Creators of Rhett & Link, JacksGap and The Young Turks channels explain why they’re so popular

The Grand Auditorium in Cannes’ Palais des Festivals is most famous for hosting film screenings during the city’s annual film festival. This week, it’s showing YouTube videos.

The MIPTV television industry conference is holding its first “Digital Fronts” – two days of screenings and talks by YouTube and the multi-channel networks (MCNs) that have built businesses on Google’s video service.

The sessions included interviews with some of the most popular young YouTubers, including the creators of the Rhett & Link, JacksGap and The Young Turks channels.

Rhett & Link

Rhett Mclaughlin and Link Neal describe themselves as “Internetainers”, producing a mix of sketches, music videos and comical adverts, as well as a daily talk show called Good Mythical Morning.

Their main channel has nearly 1.9m subscribers and 263m total views, while the separate talk-show channel has 1.5m subscribers and 166m views. The duo now have a fluctuating team of 7-8 people and their own studio space in Los Angeles.

Neal talked about how they fund their productions by partnerships with brands. “Over years of doing that a lot, we’ve been able to have a conversation with our audience as it’s grown to help them understand that brands fund our content, and help us to create content for them that otherwise we couldn’t create,” he said.

“For us, there has always been a commitment to create better content with a brand involved, and that’s really paid off in the long run. There’s no backlash from our audience, because they’re on-board. We’re not trying to pull the wool over our audience’s eyes: we’re upfront about it, and everybody wins.”

JacksGap

British twin brothers Finn and Jack Harries started their YouTube channel to document a gap year, but over time it has grown to 3.4m subscribers who have watched their videos 144m times.

“What we realised on YouTube is that it’s very different to TV. People are directly engaged with you as a person and your story,” said Jack. “People were subscribing and coming back every single week to find out more.”

Two years in, the brothers decided to branch out from their early five-minute clips and make longer 15-minute episodes as part of a web series, themed around driving rickshaws across the width of India. They raised £20,000 to fund the series from Skype, Sony and MyDestination.

“There’s money in YouTube through ads on the site, but only for a certain level. If you want to create higher quality content, obviously you need to generate more money,” said Jack.

“We did four episodes, and each is over 15 minutes,” added Finn. “We had no idea how it was going to go down, but each episode now has just over 1m views and Google allows us to see how long people watch for. The average engagement of those people is 13 minutes, out of a 15-minute episode.”

The Young Turks

Billed as “the largest online news show in the world”, The Young Turks streams live on YouTube and archives its shows for later viewing. Its channel has 1.5m subscribers and nearly 1.4bn total views. It’s aimed squarely at young people.

“There is this massive misconception that young people have absolutely no interest in the news. Young people definitely do want to be informed, but they want to be informed by people they can relate to,” said host and producer Ana Kasparian.

“We noticed this void in the market, especially in the US. There are great news anchors, they’re probably very smart, but they’re not talking to the audience like real people. They’re just reading from a teleprompter.”

Kasparian said that The Young Turks’ audience is a “huge part of our content”, playing a prominent role in commenting and tweeting on live streams and archived shows alike.

“Immediately you know what they like and don’t like,” she said. “They’re holding you accountable. If you want an audience that genuinely sticks around, you have to listen to what their opinion is.”

YouTube’s potential

These creators were all speaking as part of a Digital Fronts session curated by YouTube itself, which also saw French channel Golden Moustache’s Adrien Labastire talking about running a Web Comedy Awards as a simultaneous YouTube and TV event.

Meanwhile, football channel Copa90’s Eli Mengem outlining the dizzying rise of online video fame. “11 months ago I was a uni student working in a bar, watching Arsenal on TV. Two months ago, I interviewed Arsene Wenger,” he said.

Session host Michael Stevens, from science network VSauce, said that these stories were the tip of an online iceberg for the media industry.

“These five channels made the choice to build a global fanbase on YouTube. They are not just isolated examples: this is happening everywhere, and the scale of the audience available on YouTube is gigantic,” he said, before harking back to comments the previous day from YouTube’s entertainment head Alex Carloss about the desirability of creating a fanbase rather than just an audience.

“You can build a really big audience on YouTube: they show up, they listen. But a fanbase is going to subscribe and watch everything you make in the future, and tell their friends about you,” said Stevens.

“What we’re seeing on YouTube all over the place is the building of fanbases that will follow you to new formats and to new platforms.”

Challenge to TV networks

In a later session, MCN Maker Studios – which is in the process of being acquired by Disney – presented similarly-bullish views on the potential, with the company’s international president René Rechtman warning the television industry not to be scared of the implications of YouTube’s growth.

“It’s democratising creativity and media… It’s a big opportunity for all of us. We should embrace this,” he said. “YouTube has now become the second biggest search engine. So we go there, we search. And six billion hours of video is watched every single month. And a lot of that is happening with the mobile device. The numbers are insane.”

Rechtman also claimed that MCNs like his company are presenting a challenge for traditional TV networks – this may well have been one of the reasons Disney agreed to pay up to $950m for the company.

“Networks like Maker are now becoming more important than the traditional cable players. According to Nielsen if you want to reach the millennials, you have to come to us, or other players like us… and we do it for 5-10% of the cost of traditional TV,” he said, before turning the attention back onto the YouTubers that form the backbone of any MCN.

“Fans, hobbyists, creators are the new publishers, and they are the new distribution,” said Rechtman, who added that of the more-than 380m subscribers to Maker’s network of YouTube channels, 80% are aged between 13 and 34, 60% are outside the US, and 40% are watching on mobile devices.

He also warned the TV industry not to miss the impact of the shifting habits of young people. “We had the newspapers who neglected what happened, the music industry.neglected what happened. We cannot do the same. We need to embrace the change.”

Stuart Dredge – theguardian.com, Wednesday 9 April 2014 22.08 AEST