In the latest edition of his weekly column, writer Lon Harris says YouTube is having a bit of an identity crisis: torn between courting creators and appealing to brands.
This week, media brand (and Warner Bros. Discovery subsidiary) Rooster Teeth announced plans to pull some of its most popular shows off of YouTube and move them over to its website instead. While YouTube takes a 50% cut of the ad revenue from Rooster Teeth’s videos, the company keeps all the money when it controls the distribution channel itself.
From the perspective of content creators and producers, a strong presence on YouTube brings with it one key advantage: visibility. While Netflix’s streaming hits and Hollywood video-on-demand titles like “Barbie” soak up the lion’s share of the mainstream press and attention, YouTube remains the #1 most popular streaming service in the U.S. That’s not just on laptops and mobile phones, either, but big-screen family room TVs.
According to Nielsen, in March and April of this year, 8.1% of all television viewing in the US — streaming, broadcast, satellite, all of it together — was happening on YouTube. That’s significantly higher than even second-place finisher Netflix, which grabbed around 7% of all US TV viewing. And once you get past those two, there’s a precipitous drop-off. Hulu got around 3.3% of TV viewing, Amazon came in with 2.8%, Disney+ took just 1.8%, and so on.
Still, once a brand or creator has already attained a high level of visibility on YouTube and has built up a considerable following of fans that it could potentially direct elsewhere…
