YouTube Original Channel Initiative

» see youtube.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In October 2011 YouTube announced it was putting $100 million into original programming, not by making it but by handing advances to production partners and letting them build channels on the platform. Google added roughly $200 million in marketing on top. The roster was assembled to impress media buyers rather than viewers: Madonna, Jay-Z, Amy Poehler, Shaquille O'Neal, Ashton Kutcher, Sofia Vergara, WWE. Around a hundred channels went live through 2012 and the count grew to about 160.

The strategy had a name inside the industry, which was closing the gap with television advertising rates. YouTube was already the biggest video site in the world and still could not charge television prices, because buyers looked at the inventory and saw uploads rather than shows. Funded original channels were supposed to produce the thing a media buyer recognizes, a schedule with names on it.

In November 2012 the renewal decisions came through and more than 60 percent of the 160 channels were not refunded. That is the actual death of the initiative, twelve months in. The remainder kept running on their own revenue, and YouTube spent 2013 not talking about the program. By 12 November 2013 Tubefilter noticed that the page listing all the funded channels had been taken down and the URL was returning an error, with no post explaining it. The archive shows the page still there on 31 August 2013, which brackets the removal to those ten weeks.

~ the dossier ~

~ the renewal cut ~

The November 2012 numbers are the interesting part of the whole exercise, because YouTube already had the data by then. Every funded channel was measured against unfunded channels doing the same thing, and the advance turned out to be a poor predictor of anything. Celebrity attachment did not convert. A famous name brought a launch spike and then a subscriber curve indistinguishable from any other channel with the same upload rate.

What did convert was the material that had been built like YouTube rather than like television. Crash Course, Geek and Sundry, SourceFed and Cartoon Hangover all came out of this money and all outlived it, and the common factor is that they were made by people who had already been publishing on the platform for years. The initiative's genuine achievement was giving that cohort a production budget for eighteen months.

~ how the money actually landed ~

The advances were recoupable against ad revenue, which is the detail that made this a distribution deal rather than a commission. YouTube was not buying shows. It was fronting cash and taking it back out of the revenue split, so a channel that underperformed left the partner in a hole and YouTube with a write-off it had already priced in.

That structure explains the silence at the end. There was nothing to announce because nothing was canceled. Contracts reached their term, the renewal committee said no to most of them, and the page came down. A billion-dollar company does not issue a press release about an advance it declined to extend.

~ from Ankara in 2012 ~

I was watching plenty of YouTube by 2012, on a TTNet line in Ankara, and none of this registered as a thing that existed. The funded channels came through the same subscription box as everything else and carried no badge. Most of them were also US-facing to the point of being unwatchable from here, in the way a WWE channel or an American late-night comic is unwatchable. Geoblocking had nothing to do with it, the references needed a zip code.

The pieces of it that did reach me arrived years later and without the label attached. I watched Crash Course episodes the way everyone outside America watched them, as a good explainer channel, with no idea that Google had once paid for the first season to prove something to an advertiser.

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