YouTube Originals

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

~ the eulogy ~

i missed youtube originals at the show level. by 2016 i was thirty-two and had not paid for a youtube subscription, not for the red rebrand and not for the premium rebrand after it. youtube premium did launch in turkey eventually, but the originals catalog had already moved into a strange place by the time the subscription hit my country, and most of the marquee shows were on free tier with ads or had moved to netflix entirely.

the originals push started on february 10 2016 as part of youtube red, the first paid tier youtube had ever launched in the us. the bet was a netflix-class scripted catalog gated behind the same subscription that bought you ad-free playback. the slate was uneven from the start. scare pewdiepie for the early influencer crowd, step up high water on the dance-drama side. ryan hansen solves crimes on television sat in the satire spot, weird city by jordan peele in the prestige anthology slot.

cobra kai was the one that worked. josh heald and jon hurwitz pitched a karate kid sequel built around johnny lawrence as the lead. youtube ordered two seasons that ran in 2018 and 2019 to strong reviews and a real audience. by season three netflix had bought the show outright, the deal closed in june 2020 after youtube had already announced the originals shift away from scripted. cobra kai went on to run five more seasons on netflix while youtube was left holding the franchise spinoff plans and a handful of unscripted projects.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the spend was real. youtube originals reportedly outlaid several hundred million dollars on scripted programming across the six years, with the per-season budgets on weird city and the karate kid universe pushing into hbo-tier numbers. susanne daniels came over from mtv in 2015 as global head of original content, the hire was meant to telegraph that this was a serious play rather than a side experiment.

the conversion never showed up. youtube red and then premium kept signing subscribers, mostly for the ad-free playback and the youtube music bundle, but the scripted catalog was rarely the reason anyone paid. by 2018 the company quietly pivoted toward an ad-supported model for most originals, opening up shows like cobra kai season one to free viewing with mid-rolls. the move basically conceded that the gated-content model was not working.

~ the unraveling ~

but the 2020 cobra kai sale was the public sign that the strategy had failed. netflix paid an undisclosed sum for global rights and seasons three onward, by that point the show was the only originals title with mainstream brand recognition. youtube had built it into a hit and then sold the franchise rather than continue financing it. the rest of the slate was either canceled or quietly wrapped up over 2020 and 2021.

on january 18 2022 youtube announced the originals group was being scaled down, with new investment going only to the youtube kids fund and the black voices fund. susanne daniels departed in march. the remaining shows were finished out, no new scripted greenlights, the originals brand itself stopped appearing in product copy by mid-2022. the unit had run for almost six years, longer than most of the contemporary streaming experiments that died in the same window.

~ what it became ~

what youtube went back to was the creator economy at scale. the same money that had gone into karate kid universe and step up was redirected into the shorts fund and the creator grants program. by 2025 youtube was the biggest video subscription on television by watch hours, almost entirely on the back of creator-uploaded content rather than commissioned scripted shows.

the irony for the originals catalog is that cobra kai outgrew the whole experiment. by 2024 it was netflix's biggest cross-generational franchise, with sequels and spinoffs that pulled the karate kid franchise back to columbia pictures for a theatrical sequel. the show youtube originals discovered and bankrolled for two seasons became somebody else's tentpole. the rest of the originals catalog is mostly off-platform now, with foursome and sing it pulled from youtube circulation entirely by 2023.

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