YouTube is in its studio era
Fifteen years into the creator era, something has shifted.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment an era begins, but nearly fifteen years ago to the day, on March 7, 2011, YouTube used the word “creator” in an official announcement on its blog for the first time,1 in a post that hard-launched the creator era. I’ve been thinking about that the past few weeks— about what that time was like, and all we hoped to accomplish back then, and where we might be going now. More than anything, I’ve been thinking that YouTube is now in its studio era, and while creators are still at the center, what it takes to compete at the highest levels on YouTube has been evolving and changing for a while, and seems to have crossed a threshold in the past couple years.
The blog post that marked YouTube’s last big shift was the announcement of YouTube’s long-rumored acquisition of Next New Networks, the company I co-founded, as part of the creation of YouTube Next, a “global team of experts” tasked with accelerating the growth and success of YouTube’s partners. Until that day, YouTube used the word “partners” for users in their rev sharing program (only a few thousand at that moment), and other words like “uploaders” or “YouTube stars,” which was a bit of a backhanded compliment. I don’t remember exactly how we got the word “creator” into the blog post, but I did co-write it with my new boss, the great Tom Pickett, and creator was a word we used extensively at Next New Networks. I’m sure we put it in there as a trial balloon for the shift we were all hoping to create at YouTube. Two months later, our CEO Salar Kamangar published a post entitled “Welcome to the future of video” where he more explicitly marked the moment—using the word creators extensively, and with the full expansion of the term we were going for: a creator could be Michelle Phan, but the term could also apply to Amy Poehler, Pharrell Williams, or Jeffrey Katzenberg, all of whom would create channels in the next couple years.
It’s worth noting that YouTube didn’t really decide to invest in its native talent for some kind of punk rock or revolutionary reason, or because the company loved creators at its core at that moment. If anything, they were sometimes an embarrassment to the company. YouTube was coming out of its video era — in 2011, YouTube was widely regarded as a viral video sharing site, the home of Charlie the Unicorn, Star Wars Kid, Chocolate Rain and unauthorized uploads of Lazy Sunday, and while that was an incredibly fun place to be, our efforts to court the traditional brand advertisers, mainstream music artists, and film and TV rights holders that we needed to ultimately make the site a money maker were blocked by this perception that YouTube was low quality UGC—or “cats flushing toilets,” as people would often say to us.2 The top two most-viewed videos worldwide for all of 2010 were Bed Intruder Song and The Key of Awesome’s “Tik Tok” parody, both published by Next New Networks. And we were the ones they tasked with “up-leveling” creator videos.
YouTube invested in creators for economic reasons—it couldn’t pay TV rates for content, as it didn’t have the TV ad rates to pay for it—but if we didn’t change the perception of YouTube’s content quality, the advertisers would never come. Hence, investing in programs and features that would up-level the quality of what creators could make, and the size of the audiences they could build. (YouTube has made huge progress here, but even some of this year’s reporting reads a lot like stories from back then.)
We also hedged our bets—investing $100 million in grants for hundreds of original channels from traditional and upstart media producers like Vice, Buzzfeed, and Awesomeness TV and top creators like Hank and John Green, Rhett and Link, and Felicia Day, in the hopes that some of those channels would build sustainable businesses on YouTube (and all of the aforementioned ones did, for a while).
The shape that most new media brands are taking, fifteen years later—a highly profitable YouTube channel, reaching millions with regularly programmed, television quality (or better) shows; diversified revenue streams including sponsorships, memberships, licensing, and merch; multi-platform presence including podcasts and newsletters—was something we envisioned back then when we made those investments. The idea of a pure-play studio creating this kind of business wasn’t even a new idea—that’s what Next New was, as well as Maker Studios, Machinima, College Humor, and many others—we were all just a bit early, making digital pennies instead of dollars while we waited for the audiences to get big enough, and the sponsors to come. But as my partner Fred would like to say, those pennies would soon be nickels, and then quarters, and then the dollars would come.
What makes this YouTube’s studio era now is a shift that’s happened little by little over the past ten years—as creators built bigger and more capable teams around them; as sponsorship rates climbed; as audiences and algorithms shifted to preferring longer and more engaging content; as consumption moved increasingly to smart TVs; and as ambition and competition grew in the level of storytelling on the platform. We also saw the discovery surface shift outwards and increasingly off-YouTube — Snap, TikTok, and Instagram collapsed creation, upload, and discovery to one app, making everyone with a mobile phone a potential creator, and made scrolling the feed as easy as swiping a dating app—while playing loose with the same kind of addictive, slot machine-like variable rewards that YouTube in its maturity was trying to avoid.
Now, if you’re a new creator trying to build a voice and an audience, it’s crazy to try to do it on the YouTube home feed, where you’re competing with creator-founded studios like Veritasium and Simpli that can make everything from Emmy-worthy, hourlong documentaries to Mr Beast’s gonzo, high-concept competition formats, as well as podcast studios and media brands that offer a steady stream of A-list stars and musicians in beautifully lit sets. The place to try new things, make something viral, and find an audience now is on TikTok, or Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts—and then once you’re ready, like Kareem Rahma just did with Subway Takes, you go more ambitious, and longer-form, on the big show of YouTube. Increasingly, you can build a great brand with just a newsletter on Substack—no studio needed to start, just a great voice and a lot of hard work—then you can introduce video podcasts, or more ambitious shows, and start building a foothold in social video and YouTube. Some of the creator-founded businesses I’m most excited about, like Feed Me from Emily Sundberg, are starting there, and feel destined to be big everywhere.
Everything from the creator era is still here—it’s just moved outward from YouTube to a wider ecosystem, while the new studios—often founded by creators like Mark Rober, Kinigra Deon, Dhar Mann, and Mythical, currently sit atop the food chain at YouTube.
So what comes next, and how long can the creator studio era last? Now that the business model of YouTube is well-proven, and revenue and audiences there for longer-form programming, we can expect the libraries of the smarter traditional players and studios to open up on YouTube, as Evan Shapiro has been predicting — and the recent announcement from BBC is one of the first signs of this coming wave (although they’re clear to say this can’t replace their main business model). It’s also not hard to imagine a wave of AI studios coming—there are several already making content with AI that looks and feels objectively pretty cool, as long as you don’t think AI is inherently uncool, which a sizable portion of YouTube viewers do.3
I work with a number of creator-founded studios at Electrify, where I serve as board chair, and what’s exciting to me about their opportunity right now is that they can tap into fandom and the power of their communities in a way that mainstream media companies can’t, and purely AI-powered studios will likely find hard to do. Over years of making great videos, they’ve built up tremendous trust and goodwill, and their fans want them to be around for the long haul, in part because they’ve often created communities their fans love to be a part of. Those fans will show up en masse for live events and livestreams; they’ll buy memberships and merch; and they’ll push their new projects, like games or apps or movies, to the top of the charts. It will also make traditional brands like Nat Geo want to come to them.
The same skills that helped creators take over the world in the first place—their ability to make great entertainment with limited resources, to adapt constantly to competition and change, and to build deep relationships with their audiences—are also their best defense against all the incoming players that want to take their spot in the economy they built. With everything changing so quickly, and fast adoption of new tools like vibe coding, gen AI models, robotics, rapid prototyping, and augmented reality, the next fifteen years might be unimaginable—but I’m still bullish on creators.
The editorial team ran a feature called “Creators’ Corner” in 2009 to highlight opportunities for “videographers” to get featured on the homepage. So, credit to them—but the term never took off beyond that until the product and operations and partner teams all adopted it in 2011. The editorial team, who represented the beating heart of the early YouTube community, folded in 2010 when the home page moved to an algorithmic feed, and that story is well told in Taylor Lorenz’s great book on the history of creators and their platforms, Extremely Online.
My Next New co-founder Fred Seibert, who was also the original creative director of MTV, had a brilliant, punk rock response: to the right person, at the right moment, a cat flushing a toilet is the best video in the world. The idea that quality was subjective, and ultimately decided by the audience, was in no way the conventional wisdom at the time.
Unlike what a lot of us were doing with the last disruptive wave of technology in the early YouTube era—generative AI at the moment is decidedly not punk rock. It’s coming from, and enriching, the biggest corporations that ever existed. But all of that could change, especially if we see things like open source, ethically trained, locally run, low energy consuming AI get widesteam use. Punk rock AI is probably coming.
1) I miss hanging out with you and making videos in a too-small NYC “office.”
2) excellent review of the past 15 years. We are still so young it’s amazing
3) I really appreciate the focus on fandom and community and agree it will become an increasingly important competitive differentiator. But not just that. Also a sign of soul. Many of the platforms are encouraging high speed generation of synthetic content to be consumed at high speeds by synthetic users. Algorithmic trading becoming algorithmic entertaining. The human community element resists that trend, demands a meat-brain interpretation and bodily experience to share with other meat brains and bodies. A live concert or sports event is the epitome of this. Media that taps into those vibes should sustain.
Appreciate you!
so insightful!