YouTube has revolutionised the video landscape, offering new talent access to a global audience and providing established producers with tools to cash in on IP and develop new properties. Jonathan Webdale introduces a special season of articles.
Four years ago Scottish singer Susan Boyle became an international superstar overnight when a video clip of her audition for Britain’s Got Talent swept the globe. Boyle’s performance of Les Misérables hit I Dreamed a Dream went viral, clocking up 40 million views on YouTube in the first four days, 100 million after just two weeks.
Back in 2009, the television industry had a very different relationship with YouTube and despite Boyle’s massive popularity, UK broadcaster ITV, along with coproducers Syco and FremantleMedia, simply weren’t set up to deal with such success.
The technical and commercial arrangements that would have allowed ads to run within the clip weren’t in place and so all parties lost out – all except for YouTube perhaps, which was big enough to stomach the short-term setback in return for long-term gain, finally proving its credentials as the world’s biggest water-cooler, just in case there was anyone left still doubting it.
Fast-forward to 2013 and the Susan Boyle clip has been seen 500 million times but her incredible story has been eclipsed by that of South Korean pop star Psy, whose Gangnam Style video now has over 1.5 billion views. It became the first to break the one billion YouTube barrier in December last year, and this January, Google senior VP and chief business officer Nikesh Arora said it had made the company US$8m in revenue in 2012.
Psy’s latest single is already breaking new records and YouTube said last month that the site now attracts more than one billion unique users every month – equivalent to nearly half of all internet users.
Partly as a result of these spectacular numbers but also because of a concerted push by YouTube to work more closely with the TV industry, relationships in this space are changing rapidly. Just last week, Viacom lost its latest attempt to sue the site for copyright infringement.
Simon Cowell recently went as far as to call YouTube “the biggest TV channel now in the world” and, on March 20, used it to launch his latest show. The You Generation is a talent format that will run for 12 months, featuring a different knockout stage every two weeks, with content available in 15 languages and spanning 26 countries. It’s a solo Syco effort, with no broadcaster or coproduction partner attached, although Cowell has enlisted One Direction – a band he’s nurtured via the UK version of The X Factor – to help him launch it, drawing on their huge social media following.
Cowell is just one among a string of traditional media big hitters that have been falling over themselves to embrace YouTube in recent months. Director Ridley Scott, whose Scott Free imprint previously produced YouTube crowd-sourced documentary Life in a Day, is now working with Machinima to develop original sci-fi franchises. Ricky Gervais has relaunched his channel recently with videos including new material featuring the comedian as David Brent, the character who shot him to fame in The Office.
Gervais has had a presence on YouTube since 2006 but the relaunch came about as a result of the site this time providing backing through the original channels initiative it debuted in the US in 2011 and rolled out to Europe last year.
The online video behemoth dipped into its pockets to seed-fund some 100 channels stateside and a further 60 in the UK, Germany and France from a selection of established YouTube talent and traditional media players either proficient in the space themselves or able to work with specialist third-party channel managers.
It’s not easy to get found among the 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, so an array of start-ups has emerged, helping aspiring stars and traditional media companies alike achieve this.
As a result of its original channels initiative, plus overall design and navigation tweaks, it has seen a 50% uplift in people using subscriptions as a means of finding and following the content they like.
While the world revels in the latest viral sensation, offices around the globe erupting in the Harlem Shake, this is the story YouTube wants to tell – that of its evolution beyond internet memes.
The next step in these developments is to flick a switch that allows all parties concerned to charge channel subscribers if they wish.
It’s a fascinating move – not only will be get to see what content owners think YouTube denizens might be prepared to pay for but it opens the door to all sorts of new content propositions that previously didn’t make economic sense on an ad revenue share basis.
Over the course of the coming weeks, C21’s YouTube season speaks to leading players shaping this new industry. First up, the inside line from Ben McOwen Wilson, YouTube head of content partnerships for Northern Europe. Click here to read the interview.
