YouTube to Hollywood: We are going to eat you

A YouTube executive needed only 27 minutes to make the case that the company is taking over all aspects of how people create and consume video online.

That was the length of a recent talk by Fede Goldenberg, YouTube’s head of TV and film partnerships, at the StreamTV conference in Denver last month. Goldenberg’s presentation had an upbeat title, “YouTube is the new TV.” But the talk carried an unmistakable undertone: Resistance is futile.

I happened to be at that conference to moderate a couple of panels, and I attended a bunch of other discussions and presentations while there, but Goldenberg’s talk is the one I’m still thinking about. While most of the conference was about streamers talking shop with one another, YouTube was there to argue that it would eventually subsume them.

In some ways, it already has.

The data

Goldenberg came armed with data to underscore YouTube’s dominance in the TV space. His most convincing talking point: Nielsen reports that YouTube now accounts for 12.4% of daily TV watch time in the U.S., up from 8.6% at the start of 2024. It surpassed Netflix—now a distant second at 7.5%—more than two years ago.

In addition:

• Some 2 billion people log into YouTube at least once per month and collectively watch more than 2 billion hours of video per day.
• Roughly 1 billion of those hours are watched on TVs every day.
• YouTube reaches 92% of 18- to 34-year-olds in the U.S.
• YouTube’s 33% of podcast listening in the U.S. now tops Spotify (27%) and Apple Podcasts (15%) in the U.S., according to Edison Research.

“This company is only 20 years old, and it’s been able to really radically change the landscape of media,” Goldenberg said onstage.

Stages of acceptance

YouTube’s ascent is now forcing media companies to reckon with how they’re using the service.

While those companies started off treating YouTube as just a marketing channel with sample episodes and clips, lately they’ve been slicing and dicing their back catalogs into new kinds of long-form content. Warner Bros. Discovery has hour-long Friends complications and the entire run of spin-off Joey. National Geographic has linear rerun streams and multi-hour marathon videos. NBCUniversal has even spun up entirely new brands such as Comedy Bites and Family Flicks to showcase its back catalog.

“This is where we think the majority of sophisticated media companies operate today,” Goldenberg said.

He believes that before long, those companies will start producing new content for YouTube specifically. In January, Nickelodeon debuted a new YouTube show for preschoolers called Kid Cowboy, bypassing Paramount’s own cable channels and streaming service. National Geographic has been creating original content for YouTube as well. And in Brazil, Endemol Shine Brasil produced a spin-off of MasterChef featuring top food influencers from the country.

“My prediction is that we’re going to continue to see more and more original content made for YouTube first, and then it could be repurposed to TV,” Goldenberg told the audience.

Creator cred

While YouTube works on winning over major media companies, it’s also cultivating an army of smaller creators to replace them.

Dhar Mann, a top creator of videos with a feel-good angle, now runs production on a 100,000-square-foot campus in Burbank. Alan Chikin Chow, who creates the high school anthology series Alan’s Universe, opened a 10,000-square-foot studio space in Los Angeles last year. Sports and comedy group Dude Perfect raised more than $100 million from Highmount Capital, a private investment firm, last year.

Goldenberg delighted in pointing out a recent video on the creator channel Colin and Samir, in which Dude Perfect illustrated its business in a way that resembled the famous Disney flywheel from the 1950s. In that model, content feeds into other businesses such as merchandising, touring, and tourist destinations, which in turn feeds back into creating new content.

“It’s no exaggeration to call these guys the new Hollywood,” Goldenberg said.

YouTube also wants its most popular creators to get the same credibility as Hollywood producers. It’s lobbying for a few creators in particular—Sean Evans of Hot Ones; Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, aka Rhett & Link, of Good Mythical Morning; and Michelle Khare of Challenge Accepted—to earn Emmy nominations.

“This will be another line in the sand, when creators start to get nominated, and start to get accolades, just like traditional TV does,” Goldenberg said.

Flaws in the machine

Sitting through this presentation, I found myself simultaneously drinking the Kool-Aid and fearing the ingredient list.

After all, paid streaming services are getting worse in pretty much every measurable way. Over time, they’ve removed content, restricted password sharing, made you pay more for better video quality, and started showing more ads than they originally promised. Even just figuring out what to watch is an ordeal, thanks to selfish business decisions and petty platform politics that get in the way of finding your content.

All those annoyances work in YouTube’s favor. In an increasingly fragmented and frictional media landscape, here’s a free service that puts a growing body of content in one place, both from major media companies and new creators. While streaming catalogs are contracting, YouTube is adding 500 hours of content every minute.

But of course, Goldenberg didn’t touch on the uglier side of that growth, in which creators must literally contort themselves to please YouTube’s algorithm and risk burning out in the process. And there was no mention of enshittification for viewers, who’ve been asked to tolerate more annoying ads and higher prices to avoid them.

A world in which YouTube is the new TV, then, is one in which viewers and creators have less control than ever.

“To me, the big issue with YouTube is that it’s a monopoly,” TVRev lead analyst Alan Wolk tells me. “If you somehow run afoul of them, you have no option. You’re out. They get to set all the rules.”

YouTube’s TV takeover is still nowhere near complete. It has struggled for years to find a place for premium programming on its platform, and it’s unlikely that the biggest subscription-based streamers—Netflix, Disney, Amazon—will ever embrace YouTube wholeheartedly. Even within Google, YouTube must contend with other fiefdoms with their own visions for the future of television. (There are signs YouTube may be winning, though; The Information recently reported that Google cut the budget for its Google TV streaming platform to focus more on YouTube.)

Wolk says that while YouTube may envision itself as the Holy Roman Empire, a powerful force that wants to unify the television world, it might wind up being more like Constantinople, the lesser attempt that followed after Rome’s fall.

“It’s on some level the next iteration of television,” he says, “but it’ll never have the same impact.”