it might be a clip from the BBC. There’s a lot of power in the three-dimensional ecosystem that YouTube has, where audiences move from certain content to other content they might like.”

Indeed, along with Twitch, YouTube is one of the most powerful video platforms the world has ever seen, in terms of its ability to foster a direct connection between viewer and creator.

Goldenberg describes the potential of a successful YouTube presence as being like a “flywheel” for a brand. Gradually, broadcasters are taking note.

Channel 4 in the UK, for example, is diving headfirst into digital with its Channel 4.0 brand on YouTube, where it is launching formats and breaking new talent – with promising results. Goldenberg is eager to see what embracing the platform could do for more broadcasters.

“Television networks have traditionally thought about their programming schedule as a linear thing, where programme A goes to programme B. But on YouTube it’s much more three-dimensional, and for me, that is what’s exciting and fascinating.”

 

Neil Price

Neil Price, strategic partner manager, UK partnerships at YouTube, spoke to Nico Franks about traditional TV and YouTube’s evolving relationship.  

Tell me about your role and how you feel the worlds of traditional media and YouTube are working together at the moment.
I lead partnerships with our film and TV partners, so I speak to all the broadcasters and the large production entities in the UK.

As YouTube has grown and evolved over time, we went from probably a place that many organisations thought of as a place for some promotion and marketing. That’s absolutely still true and still happens. We’re still a great place to put up trailers and for behind-the-scenes, interview content when you want to go deeper.

But increasingly we’re seeing partners view us as somewhere to monetise and reach audiences that are incremental and additive to what they’re reaching elsewhere. A pivot from promotion to distribution is absolutely happening with both broadcasters and production companies.

Frankly, the production companies here in the UK sit with a pretty favourable rights position. They have a lot that they get to exploit in terms of their back catalogue. So they’ve often been looking at YouTube for many years as a source of reaching those audiences, helping break formats to places around the world by publishing them to YouTube. We see all of that continuing to happen.

Is it as simple as uploading old episodes or is there more that they need to be doing?
We try to make the tool and the platform as easy to use as possible. The value we try to add is trying to help them navigate how to best position content on a platform like YouTube, because it will be different than their owned and operated or on demand catch up.

There’s a plethora of great content, so how do you position that? And a lot of that is also looking at top creators and how they position their thumbnails. Where you would normally in an EPG have the title and maybe date, that doesn’t work as well on something like YouTube. You need to be thinking about how to make this piece of content both enticing while also setting up what it’s going to deliver. 

When so many people are watching TV over the internet, are there any inherent differences between a format created for YouTube and a format created for TV?
A creator who starts with YouTube first is somewhat freed of some of the conventions and constraints that would come with more traditional broadcast. How much time you need before an ad break, how much you need to remind people of something after you come back from an ad break. Maybe those are less prominent on non-ad-supported broadcasters.

On a platform like YouTube, if you’re creating an original piece of content, you have a bit more of that freedom over runtimes and you can see some of the streamers experiment with that over the years. I wonder, as a lot of the more traditional players start to think about working on places like YouTube, how much of that starts to change?

You’ll probably be very familiar with Channel 4.0, which is Channel 4’s big bet to go youth-skewing. That’s a great example of them saying ‘We want to be where the audience is with content that already resonates with the audience, featuring creators that already resonate with them.’ Episodes don’t run for 27 minutes with three clear ad breaks. They’re allowed to have a bit more creative freedom in their approach to tell those stories.

Are the days of territory-by-territory sales for youth-skewing formats now behind us?
Being able to point to how well a format works on YouTube, with data showing how many and who it is reaching in a market, goes a long way to helping [sell a format]. But it’s very possible that as production companies start to think about their future position, YouTube becomes a primary source of distribution. You could foresee that producers will start to think about being more intelligent about their rights position to make the most of YouTube given its growth in the living room.

Is there a danger that YouTube’s revenue share model means content made for non-commercial purposes, like public service content for children, fades away? 
I talk to quite a number of people at the BBC, which is a good example of an organisation that isn’t attempting to commercialise a lot of their content, at least within the UK.

Our goal is to be there for them as a partner, to help them navigate and drive the things that do matter for them. We’re in frequent conversation with the BBC about how what it does on YouTube can help it underscore the value of the licence fee back to licence fee payers.

In terms of the viability of their content in the future, it is probably more a question for the BBC of how they square that with their challenges.

As we grow, we’re also diversifying in terms of our content offering. You’ve got every major UK news organisation active on the platform and producing and publishing content. We’re doing more and more in the world of health creators in that space.

The platform recognises that it also wants to be a place for good information for people that are coming to look for it. And a lot of times that’s going to be partnering with people like our public service broadcasters. So that’s the big win for us too, to continue to work closely with them across all of the content that they are publishing and creating.

How is the distribution of scripted content on YouTube evolving?
We see a lot of success with comedy. It lends itself really well to a YouTube model of clips, compilations and best-of moments that you want to revisit over and over again. Dramas tend to be more serialised, so you need to know context. We know that people go to YouTube for comedy and for unscripted. But I wouldn’t be surprised if companies continue to experiment with a variety of content within their archives to reach audiences.


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