How do I love thee, YouTube? Let me count the ways
Opinion
Channel 4’s non-executive director Tess Alps suggests how YouTube could become a better partner to the TV industry.
I’ve just watched Pedro Pina, VP of YouTube EMEA, deliver this year’s MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival. He sparked a few entirely personal thoughts.
Pina came across as a charming, clever bloke, like everyone I know at YouTube and Google. He seems to genuinely love TV. Unlike some of its competitors, I consider Google on the side of the angels and its products – from search to maps – enrich our lives in so many ways.
‘What would we do without them?’ is both an appreciative endorsement and a sobering reality, because the global industry it operates within has allowed it to become a quasi-monopoly in ways we would never tolerate at a national level. This is a testament to its excellence, but it also means that companies and individuals who partner with Google have to navigate this dominance.
Both of the boards I sit on have an excellent, positive relationship with YouTube. Pina cites Channel 4’s approach to YouTube, with both whole episodes from broadcast series and made-for-Channel 4.0 content on the platform, as being one of the most forward-looking among UK broadcasters.
TV companies – broadcasters and streamers alike – have been using it as a marketing platform for more than a decade. Comic Relief has its own YouTube channel and this year’s Red Nose Day was streamed live on the BBC’s YouTube channel for the first time.
As a family, we are YouTube enthusiasts; I’ve just watched a video about how to prune tree peonies and my husband has a range of narrow passions from dragonflies to Shakespeare authorship and baroque opera, none of which are fully served by TV.
Liverpool Football Club is not a narrow passion but, in addition to subscribing to LFCTV, he has an insatiable appetite for opinionated podcasts about the ‘RedMen’. None of this replaces our TV watching; if it replaces anything, it’s magazine content. Mostly, it is just extra viewing time.
So, I think that makes me personally a YouTube superfan. YouTube isn’t perfect, but who is?
I honestly never meet anyone working in TV who doesn’t regard YouTube as a valuable – maybe even essential – part of today’s TV landscape. Much of Pina’s speech seemed to be addressing a small and disappearing rump of disgruntled TV professionals, so I think, therefore, he missed the opportunity to address the legitimate concerns of the majority in the hall, all potential partners, concerns like these:
Numberwanging
YouTube likes to fling some very big numbers around, but it’s often an apples-and-pears situation. Saying that blacksmith Alec Steele has more than 3m subscribers globally can’t be compared to the average viewing numbers for a single live broadcast programme on one channel in one territory.
And YouTube’s definition of a view is effectively a start, not the average second-by-second standard that TV has to meet. Using the best-performing YouTube content, like The Sidemen or Amelia Dimoldenberg, as examples of the viewing levels creator content can expect is misleading; these are extreme outliers, and aspiring creators would be better served by knowing the average viewing they can expect.
Comparing YouTube’s UK reach and viewing time to the BBC’s is misleading. A proper comparison would be to another platform like Freeview.
I won’t go on. Nobody sensible is going to deny that YouTube is big and growing, so there’s really no need to do these misleading comparisons.
Please, YouTube, use numbers, of which you have many, to help us understand better, not just to sell.
Over-egging the pudding has consequences for the TV industry you say you love, from depressing advertising investment to government intervention – so please fling responsibly. Better still would be to embrace BARB, so that we could all have the same independently measured, industry-approved, transparent numbers to use for comparisons.
Sharing nicely
Pina did a lot of appropriation – ‘our (meaning YouTube’s) content’; ‘giving away our advertising revenue’
I don’t upload content onto YouTube, but I can only imagine how irritating that language must be to people who actually make the stuff that people want to watch, with all the risk and cost attached, that enables YouTube to earn advertising money.
I never hear Sky talking about everything on its platform as ‘our content’, nor does Amazon talk about the products it sells as ‘our content’.
YouTube is a video-sharing platform, a distributor – a retailer in effect – of video, some of which is TV. Ad revenue sharing isn’t YouTube’s generosity in action, but a mutually accepted business arrangement.
The big debate is whether this revenue sharing is fair, given YouTube’s dominant position. I won’t go into details here, but it’s true to say that if broadcasters and streamers abandoned their owned platforms and relied only on income from YouTube’s distribution, they would all go bust.
The quality content that earns YouTube so much money is effectively subsidised by TV companies’ other advertising, subscription, and licence-fee income. Only low-production-cost content could ever generate a profit on the current revenue-sharing model.
Talent
YouTube offers young video-makers a brilliant way to develop and showcase their skills, and the funding it is giving to the NFTS is a great initiative and very welcome.
The best will get noticed by TV and film companies, and content creators don’t say no to the chance to move on to broadcasters and streamers.
Just as sports talent scouts watch amateur teams play, TV producers take note of YouTube content that gains a following. But do we think that making content solely for YouTube is a long-term career for filmmakers? Yes, a few make decent money, but they often make content without paying crews properly, without insurance, without legal compliance, and without adhering to health and safety, diversity and equity, regional representation, and the many other standards that govern the TV industry. Not a model career option for most.
Talent goes the other way, of course, and major stars who have become famous via TV find YouTube a great place to build a business but, crucially, they adhere to the important standards that they learned from TV.
Renowned companies like Goalhanger Productions produce great content that is ‘fit for TV’ and this distinction really matters. I believe YouTube has just announced that it is raising the threshold for content creators to be counted as partners and hence eligible for ad revenue sharing, but in other matters, such as advertising pricing and algorithmic prominence, there is no benefit to being a producer of quality content. This really damages our professional world-class TV and film industry.
TV or not TV
Online commentators seem to fall into one of two camps: either TV is defined very narrowly as strictly broadcast, linear TV viewed via channels on a TV set; or it is defined ridiculously broadly as anything that moves on any screen whatsoever. Website video banners, anyone? This is a tedious debate in lots of ways and, to some extent, it doesn’t matter.
I would argue YouTube is not TV; if you build a fabulous dance hall and dancers come and use it, it doesn’t make you a dancer. If you run a corner shop and you sell Crunchies, it doesn’t make you a confectioner.
But YouTube clearly thinks it does matter, and that must be because the TV word denotes something desirable to both viewers and advertisers.
The professional standards referred to earlier are a big part of it, along with the independent measurement, the responsible commissioning and curation, etc.
The fact that Pina was invited to give the MacTaggart lecture does not magically make YouTube a TV company; many people who are not TV executives have given the lecture, including Eric Schmidt, then chair of Google, back in 2011.
They are invited because they have something interesting to say about TV (there are exceptions to this rule; remember the guy from Vice Media, anyone?). Pedro did have something interesting to say: YouTube wants to continue to be a fabulous partner to the TV industry. Hurray!
So, what would I like to see YouTube do to become the very best partner it could be?
1) Adopt independent, transparent measurement. Doesn’t have to be BARB, but that would be ideal.
2) Give Public Service TV some prominence through its algorithms. This isn’t an anti-democratic intervention, but one for society’s benefit. We intervene in all sorts of ways – food standards, film classifications, speed limits, removing sweets from checkouts – that you could argue limit total free choice, but we accept it for the greater good.
Being a Public Service TV company carries many onerous and expensive obligations, and the small reward it gets in return is prominence on TV platforms. YouTube can show it understands how important this is and become a better partner. In fact, I would like YouTube to distinguish between quality, ‘fit for TV’ content and the rest, and treat it differently. Different branding, different pricing, different revenue-sharing model, maybe. I think advertisers would like that too. Not making any distinction is already an editorial judgement; my wishlist just requires YouTube to start making some different ones.
3) Moderate content. Pre-vetting costs money, but removing harmful content and ads would give YouTube a better claim to being ‘TV’. Not only would it benefit society, I think it would benefit YouTube and put more clear blue water between it and its platform competitors.
All of this might be a pipe dream, but I remain an optimist.
The year of YouTube: What happens when the side door becomes the front door?
Tess Alps is a non-executive director at Channel 4 Corporation and a member of the board of trustees for Comic Relief.