YouTube Just Ate TV. It’s Only Getting Started
For a moment, the 50-yard line at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, was the media capital of the world. As the San Francisco 49ers were warming up for a Sept. 21 game against the Arizona Cardinals, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell caught the eye of Neal Mohan. The YouTube CEO, flanked by a handful of his platform’s top creators, marched onto the field and embraced Goodell.
About an hour or so after their meeting on the field, the moguls addressed creators and guests in a suite. “We want to continue to double down on that partnership you saw,” the YouTube chief said, referring to the first exclusive NFL game that YouTube hosted live, the Sept. 5 contest between the Los Angeles Chargers and Kansas City Chiefs, which they played in Brazil.
“More to come, right?” Goodell quipped in response.
“Well, that’s up for you to decide,” Mohan replied.
When asked a few minutes later whether that means YouTube is in a strong position to carry exclusive NFL games going forward, Goodell was unequivocal. “Absolutely,” he said.
But as big a deal as YouTube becoming a league broadcast partner would be (on top of its existing $2 billion deal for NFL Sunday Ticket), the platform’s scale and cultural relevance were also on display in Santa Clara. Even with the 49ers on the field, a large group of kids on a rope line near the stands were screaming for one of the creators that had joined Mohan, sports influencer Jesse “Jesser” Riedel, as parents jockeyed to get them closer for a photo or autograph.
“It’s a blessing,” Jesser said modestly after heading back into a tunnel under the stands, away from the roar of the crowd. The kids were there for the 49ers, but a YouTuber stole the show.
During the past 20 years, the Google-owned YouTube has slowly — then rapidly — become a dominant force in media, the hub for a wide array of genres, from talk and comedy to food and unscripted fare. But the bigger prize for the video platform would be to take over the other hours people are spending on their TV sets, and there are signs that YouTube is close to a breakthrough there.
Sports, led by the NFL, is in many ways the final frontier for YouTube to conquer. The platform is on the verge of subsuming the genres that have helped define the past 100 years of TV. In fact, the CEO noted in his annual letter to the YouTube community that the platform’s viewership on TV sets has “surpassed mobile and is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S.”
For someone running one of the most important entertainment companies in the world, Mohan, 52, is very much of the Silicon Valley mold, not a creature of Hollywood. He has an electrical engineering degree from Stanford and was an executive at the ad tech firm DoubleClick when Google acquired it in 2007, joining it in the deal. He went on to lead the tech giant’s display business before becoming YouTube’s chief product officer in 2015 and its CEO in 2023.
He carries himself with an amiable and good-natured Midwestern attitude (he was born in Indiana, where his dad was a grad student at Purdue). It’s a personality that meshes well with YouTube’s stable of creators, many of whom are, befitting their on-camera personalities, over-the-top and engaging. Just as Hollywood executives are eager to give notes to creators and put their stamp on content, Mohan is happy to step back and let the creators on his platform lead the way.
While the creators at the NFL game were filming a wacky sketch in the end zone, Mohan was watching from the sidelines, beaming at the access his platform gave them. It was a real-life metaphor: Mohan is happy to cheer from the sidelines while the creators are in the spotlight.
But while he is a tech executive first and foremost, Mohan says that it is his “deeply personal” love of stories that keeps him engaged.
“I am a technologist, but I also love media and storytelling. I’ve been that way since I can remember, I’m a fan myself, fundamentally,” he says. “Leading YouTube is a privilege where I can actually bring both those pieces together, that human storytelling and creativity and the best of technology, that’s what motivates me every morning.”
As Mohan is fond of saying, “There’s only one YouTube,” and in a landscape littered with streaming services, it can still find ways to surprise. On Sept. 16, a few days before his summit with Goodell in Santa Clara, Mohan took to the stage in Google’s office at Pier 57 in New York with news to share: Over the past four years, YouTube had paid out more than $100 billion to its creators, artists and media partners. After his presentation to creators ended, he stood on the stage in the Google office taking photos with attendees, chatting about their hopes and concerns.
Walking through New York’s Meatpacking District later that evening to a reception the platform was hosting, Mohan reflected on that moment onstage. “There are two really fundamental things that we do for creators,” he said. “One is help them build an audience and connect with their fans, regardless of where those fans are in the world; and the second thing we do is we help them build businesses. That’s what that $100 billion represents for me.”
It’s also reflected in the company’s bottom line: YouTube generated more than $36 billion in advertising revenue in 2024, and executives say annual revenue — including subscriptions like YouTube Premium and YouTube Music — tops $50 billion, with revenues shared with the more than 3 million creators in its Partner Program, which reflects channels monetizing their videos. Both numbers are rising fast, even as traditional entertainment companies find themselves stagnating.
It’s come a long way since the 19-second “me at the zoo” video was uploaded in April 2005. Now, per a KPMG report released Sept. 23, YouTube is second only to Comcast in terms of annual content spend, inclusive of payments to creators and media companies, paying out as much as Netflix and Paramount combined, $32 billion.
Already, many of the genres that once defined cable TV have migrated to YouTube. Chefs explaining recipes in the kitchen, once the domain of Food Network, have moved there (even The New York Times’ cooking section is going all in on YouTube videos), while creators like Dude Perfect and Mark Rober are creating shows that would once have been right at home on Discovery Channel or Nickelodeon.
The only question is what genres it will take over next, and how quickly it will do so. From talk shows to scripted dramas to, yes, live sports, there are signs that the platform’s ambitions will collide with the traditional TV business sooner rather than later.
Everyone knows late night TV is in trouble. The Late Show With Stephen Colbert has been canceled at CBS, while Jimmy Kimmel’s short-lived suspension at ABC brought fresh attention to the struggles of the format. YouTube has slowly, then all at once, become the de facto home for what had been late night, not only for the shows on linear TV, but for an emerging crop of new talent born on the platform.
As it happens, late night itself transformed YouTube when the Saturday Night Live skit “Lazy Sunday” went viral 20 years ago on the platform, which had only been live for a few months.
“One of the really big [shifts] was Saturday Night Live and clips getting consumed not on Saturday night but on Sunday morning, when people would open up YouTube,” Mohan says, adding that it was in his mind a “seminal moment” in the platform’s history. “In that sense, they were a pioneer in getting their content out to so many viewers.”
It was a seminal moment inside the big media companies, too.
“As somebody who was at NBC at the time, part of the thinking was, ‘How do we build out the NBC universe of websites so that people know to come here to get the clips of these shows?’ ” recalls Gavin Purcell, the former showrunner for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “[YouTube] knew the value of having it all in one place.”
As consumer preferences collide with a burgeoning ecosystem of video podcasts (YouTube now claims more than 1 billion podcast users monthly), the world of late night, and for that matter TV talk shows more generally, increasingly revolves around the platform.
One current late night producer says that almost every A-list booking now includes some sort of sketch or bit that they think will play well on YouTube, but booking those guests in the first place has become less of a sure thing. A veteran Hollywood publicist says that for many of their clients, they are now recommending that YouTube podcasts or shows become the first stop, or at least a major stop, on press tours.
Just look at Alex Cooper, whose recent guests on Call Her Daddy include Cardi B and Gwyneth Paltrow; Brittany Broski, who spoke to David Corenswet for her series Royal Court; or Travis and Jason Kelce’s New Heights, which hosted Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio Del Toro to talk about One Battle After Another, not to mention Taylor Swift, Travis’ fiancée, to announce her new album. “I think Royal Court is an exciting example that was, by accident, what the new Hollywood is shaping up to be,” Broski says. “I’m not trying to get you. I’m not trying to get the tea. I want to hang out with you.”
In fact, what had been late night is being splintered into pieces, where consumers can create their own show, complete with comedy sketches, political monologues and jokes, musical performances and interview segments all pulled from different channels.
“It gets reconstituted in your feed, which is a personalized set of preferences in terms of what speaks to you around that particular format, whether it’s the monologue, whether it’s the sketch, whether it’s what Brittany [Broski] does in terms of the conversation,” Mohan says.
“All of us on YouTube come from a world where when you want to create something, you just go do it,” says Adam Waheed (he goes by “Adam W”), whose YouTube comedy sketches routinely draw millions of views on the platform. “You don’t wait for somebody, you don’t ask somebody. You just go make it. And you get feedback right away.”
That freedom is particularly relevant in the moment, with Colbert on the way out next year and Kimmel surely weighing his options at ABC.
“As you’ve no doubt observed, many people who came from that linear background have found lots of success on YouTube and been able to control their destiny and their creative ambitions,” Mohan says, perhaps tempting the fate of broadcast TV veterans.
The result of the podcast explosion and the late night revolution is what Purcell calls a “flattening” of the format, where big stars can leverage their fame to become major YouTube creators and creators can leverage the platform to become big stars themselves.
“The people that used to host podcasts were no-names in some form, and a lot of names have come into this space,” says Purcell, who also co-hosts a podcast himself on YouTube called AI For Humans. “I would argue that Amy Poehler’s podcast [Good Hang] is not that different than what, say, Tom Snyder was doing at 12:30 back in the day, except she’s funnier and she’s more charming, and the guests that come in are bigger because of the distribution platform.”
Nielsen has been tracking the streaming platforms that consumers watch on their TV screens ever since it launched what it calls The Gauge in 2021. But over the past year, YouTube’s domination of The Gauge has unnerved executives at some competitors. The most recent Gauge report showed that YouTube was by far the most watched video platform, holding 13.1 percent share. Netflix, in second place, was at 8.7 percent.
Nielsen senior vp product strategy Brian Fuhrer says that today reminds him of the early days of cable TV. “As the cable networks got bigger and bigger, and they had a lot of penetration, their ratings naturally increased,” he says.
It was a flywheel effect, a flywheel that now appears in motion for YouTube, at the same time that most of the rest of the streaming business (Netflix notably excluded) is stuck in stagnation.
In an industrial park in the shadow of the Burbank airport, a suburban street is coming to life. There are shops and restaurants, a school and homes, both wealthy and more working class. Pumpkins appear on the doorsteps around Halloween, and Christmas lights around the holidays, but not everything is as it seems.
The street is a facade. It’s a full-scale set inside the 125,000-square foot studio of Dhar Mann, the YouTube creator who is on a mission to turbocharge the creation of inspiring, uplifting scripted entertainment.
Mann is perhaps the biggest creator in the scripted space on YouTube, with his studio turning out everything from shortform scenes to feature-length movies.
In YouTube’s quest to take over TV, scripted entertainment may be the ultimate challenge. The cultural relevance of shows like The White Lotus or Abbott Elementary simply hasn’t been replicated yet on a user-generated platform, though Mann’s operation is a sign of just how far things have come.
“A lot of times when people think of YouTube content, it’s mainly spectacle-based or gamified, or music or podcasting, reactionary content, but there’s a whole ecosystem of scripted content that’s really growing, and I think it’s going to be one of the areas that really explodes,” Mann says.
“I do think it is maybe the early phases of growth that we’re seeing there,” affirms Mohan.
Mann, like many other creators, does not produce content at the cadence that traditional studios do. He will have as many as eight productions going at once in his studio, spanning lengths and genres.
“Traditional Hollywood is like, ‘I’ll put out eight episodes or 10 episodes of something, and it took me a year to make it,’ ” says Nic Paul, the president of Spotter, which provides capital, tools and resources to creators. “These creators are every week engaging with tens of millions of unique viewers and hundreds of millions of views in 30 days. They’re putting out content either several times a week, every week or every other week. Audiences no longer have to wait.”
But scripted content is also at the heart of one of the tensest parts of the relationship between YouTube, the platform, and the ecosystem of creators who populate it.
Unlike with Netflix or HBO, YouTube creators are taking on the risk for their projects (though, granted, there’s a great disparity in production budgets). If Netflix likes a concept, it picks it up, providing the budget and resources to help get it over the finish line. On YouTube, it is up to the creator to finance and produce their content, and while the platform regularly releases new tools to help them (including AI-enabled tech that suggests video ideas and can create short background videos for use in Shorts), scripted entertainment is a particularly tricky challenge, requiring writers, directors, sets, costumes, lighting, editing, special effects and other production requirements that may go beyond the typical creator-led show.
“If you’re working on scripted, you sometimes might need some of those resources,” Mohan says, arguing that the infrastructure is being built before our eyes. “The best sort of visual example in my head is, if you go down to Burbank, you’ll see on one end of the town, a storied studio like Walt Disney, and then you’ll see rows of these smaller studios.
“It’s just like what happens right here in Silicon Valley, which is that next to the big technology companies, you have this startup ecosystem,” he adds. “People like Kinigra Deon and Dhar Mann and Mythical Entertainment and Alan Chikin Chow, they’re the startups of Hollywood.”
And just like tech startups, that sometimes means looking for outside financing and support.
Some of the biggest creators have turned to the major studios and streamers to help them do the projects they want to do (see MrBeast’s nine-figure deal for Beast Games with Prime Video) or are seeking to raise money to bulk up (MrBeast and Mann have been in the market).
Others have turned to private equity, with several PE-backed firms promising six- and seven-figure investments (in some cases eight figures) to subsidize the production of shows that will live on YouTube in exchange for partial ownership of the show in question.
“There’s a burgeoning ecosystem of investors and studios that are backing YouTube content to bridge that gap” between creativity and financing, one connected source says. “Obviously, there’s a trade-off with that, because you end up giving upside in ownership.”
But creator-driven scripted content may be rising at the perfect moment for Hollywood, which is in the midst of a historic pullback in the genre after years of explosive growth.
“That competition for their IP is going to just get greater and greater,” says Frank Albarella, the U.S. sector leader for media and telecommunications at KPMG. “The evolution of what we’re seeing in terms of viewer preferences is lining up with this transformation of the models from that traditional high-cost, high-investment, high-risk production model, to the user-generated content model.”
Mann, for his part, says that when his studio creates a feature-length scripted film, it costs in the low six figures to produce from start to finish, a fraction of what even the nimblest of traditional production companies operate under.
It’s caught the eye of Hollywood veterans, too: Mann says that he has spoken to executives at traditional studios desperate to understand how he produces content at a fraction of the cost: “As you know, production budgets are constantly getting cut. Production in L.A. is down 45 percent last time I checked, so many studio lots are sitting vacant,” he says.
A creator-led studio is not going to sit back and let its lots remain vacant for long.
Across the country, Kinigra Deon is buying a school in Birmingham, Alabama. Known for her scripted content that touches on comedy, drama and even fantasy, this creator has been quietly building out a studio complex where she and her team can soon double their output
