Hollywood Breaking into Youtube

YouTube Premium may not be a recent development, created on the 17^th of May 2018 with the unification of YouTube Red and YouTube Music, but the influx of celebrity based content throughout the year and currently, provides an interesting insight into the ever growing corporate change of the platform. YouTube used to be about young digital influencers who succeeded in threatening television with their video blogs, but now it seems that YouTube is opting for 'traditional celebrities' to be the forefront and represent their brand instead of the creators who built the platform.

Front page of the subscription service

YouTube Premium is an online subscription service much like Hulu and Netflix, with their own original series’, ad free content, ability to download videos to watch offline and much more, all for £11.99 a month. As YouTube is the second biggest website in the world, a subscription based service converging the most popular modes on the platform (music and video) was inevitable. For YouTube, 2018 was the year of investing into and growing their original series’ in hopes of attracting new markets to the platform. Their production budget was a fraction of the other streaming organisations spending “a few hundred million dollars” compared to Facebook’s predicted $1 billion spent on original content, which is only 1/13^th the amount Netflix invested into their programming. Susanne Daniels (YouTube’s global head of original content) argues that the company doesn’t need an extortionate budget in order to create compelling and enjoyable shows, rather that incorporating stars and already loved celebrities is an effective strategy to attract non-users of YouTube.

A recent example is Ariana Grande’s Dangerous Woman Diaries four part docu-series produced by YouTube Premium that debuted on her channel on the 29^th of November 2018. The first episode is available for any user to watch but the rest are exclusive to the subscription based service. It documents Ariana through her recent tour, behind the scenes footage of her music videos for ‘God is a Women’ and ‘The Light is Coming’ and her MTV Video Music Awards rehearsal performance. This is just one of the several music-centric projects along with Katy Perry’s 48-hour Witness live stream in 2017 and the Demo Lovato documentary Simply Complicated, labelled as YouTube originals. The Google owned site has been spotlighting musicians like Shawn Mendes and Janelle Monae through its Artist Spotlight Stories program to promote its new music app and establish themselves as a platform for new musical content unobtainable anywhere else.

Dangerous Woman Diaries Youtube Original

A celebrity based original hitting YouTube Premium in 2019 is an A.I documentary series hosted by Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr. It will be an eight hour-long series featuring experts in science, technology, futurism and entertainment that is bound to be a huge success. The success of 'traditional celebrity' based content is especially evident from the Will Smith: The Jump series where Smith live streamed himself bungee jumping from a helicopter over the Grand Canyon for his 50^th birthday. In the first 48 hours, this YouTube original acquired over 17.5 million views.

Will Smith: The Jump YouTube Original 

But what about creator based originals?

Inspecting the list of originals provided by Susanne Daniels to Rotten Tomatoes for 2018/2019, all 11 she showcased features no YouTube based creator or team. In fact, the majority are recycled Hollywood stars with most noticeable examples including, Weird City by Jordan Peel, the director of the critically acclaimed horror Get Out, and Becoming a God, a series including Kristen Dunst produced by George Clooney. In fact, through searching for creator series’, I could only find two that were released this year. Escape the Night is a postmodern metafictional murder mystery reality web series hosted by YouTube star Joey Graceffa (nearly 9 million subscribers) with the third season released on June 21^st 2018. The cast consists entirely of YouTube creators with the likes of Colleen Ballinger, Manny Mua and Nikita Dragun. It perfectly encompasses a series through-and-through creator based. Liza on Demand is a comedy web television series co-created by YouTuber Liza Koshy (16 million subscribers), Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont which won comedy series of the year at the 2018 Streamy Awards. Although YouTube is facilitating some creator based premium series’ as stated, they are by far the minority in 2018, being dominated by house hold name celebrities.

All the YouTube Stars in Escape the Night Series 3

This development is understandable as external based content will automatically appeal to the platforms advertisers, being a ‘safer’ investment and guaranteeing better advertising income. 

Picking ‘traditional celebrities’ to front its shows prevents the possibility of something going damagingly wrong, tarnishing the fragile reputation YouTube has with its shareholders such as controversial YouTube star Logan Paul who was responsible for the most contentious and exemplified moment of 2018; broadcasting an apparent suicide victim to millions of viewers. However, YouTube continually separating itself from the home-grown creators that built this platform is another rejection, contradicting the ‘Broadcast Yourself’ ideology that makes them unique from other streaming sites in the first place. While YouTube increases the financial position of established celebrities in 2018, they are overlooking the hardest year for creators for whom many have seen their content demonetized and restricted. YouTube finds itself in a tricky tug of war between their commercial needs and re-building a home for the independent creator.