YouTube Originals and the content value spectrum
What you can learn from a beauty creator’s recent partnership with the video-sharing platform.
Last Friday, beauty YouTuber James Charles announced that he has developed his own reality TV competition show, scheduled to debut this spring.
Produced by Brian Graden Media and distributed by YouTube Originals (a network of series, movies, and events backed by the Google-owned platform), the show, tentatively titled James Charles Instant Influencer, follows a familiar template: Six contestants will be selected to compete in a set of weekly challenges designed to test their skills in makeup, branding and marketing. Celebrity judges will appear and the winner takes home $50,000. Charles, who’s 20 and based in Los Angeles, will executive produce, host and act as a judge on the show. The first season of Instant Influencer has been picked up for four episodes.
In a video to his more than 16 million subscribers, Charles shared the inspiration for the show. “Three years ago when I first moved to LA, I remember spending one morning in my downtown apartment and creating a full Notes app document on my phone and planning out a full concept for a makeup competition show,” he said. “When we started talking about making the show a reality, the most important part to me by far was that it was authentic and that it was by creators for creators and it showed an accurate depiction of the beauty community and what it actually takes to be an influencer.”
At press time, the announcement’s amassed over one million views.
I’m not active on YouTube or the beauty influencer space, so I have little skin in the game when it comes to Charles or his show. Most of his exposure to me came earlier this year after he was supposedly canceled by the internet after a salacious feud with former friend and fellow beauty YouTuber Tati Westbrook. I’m aware of his racist tweets, perceived transphobia and inconsistent origin story. But I’m also aware that whiteness and manhood enable a type of privilege that affords him second chances and benefits of the doubt that women and people of color usually never get to begin with, despite his gay identity.
The news of Charles’ upcoming show wasn’t as interesting to me as its free cost, which is worth noting because, until recently, YouTube Originals were only available to those with YouTube Premium accounts.
The same experience for a younger audience
Developed in 2016, YouTube Originals was the platform’s attempt to compete with Netflix, Hulu and other streaming services.
That same year, Netflix announced its target of 50 percent of all its content to be original programming, with the other half encompassing the licensed TV shows and movies that have subsequently relocated to newer services (more about that in this Daily Reader). Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s content chief, expected to increase its output of original programming from 450 hours to 600 hours, with an additional $1 billion allocated to content spending.
Original programming and on-demand video were the main attractions to those streaming services; YouTube wanted to offer the same experience for a younger audience, while ambitiously competing with on-demand music providers like Spotify and Apple Music.
Experts were skeptical YouTube’s bet would pay off. “YouTube is faced with competitors like never before,” Peter Csathy, CEO of Manatt Digital Media, said at the time. “But we’ve always thought of YouTube as free. How many of the hardcore audience will be willing to pay subscription pricing? That’s going to be challenging, given YouTube’s demographics.”
Undeterred, YouTube forged ahead with a hands-on approach to enabling creators (and production companies) to make higher-quality videos while also rehabbing its reputation from the place for homemade clips to a destination where viewers could get top-notch content — and creators could get paid top-notch dollars.
“We have a unique path that’s different from others,” Susanne Daniels, YouTube’s global head of original content, said in 2016. “We’re taking advantage of the enormous amount of talent on our platform and giving them the ability to do things they haven’t done before.” YouTube’s X factor, according to Daniels, was that its creators had existing relationships with its audiences. Potential subscribers weren’t being asked to subscribe to YouTube, per se; they were being invited to get more (and better) content from people they already adored.
Another advantage YouTube had was its creator centricity. Vimeo doesn’t share revenue with creators. Wistia is better suited for marketers. Vid.me, Vessel or Daily Motion are either extinct, forgettable or both. The fans were already there, which meant YouTube didn’t have to get people to pay attention to the content, they just needed to get people to pay for the content. I can see why the powers that be were so high on YouTube Originals.
Another goal for Originals: Keep creators from jumping to more traditional studios or challenger platforms in the digital space. YouTube now had a way to give its creators the opportunity to make and market the shows and films that mattered to them on its platform. YouTube played a role in anointing a new generation of creators — something Netflix, Hulu or other streaming services couldn’t say — it would have been inexcusable to let them get away without at least offering a viable alternative. “The diverse, dynamic creators have already built massive audiences on YouTube, rivaling many cable shows,” YouTube said in a statement a week before the launch of Originals. “We want to help them tell bigger and bolder stories that delight you, their fans.”
Research showed teens spent the least money on entertainment like the music, movies and events featured in a YouTube subscription. Food, clothing, cars, accessories and cosmetics, shoes, video games and electronics were higher spending priorities for this cohort. For Originals to work, YouTube needed its young viewers — mostly teens — to buck those trends and instead pay $10 to see their online stars. Nearly four years later, it’s clear that those young viewers didn’t think it was worth it.
“There isn’t a clear direction in strategy”
News of YouTube Original’s pivot from a premium subscription offering to an ad-supported product first surfaced in late 2018.
“If you look at our originals over the last few years, our main goal was to drive subscribers to YouTube Premium,” Robert Kynci, YouTube’s chief business officer, said. “But through experimentation, we’ve also learned that we can make a lot of the projects work incredibly well when we make them available free to users.”
Digiday reported that YouTube Originals “suffered from a lack of consistency in programming and a disconnect between the programming and the product.” In the same report, Adam Wescott, partner and executive producer at Select Management Group, said, “From an original programming perspective, there isn’t a clear direction in strategy.”
Also troubling for YouTube Originals was its lack of discovery. “[Content doesn’t] get the prominence on the platform or a boost from the algorithm — despite that YouTube content thrives off of search and discovery,” Digiday reported. This was an issue first flagged in 2016, just weeks after the launch of YouTube Originals.
“If you head to YouTube without signing in right now, there’s nothing on the homepage about YouTube Originals,” Android Central reported. “The only indication that YouTube [Originals] exists at all on the homepage is an icon in the bottom left corner, with no real explanation until you click.” This critique wasn’t exclusive to YouTube: “Netflix had a similar problem in the early days of their original programming, and it wasn't until House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black that Netflix really seemed to figure out that promoting these exclusives on the homepage was just as big a deal as the content creators self-promoting.
We also didn’t know at the time if this was an intentional attempt to maintain YouTube’s stature as a place to consume whatever videos you want, not just those that were subscription-only. “The sudden appearance of a paywall for content being advertised on the homepage could be immediately off-putting to the younger audience who basically view YouTube as a place for unlimited free videos,” Android Central said.
In an interview with AdWeek published in August that seemed to acknowledge this reality, Kynci said, “One of the changes that we’ve gone through is to align our Originals with the way YouTube works, which is that everything is available free, and everything is available behind a paywall if there are certain features that you value in order to pay for a subscription. With Originals, we’ve gone from being focused on driving subscriptions to aligning with the core business.”
The content value spectrum
YouTube Original’s refocusing was necessary because its content is most valuable to advertisers, not viewers. James Charles’s show is free because the internet gives even his loyalist supporters a seemingly infinite stream of beauty content to consume whenever they want it. Advertisers, on the other hand, don’t have direct access to the attention of Charles’s 16 million subscribers. They’re willing to pay for it. Viewers aren’t willing to pay to skip ads for content that are nice to have, but not necessary to a meaningful experience on the social internet — especially when most creators like Charles offer merchandise, live events and other ways to experience connection.
Not all content is valued equally. It exists on a spectrum that determines who pays for it and how much they’re willing to pay. This value is determined by the creators’ priorities. If convenience and scale are non-negotiables that enjoys how easy it is to broadcast your creative work to a global market of dream customers and super fans on a platform like YouTube, then advertising is really the only way to monetize big content.
But if you value freedom and niche, then subscriptions are a viable business model because you can profit from a small community in a way you can’t with a big audience. This is the route I’ve taken because when you over-index on convenience and scale, then you sacrifice control of your content, the social approval it generates and a direct connection to your readers, listeners, and viewers unless you’re a creator with a platform like Charles’s.
In a world where you can effortlessly rent, share or subscribe to fashion, media, education, transportation, groceries, software, subscriptions are ubiquitous in our new economy. Before I launched this newsletter, I spent test-drove all manner of subscription products, thinking that the model itself was what people valued, not the content that the model enabled.
However, as I wrote in last Thursday’s Daily Reader:
Subscriptions work because the value of getting an instant solution to a critical problem is worth the cost of a monthly or annual fee. People who value their time are willing to pay a few extra bucks for commercial-free viewing on their preferred streaming service. People who value independent journalism that empowers them to make informed personal and professional decisions are willing to pay the New York Times or this newsletter for premium content that does just that.
The YouTube Originals experiment teaches those of us who make and sell creative work for a living (or have ambitions to do so) that after you decide what you’ll produce, your next decision is to figure out who values the content or experience you’ll deliver the most: consumers or advertisers? If it’s the former, then you can feel confident in adopting a subscription model focused on an exclusive experience that can’t be replicated anywhere else. If it’s the latter, then you’ll need access to a sizable audience that businesses want to market to.