Mixed Signals: How YouTube became TV – with Colin and Samir

Ben Smith:
I’m Ben Smith.

Nayeema Raza:
I’m Nayeema Raza.

Ben Smith:
And this is Mixed Signals from Semafor Media.

Nayeema Raza:
Today we’re going to talk about convergence. This is the primacy of YouTube and the desire of legacy media to maybe gobble it all up.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I mean, it’s the biggest story in media right now. Just everything competing against everything else for your screen, increasingly for your big TV screen, not even your phone.

Nayeema Raza:
Yes, that’s true. Well, both. You can have it all. Have both the screens at the same time.

Ben Smith:
At the same time, yes.

Nayeema Raza:
To talk to us about all that we’re going to have Colin and Samir, two legacy YouTubers, if there is such a term. They’ve been in the business since 2012 and can talk to us about what’s new, what’s not, and where it all goes from here. All of that after the break. Ben, I think you have a little bit of a media crush on Colin and Samir. Is that fair?

Ben Smith:
Yeah, they are kind of the great homegrown YouTube analysts and commentators. And their post-election episode, actually, I thought was the best discussion of what had just happened in media. And they publish a newsletter called Publish Press, which is in some sense the paper of record of the YouTube ecosystem. It’s the New York Times of YouTube.

Nayeema Raza:
Oh, gosh, paper of record of YouTube. That’s a matryoshka doll of media metaphors right there.

Ben Smith:
Mixed metaphor, yeah.

Nayeema Raza:
Mixed metaphors. The thing that I think they do so well, Colin and Samir, is they have really charted their own trajectory and their own journey as creators from 2012 till now. They’ve seen the ebbs and flows of YouTube, seen the money come in or not from AdSense, that’s the YouTube monetization platform, throughout their time seen the CPM shift, the brand deals come in and out, and seen the pandemic really revolutionize how we think about television too. They have created the destination for, I think, aspiring creators, current creators, to get smarter about their craft and for brands and other media institutions to understand what creators are doing on YouTube. But we wanted to talk to them because legacy media is just waking up to this moment of YouTube in a big way, and we wanted to unpack what’s really different this time around.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I mean, they’re perfect guests for this moment because I think they have a deep grasp of what’s coming and what’s happening right now.

Nayeema Raza:
So let’s bring in Colin and Samir.

Ben Smith:
Hey guys.

Samir:
Hi guys.

Nayeema Raza:
Hi Colin. Hi Samir.

Ben Smith:
Thank you for doing this by the way. I wonder if you could just talk us through a little bit, how you turned yourselves into the paper of record of YouTube, how you got into this stuff.

Samir:
It was a really long process and not actually as intentional as maybe it looks from the outside. We’ve been making YouTube videos together for just about 14 years now.

Colin:
Yeah, I would say if we’re the paper of record, it’s because people weren’t reading the paper for many, many years, [inaudible 00:02:59] were still putting it out.

Samir:
Yeah. So we’ve been making YouTube videos together since January 2011, and I started a YouTube channel right after I left college. I really wanted to break into Hollywood. I grew up in LA, but it was just hard to get in and it was a very long, slow process to get involved in that industry. But I felt really capable of making stuff so decided to spin up a YouTube channel for the sport that I grew up playing, which was lacrosse. Which is a really weird thing to do in Los Angeles. But I had this idea of maybe this niche sports network could exist.
And it wasn’t going to exist on TV, no one was going to give me the time of day on TV, but the internet offered this opportunity to just go, “If you want something to exist, you can actually just do it.” And YouTube was that place to create that. So I spun up a channel called the Lacrosse Network with the idea of programming it like television. Every day there’d be a new show. We’d eventually have live games, and that’s how I met Colin. Colin was making a docu-series about the Colorado lacrosse team.

Ben Smith:
Were there a couple of key inflection points that take you from lacrosse YouTube, to this?

Samir:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, there was many. We did grow into being the second-largest distributor of live sports on YouTube within two years. But the biggest inflection point was selling the company in 2014, and we got absorbed by a bigger sports media company that had just done a big deal with Dude Perfect. And their concept was, can they reinvent sports entertainment online? And so our network got absorbed into that, but we also got to become employees of this company and learn a lot about the media business, the modern media business. And along the way, since 2010, 2011, most of our life has been advocating for YouTube.
And advocating that it is a reasonable place to spend your ad dollars and there is good entertainment being created there, and these creators are really good storytellers. So whether we were in the room at Nike trying to convince them to spend ad dollars with the lacrosse network, or eventually working with Dude Perfect and exploring their country music television TV show, or when we left and producing behind the scenes with a lot of our friends on YouTube, our primary life has been just on YouTube with YouTubers and advocating for creators in the broader media and entertainment business.

Nayeema Raza:
So of course, 2014 you guys got bought by Whistle Sports was the business, and I actually came across you guys at that time because I was working for this company called Vessel by Jason Kilar. Of course, if you guys remember Vessel.

Samir:
Of course, it’s a old school creator economy.

Nayeema Raza:
So there was this, Jason of course had been the CEO of Hulu, went on to be the CEO of Warner Media, in between had this dream of making a box office for YouTube where there would be three day early access theatrical releases. It was, I think I can say, and I’ve said this to Jason, a dumb idea. Because it could move over the content, but it couldn’t move over the community of YouTube. And so people took all these massive minimum guarantees. But I tell that story because there have been a lot of attempts of legacy media to come in and try to get in on the YouTube business. And whether it’s Katzenberg and Quibi, short-form content has really eluded legacy media companies. I’m curious if you think this what will become, I think a feeding frenzy for creators and a rethinking because of the election, does this moment feel different to you somehow? Does it feel more sophisticated? Does it feel like more of the same?

Samir:
How do you define short-form content?

Nayeema Raza:
I mean, it’s not always short-form content. You’re right, because YouTube now of course, is this longer, but I guess it’s like digital content. What does it mean now?

Samir:
We’re all making internet videos. Whether you are Adam McKay and you’re making Winning Time, or you’re Mr. Beast or you’re Colin and Samir, we’re making videos and we’re uploading them to the internet and people are streaming them using the internet.

Ben Smith:
So does digital just mean cheaper?

Samir:
Maybe. I mean, in some respects it does. In some respects it doesn’t. There’s two YouTube creators, RackaRacka, these two brothers who created a movie with A24, they did it relatively cheaper than everyone else in the movie business. They made a horror film. I don’t remember the exact budget. I think it was somewhere in the $4 million range. And that movie grossed over $90 million. And so in some respects, it does mean cheaper on a relative scale. But that also can be the cost of a Mr. Beast video, three to $4 million.

Colin:
Yeah, I mean, I would say for me, digital means grassroots, humble beginnings. It’s probably evolved. There are lots of media entities now that have started very grassroots and digital, that have huge teams, have a lot of overhead. But I still think they get that benefit of the doubt from the audience, that it started with humble beginnings. It started in an independent manner that audiences can relate to. They can see themselves in it. Whereas if we’re watching a clip of late night, something with Jimmy Kimmel on YouTube, we can’t really relate to that as an audience. We see that as television, even though it’s distributed digitally. So I think digital to me means independent, grassroots, humble beginnings, even if it’s evolved.

Nayeema Raza:
I love that definition. I think that makes a lot of sense. There’s something organic about what’s happening in the YouTube creative ecosystem, that just feels authentic. It feels of the moment. So I guess my question remains, now that we’ve defined what it is, is this moment different?

Samir:
Yeah.

Nayeema Raza:
Is legacy media’s interest different?

Samir:
I think it’s dramatically different because, well, just to tack onto the definition of digital, I also think it has to do with who you asked permission from or if you needed to get permission to distribute your content or create your content. I think that is actually honestly the biggest change, is that when I was growing up to have that idea of making an incredibly niche sports network, if I was 10 years prior, it would just be dead in the water because I would have to walk into rooms and get permission. But the fact that I could just make a Gmail account called the lacrossenetwork@gmail.com and then make a YouTube channel, it was like, “All right, now it exists.” I think that also plays into the definition of digital is that I didn’t have to ask anyone for permission to do it. I didn’t have to ask anyone for permission to upload. We talk about this all the time with Colin and Samir.
We can’t get taken off the air. I mean, there might be some ways we can get taken off the air, but we can’t really get taken off the air. If our show fails over the next year, we can just reinvent ourselves, because we own the... Or we rent the distribution property. So yeah, I think permission plays a big role in digital. This moment does feel dramatically different because I think you’re getting a level of sophistication and maturity from creators who are now capable of storytelling and capable of production at different scales, but also more in touch with the largest group of people who are online in the world of digital entertainment than some of the other people, right? Then some people who are more in traditional media. So I think that’s the biggest difference is, who is most in touch with the audience? In a business of attention, that’s what matters the most.

Colin:
For me, I would just say I think the election showed that this moment is different because it felt like digital creators and digital platforms had that appointment viewing feel that TV used to have, where it’s like, we’re not waiting for the interview with the future president to come out on CNN. Everyone’s actually waiting for Rogan, and then that comes out. And everyone’s waiting potentially like, “Is Kamala Harris going to come out on Rogan?” That’s the appointment viewing now, it’s not really on television. I think that’s what it showed me is like, wow, these digital creators who’ve built these platforms have earned the right from audiences to have that tune in appointment viewing.

Ben Smith:
It has a huge shift.

Colin:
Yeah.

Samir:
I think there’s two actually shifts to talk about. One of them came from a conversation we had with Scott Gimple, who was a longtime showrunner of The Walking Dead. He said the shift of television to the binge model is what really opened the door for digital creators. And I think that does have a lot of merit to it, and the fact that when you look at a Netflix or HBO Max or Apple TV, they’re putting out these shows all at once. That creates a situation where a lot of people can be fans of a show, but not at the same time and not in the same way, and be watching things at home in different ways. So podcasts and YouTube videos become the ritualistic viewing in a way that television used to be. There’s probably a lot of people who live their life and not a week goes by that they don’t watch a Marques Brownlee tech review or video.
So he’s more a part of their week to week routine than anything else. And I think that shift is dramatic. The second shift is the rise of connected TV viewership for YouTube, and I think that’s one that can’t be talked about enough. To give you some stats from our channel, 32% of our viewership comes from connected TV. Our catalog this year, or our new videos have done 40 million views across long form content. 32% of that is coming from connected TVs. 52% of our channels total watch time comes from connected TV, and our average viewer duration is 40 minutes. So that looks and feels, that’s a trend that’s happening across all of YouTube, probably more dramatically for other channels. And so living room, us occupying space in the living room is very different.

Ben Smith:
And that’s real convergence basically, right. If I am a person who has enjoyed watching idiots yell at each other on cable news for years, I can now watch us idiots yell at each other and not even know it’s different, basically, right.

Samir:
Right, exactly.

Ben Smith:
Just to go back to the election, Colin, before, I can’t quite get away from it yet, and I really thought your post-election episode was so good. But one point you made, which I don’t know if this cuts against something Samir just said, but was that a lot of these Trump podcasts were not appointment viewing. They were smaller shows that then resonated. And I am curious if people are going to take the wrong lesson from that. Are a bunch of CEOs going to be desperate to go on mid-tier podcasts and imagine that they’ll then get a lot of attention when really only Donald Trump can do that? And maybe if you could explain your theory a little bit because I just botched it.

Colin:
Sure. So what we talked about in our episode about the election was that the strategy of Donald Trump was actually to go on a lot of niche podcasts. So he showed up on a golf channel, Bryson DeChambeau, he showed up on a crypto podcast, a smaller sports show. Shows that you stereotypically wouldn’t think would warrant a sit down interview with a presidential candidate. But the strategy here is, he can go on those shows with the understanding that traditional media will watch and clip it and talk about it anyway, so he’s getting a friendlier environment with generally an underserved community. The crypto community is like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe a potential president is sitting down with us. That’s amazing.” They’re so excited. So he gets to sit down in a really forgiving, excited place with the understanding that that will get clipped anyway.

Ben Smith:
I mean, that feels like only Donald Trump can get away with that, right? Or is that a replicable strategy?

Samir:
Well, I actually think Trump is using the Zuckerberg strategy.

Ben Smith:
Yeah.

Samir:
I actually think Zuck did that first. Zuck’s rebrand and reshaping of who he was and who he is, how that’s played out is a very similar way. He’s showing up on very niche shows, and he’s not doing the long, big sit downs. I mean, I think he did one with Bloomberg and maybe another one, but he is getting covered by the New York Times by things he says on podcast with Kane Kallaway, like an independent AI creator. And that’s a really interesting thought. And we’re seeing this too, right? We’re seeing a lot of outreach from tech CEOs who want to come on our show. And then we’re seeing that when we have Neal Mohan from YouTube on our show or Daniel Ek, that there’s outlets that cover the quotes from that episode. So it is a good strategy. It makes sense.

Nayeema Raza:
I loved in your podcast election debrief, I think, Colin, you might’ve made this point about these were endorsements, not grillings. I’m curious when you guys do an interview, when I hear you talk to Daniel Ek, you’re trying to do journalism, you’re trying to break news, understand a little bit, right? I mean, I don’t know. What are you trying to do? Are you grilling? Are you endorsing? Are you...

Samir:
To us, we don’t feel like we’re doing either of those things, nor do I think we’re journalists.

Ben Smith:
I’m afraid you are, sorry.

Samir:
I mean, it’s a interesting conversation.

Colin:
People bring this up to us a lot.

Samir:
People bring this up all the time. I have never considered myself a journalist. I never wanted to be a journalist. I’m allergic to the term.

Ben Smith:
Should I be insulted?

Nayeema Raza:
Why? Tell us why. Yeah, yeah, that’s okay. I didn’t come up as a journalist. I want to know why you’re allergic to it.

Samir:
I don’t know. I know nothing about what the journalistic code is and don’t... When I think about journalism, sometimes I think about gotcha journalism. And I think about, sometimes when I’ve been on with a journalist and my words have been taken out of context or the discomfort I feel with the journalist, I never want to give that.

Nayeema Raza:
Do you feel uncomfortable now?

Samir:
No, but do you guys consider yourself journalists?

Nayeema Raza:
I mean, Ben is a definitional journalist.

Samir:
I know, I know.

Nayeema Raza:
He was at the Indianapolis Star in the 1990s.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting though because I feel like a big part of what I think about all the time now is that there are people doing what looks to me a lot like journalism quite well, and in these new spaces. And then there are people in the old media doing sometimes very similar stuff. Sometimes they’re doing it well, sometimes they’re doing it badly. And how do you get that convergence to a place where we can talk to each other and do some of the same stuff? And I think sometimes you ought to be made uncomfortable. Sometimes the point of an interview when you’re talking to somebody very powerful is to ask the hard question that people won’t ask. That’s obviously an important thing to do. I don’t think you guys are particularly afraid of doing that, actually. Although you’re nice about it. When we interviewed Trump, he said to our reporter like, “Well, that’s a mean question, but you asked it very nicely,” Which I loved.

Samir:
That’s a high compliment though.

Colin:
Yeah, that’s high praise.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. But I think I really do feel like it’s worth encouraging that convergence, rather than arguing about this definitional stuff.

Samir:
Totally. I just never envisioned that. I envisioned myself as a filmmaker, a documentarian, a storyteller. It was never a word.

Colin:
I never want to feel a responsibility to journalism. I just want to feel a responsibility to our audience, which we feel is to educate.

Ben Smith:
Well, that’s what good journalists feel. The notion that journalists feel responsible to each other, to the profession, to a code, I totally agree with you, is a trap. You should feel responsible to your audience, and I think that’s what good journalists feel too.

Samir:
I also think the world of journalism and the creator economy right now can be at odds with each other because to be a creator, you’re in the ad business. And to hold some of those companies, hold power to account of your customers or your advertisers can be challenging. And I think it can get into a really murky place. I think journalists who are doing subscription backed and truly just have a relationship with their audience... And I, again, I don’t know the rules of that, of how that works when you’re getting paid by a tech company, but then you’re covering them at the same time. I don’t know how that works.

Ben Smith:
No, I mean, our sponsor is Google, right? So we deal with that all the time, and I think you probably do too. And I think the rule, I mean, there are the big picture rule, which I assume you observe too, is you want to be honest with your audience all the time.

Samir:
Yeah.

Nayeema Raza:
Well, I think that something that’s different, and I came into this industry as a maker, someone who makes video op-eds, someone who makes podcasts. I love making things. And the thing about journalism is there is this wall between you and the business side. You guys are so close to your analytics and you are paying attention to what your audience is thinking, what they want, their feedback. I’m not saying you’re necessarily driven by it, but you are attentive to it.

Samir:
You have to be.

Nayeema Raza:
Yeah. And news organizations, you’re taught to ignore that. And actually one of the critiques of journalism in the last four years is it’s become too beholden to its subscribers. So I find it really interesting how you guys grapple with this and what do you think the future is for you? All these news organizations are going to be interested in people like you.

Samir:
I think this whole career has been really, Colin describes it as the ticket to the extraordinary. Uploading videos has brought us to just, I didn’t know that uploading our thoughts on the podcast election would land us here with you guys. I don’t know. You just never know when you put out a story or put out your thoughts where it takes you. And it’s taken us to some pretty amazing places, places that I don’t think we anticipated when we first picked up cameras 13 years ago. So I don’t know the answer to that. What I can tell you is that right now, I think to be a successful creator in our business, you do have to operate more like a programming executive than an artist. You do have to think about the analytics, and you do have to think about what to put on the air that your audience is going to want because that drives the ads business.
All of us who are creators, we are thinking in that direction. And I think my impetus when I’m a college grad or when I studied at UC Santa Cruz studying film was to be a filmmaker and was to explore the art and the craft of storytelling. My hope is that in the next chapter, that is an opportunity for both Colin and I, and I think that might come in the convergence of traditional and digital media. Because I think our opportunity to work with, let’s say an A24, or produce something for a streaming platform, what’s really wonderful about that is that we are no longer... We have to think about it from a distribution mindset, but our job is to craft the story and then we work with someone who’s excellent at distributing that to an audience. That would be an amazing relationship in the future.

Ben Smith:
I mean, isn’t that sort of, when you talk about the business maturing, in a way isn’t what you’re talking about, being able to become divas who say, “I don’t care what the advertiser thinks, fuck them,” Like some old-fashioned journalist. Or, “I’m sticking to my art and pay me anyway.” I mean, in a way, when you talk about maturing of the business, it’s a specialization and that you guys are the creators, but that somebody else is worrying about the monetization.

Samir:
It’s very cyclical because initially you’re like, “This is amazing. I don’t have a boss. I can do whatever I want.” And I think what we’re starting to feel in the world of creators is that there’s some creators who including us, where it’s like for part of the business it’d be nice to have a boss, for someone to tell me when I’m on the air, when I’m off the air, how many episodes to make. Because we just produce and create in this Infinite world where it’s ever expanding. Technically, we could upload something every day. So every day you’re not uploading, you’re thinking in your head, “Should I be making something?” There’s no frameworks around it unless you put it on yourself. So I do think that the world of the creator economy might move back in that direction, but some of the current creators today will be the distribution platforms and the studios.

Ben Smith:
Totally.

Samir:
Yeah.

Nayeema Raza:
Well, speaking of programming, we’re going to take a quick break and we’ll be right back with Colin and Samir.

Ben Smith:
This week on our branded segment from Think with Google a particularly timely question. I spoke with Google’s VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about reaching a mass audience through fragmented media. So we’re living in this age of real media fragmentation, and how do you think about reaching a mass audience at a moment when people’s consumption is so fragmented, and is that even still important for marketers to reach a mass audience?

Josh Spanier:
Mass audiences are really, really important. And within the world of marketing, we come up with clever theories about all this. We talk about recency and getting the ad in front of someone just before they’re going to go shopping. And so you try and run ads every day of the year. And it obviously varies by product. If you are selling a car, you don’t need to be so visible all the time because the purchase decision is much longer. The Super Bowl is the biggest moment in the advertising year, but no one Super Bowl ad is going to change the trajectory of a brand for the whole year because most of the time, and this is a dirty secret of marketing, people don’t care. The biggest thing that I’m competing against is apathy. People want the content, they don’t want the ads particularly. So what we’re really striving for is relevancy, authenticity, and actually cultural resonance. Because when we get that, people will lean in and almost welcome the marketing into their world and into their lives. I’m sorry to go back to Barbenheimer. Last year.

Ben Smith:
Always.

Josh Spanier:
Two movies which touched a cultural nerve and the marketing built on that, and actually people participated in that moment. That’s the holy grail or the thing that all marketers really want to achieve at the mass level. How do you break through in culture? And it goes back to my old days working on movie studios. And in the world of magazines, what magazine cover did you want? You didn’t want the cover of the film magazine, you wanted Time Magazine. Because if you had on the cover of Time Magazine, that told you you’d broken through. That’s what we’re striving for.

Ben Smith:
And what’s the connection between the Big Bang Super Bowl ad that still people spend a of money on, and that kind of more organic quest for cultural relevance?

Josh Spanier:
Ideally, you are operating against whatever audience, large or niche in a way that actually connects and resonates with them. What I’m seeing in industry is a real move to what you might call the mid-funnel. So this is advertising and marketing, which connects with audiences because it’s useful and relevant to them in the moment, but also builds brand equity and love for the long-term. That Holy Trinity in the middle of long-term love, short-term action and relevancy in the middle.

Ben Smith:
Just to get really meta here, is that where we are right now, Josh? Recording in the mid-funnel?

Josh Spanier:
We are absolutely in the mid-funnel with a niche smart audience who likes this content.

Ben Smith:
Where can people who want to join us in the mid-funnel find out more about this?

Josh Spanier:
So there’s a great article on Thinkwithgoogle.com if you search, tips on agile marketing. It really speaks to how you can actually build agile, creative, data-driven creative and actually be relevant in the mid-funnel. So tips on agile marketing at Thinkwithgoogle.com.

Ben Smith:
Thank you, Josh.

Nayeema Raza:
Are there projects you want to make? How many videos are there that you think about that you don’t make?

Colin:
Oh my gosh.

Samir:
Oh my God. Unbelievable. This doesn’t have to do with videos, but it’ll tell you how our brains work when it comes to creative projects. My niche addiction is to domains. I buy so many domains because-

Nayeema Raza:
Oh my gosh. You’re like a domain slumlord?

Colin:
He’s like a GoDaddy Ultra-premium member.

Samir:
Yes.

Ben Smith:
When the whole web goes away, this is going to look like a bad investment.

Samir:
Totally, totally. But I get calls from GoDaddy sometimes just thanking me for my business because I have to renew these domains. Basically Colin and I and a cup of coffee is a bad combination for like, “Ooh, that would be such a good idea. We should buy that domain. Does that exist?”

Colin:
We see our whole lives changing.

Nayeema Raza:
Wait, sorry, I need you to log into your GoDaddy right now. And I’m like, tell us some of these domains and-

Colin:
We can tell you what some of them are.

Samir:
What was the gum brand name? Because I bought that and that was very expensive.

Colin:
Oh, yeah. What was that?

Samir:
So there’s one that prior to Colin and Samir taking off, we were dead set on starting an alarm clock company. This is in 2018-

Colin:
Called Upright.

Samir:
Called Upright, and we bought the domain getupright.com.

Colin:
And it was about taking your phone out of the bedroom, which I think would [inaudible 00:26:19] company success.

Samir:
It ended up happening. Yeah.

Colin:
Samir’s opening up his GoDaddy right now. He’ll run you through all of them.

Samir:
Yeah, just give me a second.

Colin:
But yeah, there are, I mean, thousands of videos that we want to make and that we don’t make, for sure.

Samir:
Yeah. What do you think the most niche one is here? I mean, some of these are based on Colin’s wearing a hat from our skateboard company that we launched [inaudible 00:26:37]

Colin:
Called Bordees. We own multiple domains for that.

Samir:
Brushyourteeth.world. A tooth brushing brand.

Colin:
That was a good one. That was going to come with an animated show that was all about teaching young kids dental hygiene.

Samir:
Get upright. We do this thing, we actually still do it called Weekend Film Fest, where we give 48 hours. We give a prompt and we give people 48 hours to make a movie, a one-minute movie, typically on their phone or something quick. But we have weekendfilmfest.com, .org, .net, .info, whatever you want. I probably can sling you a domain.

Nayeema Raza:
How many are there?

Samir:
So I have multiple accounts. This one has, how many domains is this? I mean, it’s a never ending scroll.

Colin:
Yeah, incredible.

Samir:
It doesn’t stop. Hitfactory.la, which was our ad agency at one point that we wanted to start.

Ben Smith:
See, the problem is when you have a boss, the first thing they’re going to do is cut the budget for domain names.

Samir:
Yeah, that’s really funny. That would probably be the first thing that happened. But this gives you insight into us as creatives of how many videos do we want to make that we don’t make? I mean, daily, there’s videos we want to make.

Nayeema Raza:
I mean, the thing about Hollywood is the delay and the projects you don’t have control over. You just go into meetings where people are like, “Love your idea, love the thing, let’s keep talking.” And years later, you haven’t made the thing. And I think that’s what’s really exciting. That’s when YouTube came around that was so cool to see people just starting to make their stuff and it take off in awesome ways.

Samir:
Well, Hollywood is risk management, as are most businesses. So why do we see another Spider-Man and another Spider-Man? Because that’ll put butts in seats. We bring you our niche artsy idea. It’s like, why would I take a risk on that? So a lot of things have to go right for Hollywood to take a risk and then all those risks turn to the internet.

Nayeema Raza:
Are you afraid of, I look up something like Vice, they were making really cool YouTube content. I loved it. And then it started getting all this legacy media money poured into it. A&E bought 10% at crazy valuation. And HBO is like, “Let’s have a cable channel of Vice.” And then fast-forward, obviously there were also some personnel and broader issues happening at Vice, but fast-forward, what happens to Vice? Do you worry about that for the creator economy right now, as there is money and interest from not just advertisers, but behemoth media entities?

Colin:
I think it’s something that all creators need to look at, finding themselves in a position where they’re making revenue backed creative. And I think every creator needs to look at, even if it’s a small creator or a creator with hundreds of employees, I think you need to think about what you’re putting out, who it’s for, and how much of it actually are you making because you got paid for it from a certain brand, right? Because then I think that’s when you get to that point like a Vice where you’ve lost the plot of why you’re doing what you’re doing, and you’re looking at 85% of your media is just made because you did a deal with a brand.

Ben Smith:
And also, there’s revenue backed creative. I mean, there’s also investment backed creative.

Colin:
Totally.

Samir:
Yeah, totally.

Ben Smith:
I was running Buzzfeed for a while and Vice was producing wonderful stuff on YouTube that the economics of YouTube were just never going to send you guys to Syria for two months return with a crew of security guards. And they just got way ahead of the economics of the space, in a way that to me is sad, but was also obvious at the time.

Samir:
My honest perspective is that good creative doesn’t scale. It never does. And I think media and good media formats scale, but good creative is so hard to scale. And I think sometimes it feels like you can scale it just by pouring money on it. But what was happening at Buzzfeed in those early days with The Try Guys and with Worth It, those were magical times. And those guys are really creative and they’re all still creating.

Ben Smith:
And they were also so careful about cost. We were so careful about cost back then.

Samir:
Yeah, but those guys are creative and the formats were good. But it is challenging to scale it at a multiple that investment requires.

Ben Smith:
I mean, YouTube also favors, and I think, I guess my conspiracy theory here, you guys are the experts. I’m curious what you think. I think YouTube is built to favor individual creators over any middleman, be it some kind of collective or union, be it a media company. And I think that’s ultimately to the benefit of the platform, whether it’s Uber or whether it’s YouTube or another one to atomize their creators. And it’s good for a creator, but it does limit the scale. And I think that’s actually to some degree a YouTube. And I’ve yelled at Neal Mohan about this. I think that’s to some degree a choice of how YouTube is organized itself, more than a feature of the universe. But maybe that’s a conspiracy theory.

Colin:
I think it’s a bit of a symbiotic relationship. I think audiences also want content from what feels like the grassroots individual creator and getting to see their rise. And it is good for the story of YouTube and for making sure that there are more independent creators who are going to come about

Ben Smith:
The story, but also the profit margins. If YouTube was dominated by four cartels, like the music industry, they would have narrower margins like the music industry.

Colin:
Yeah, of course.

Nayeema Raza:
The thing about, you were saying Samir about the creative doesn’t scale. It’s such an interesting point. And your conversation with the showrunner, there was this conversation about writing rooms. I mean, a lot of Hollywood is trying to do these mini rooms. I mean, this is why we went on strike and WGA, et cetera, and there has been a desire to actually cut down the costs. Your GoDaddy account cuts weren’t enough, and now it’s like, there’d be fewer writers. But then here comes AI down the pike, and I think no one knows really how to think about it. Do you see AI being... I’ve been listening to NotebookLM podcast, I was wondering what I do that the NotebookLM cannot do. How do you think about AI changing the business?

Samir:
You provide inefficiency, and that is actually a good thing in some respects. I think that’s the question. There’s going to be places where efficiency is very valued. Sitting in a conference room and brainstorming, it’s interesting. It’s an interesting question of, “Hey, we want to come up with 10 title variations for this YouTube channel.” If I ask ChatGPT that question, I need 10 title variations. It happens in a matter of seconds. I can get to thousands in a matter of the time I could get to 10 with a group of creatives. That’s a question of which one is better? Is the inefficiency of it better for a certain project because we want to bounce around and feel that collaboration?
Or is the efficiency of it better? I think that continues to beg the question of media versus art. Media needs to be efficient. We’re running on a schedule. Again, like Colin said, revenue back to creative often happens. Conference room creative is what I call it. Sometimes it’s like when you’re sitting in a conference room and you’re like, “This advertiser wants to buy this, what do we make?” And you have to come up with something in a conference room. I’m not looking down on it. I’ve been in those conference rooms. I think great creative comes out.

Colin:
It’s taught us a lot. It’s a great prompt for creating something, learning.

Samir:
But you have to be efficient. And Ben, The Try Guys told the story on our podcast about how at Buzzfeed, there was four of them, and at one point they were approached and they were like, “We think it’s more efficient if it’s just one of you guys in these videos. Do all four of you have to go be in these videos?” I think that’s a great example of efficiency versus inefficiency.

Ben Smith:
Right, and we were trying to create a factory for creative in a way, and there was a second when it felt like it was going to work.

Samir:
Right. But good creative doesn’t scale because it’s inefficient. It’s inefficient and it’s unpredictable. I think creators are more musicians than we currently talk about them. We don’t talk about them in the same way that we would talk about a band, where you look at The Try Guys, they’re a band and do we know they’ve written great albums, they’ve written great songs. How they write their next one might look completely different from how they wrote their last one. And we might not... There’s some pop stars and musicians with big commercial opportunities that you might invest in. But then there’s other bands that you’re like, “They wrote a great album, man, but I’m not going to put a million dollars behind them with the expectation that maybe they’d write another great album.”

Nayeema Raza:
And there’s also musicians who are like, “I’m done making music,” For whatever reason.

Samir:
Sure.

Nayeema Raza:
But the difference being, of course, they own both sides of their rights in this case. These musicians versus the labels, right?

Ben Smith:
Yeah, and I think media companies broadly have not mostly figured out a model for, because I think the Buzzfeed perspective on this, and I was adjacent to this. I was running news was like, “Wait, we gave these guys their start, but ultimately they’re the talented ones. They can take the talent and leave with it and they will.” And I think Buzzfeed and other companies that gave birth to a generation of YouTubers, or at least played were an important stepping stone for a generation of YouTubers-

Colin:
Yeah, totally.

Ben Smith:
Vox is another with Johnny Harris, and Cleo didn’t quite figure out, how do we create a business arrangement ultimately where both sides feel that it’s really fair and where we’re providing real value and support? And I think that’s where YouTube really doesn’t want a middleman, they want to be the business partner, is part of it. It’s interesting, and I wonder, just to switch to a big picture question about YouTube, it does feel like they really, they faced some challenges, whether it was the Nebula type stuff or whether it was Rumble. There’ve been moments when creators were really unhappy with YouTube and Instagram and TikTok, or we’re talking to creators, but it feels like they’ve really cemented their place as the absolute center of the universe. And I’m curious how they did that and what you think about that.

Colin:
I think it’s just the right model over time. I mean, there’s just no other platform that pays out in the 55/45 split that can actually pay you a significant amount of money over time in the way that YouTube does, and allow you to have a community. I think people who aren’t active YouTube creators and don’t have a business on YouTube don’t understand how amazing it is to create content that you enjoy, find an audience and have money show up almost like magic because you’re not contacting the advertisers, you’re not making any of those deals. The ads are just playing at scale. It truly is an incredible system that is very unique to YouTube. It’s really hard to build those types of businesses from direct payments from the platform on an Instagram, a Facebook, TikTok, any other platform.

Samir:
And I think part of that clarity, and I think revenue transparency is super important if you want to build a creator ecosystem. Do we know everything that goes into that 45/55 split? No. But we feel like that is what we understand is 45/55, and it feels very understandable, but that also clarifies our relationship and our value to the platform of like, “All right...” It’s always been really clear. You get more people to watch for longer and you’re rewarded more. Other platforms, like a TikTok or Instagram Reels, it’s really unclear our value to the platform and our relationship to the platform.

Colin:
You’re incredibly replaceable on those platforms. Whereas on YouTube, if you’re building an evergreen library of content, you’re seeing your viewership go up exponentially over time and your revenue. So if you look at the money that we made from YouTube specifically year over year, it was like the first year we had monetization, it was $4,000. Of course, that’s nowhere near enough for two guys at 30 to sustain in Los Angeles. We’re making money in other ways. Year two, it’s 16, year three, I think it was like 84. And then after that-

Samir:
And it just started ramping.

Colin:
... it just started ramping up because we’ve got this library effect over time.

Nayeema Raza:
Is the majority of your revenue, what percentage of your revenue comes from sponsorships versus from AdSense?

Samir:
About 10% comes from AdSense.

Nayeema Raza:
Wow.

Samir:
Most is sponsorships. Yeah. Just like any other media business. And I think also when you’re a niche media business, that’s typically where you live. But this year also another significant line item is speaking events, like-

Ben Smith:
Checks in the mail for this.

Colin:
Oh, thank you. Appreciate it.

Samir:
Good.

Ben Smith:
Yeah.

Nayeema Raza:
Okay, here’s a question because I have been mulling as someone who came from making things, and I have a show idea that I’ve been sitting on. I have a GoDaddy account where I bought every single domain version of this name, .life.com, whatever, all over it. Is it still a good time to get in? Is it still a good time to build on YouTube? Is there space for new creators?

Colin:
I think, if you like it and you have time, yes, which is the same answer I would’ve given 10 years ago. If you like it and you have time.

Samir:
Here’s what’s incredible about YouTube. It is a recommendation algorithm. So what’s amazing about it is that so long as you understand how to get your content recommended. The majority of traffic for any creator, including ourselves, comes from suggested videos. Meaning, if I am watching another video and then my video gets suggested, that is how the majority of recommendations work. So when you think about that, that’s why every YouTube creator harps on titles and thumbnails because you have to look both familiar to an audience.
So if I’m a gardening creator and I want to show up next to Epic Gardening who’s a massive gardening channel, I have to look like I’m a gardening channel, so I can research all the gardening channels on YouTube. Then I have to find the white space, just like any other product conversation you’d go, “What’s missing from gardening? How do I show people in a thumbnail and title that I’m doing something totally different in gardening?” But also signal to them that I’m a gardening channel. So visually, you can start to solve some of that. And if you’re willing to research YouTube and research your niche, you can jump in at any time because you’re jumping into a recommendation algorithm.

Ben Smith:
What’s your niche going to be, Nayeema? What’s happening here?

Nayeema Raza:
Oh, I don’t worry about it, Ben. I’m going to tell you in the next episode.

Samir:
Ben’s like, “Wait, are you jumping ship? Is this happening live?”

Ben Smith:
This is happening. We’re doing this live.

Nayeema Raza:
I’m doing this live. I’m going to hit you guys up for advice.

Ben Smith:
I have a last question for you before we let you guys go, which is, I think a lot of people listen to this are probably maybe in my position, which is to say, with the one foot in both worlds, doing something new, interested in doing new things, but also coming out of legacy media. What do you feel like the legacy media is getting most wrong about this YouTube space, and what’s the old stereotype of YouTube that you hear where the world has changed? Because that’s so much what I learned from your newsletter, is that the YouTube world is changing so much, so fast.

Samir:
Maybe that it’s for kids. It is largely there’s a big kid audience there. But I do think that there’s maybe a misguided assumption that every YouTube creator is primarily making content for a very young audience. But I would say that’s probably one of the assumptions that I think is not correct and is moving away. There’s all types of audiences that exist on YouTube now. And I’d say the other thing is just about creators. I think when Legacy Media has engaged with creators in the past, they’ve engaged with creators as talent. I think A Little Late with Lilly Singh is a great example. Hey, here’s Lilly Singh. She’s a popular creator. Let’s put her into a Hollywood production company and into a traditional format and let her be talent. We are very uncomfortable in that setting because we produce our stuff, and we use ourselves on camera as a tool to tell a story.
And so I think as we move forward, the thing that will continue to happen is that the creators will be the production companies. You might even see over time that we, like with us, it’s very possible that the next evolution of Colin and Samir is not Colin and Samir on Camera. Because we currently are a vehicle to tell stories, but we are storytellers and we’re really passionate about storytelling on the internet and about the internet. So I think you might be surprised at how some of these YouTube creators evolve and maybe the legacy media would be confused of like, “Wait, that person’s on camera. Why would they want to direct films?” But actually we’re all just people who wanted to tell a story and tried to do it with the least amount of friction, which was a camera and ourselves. And so the evolution of where that goes might surprise people.

Colin:
I would say for me is just production value in general. I think a lot of times traditional media still assumes that there is value to production value, but what matters is value to the audience. That’s what production value is for digital creators. And I was watching Jason Kelce’s a former Eagles player who just launched a YouTube channel and it’s doing relatively well. But there’s this one thing I see in a lot of celebrities who start YouTube channels is that they’re hosting to the camera and then there’s a second angle that they cut to where all of a sudden they’re not. And they’re like this talking to the audience. That is a classic traditional media thing to do because that’s how traditional media shoots interviews. It’s like you have an angle down the lens, then you got an angle on the side in case you need to cut.

Ben Smith:
Didn’t one of you guys go to film school? I feel like people are listening to this and weeping.

Samir:
No, but it’s a different medium, man. It’s different. It’s just not... It’s reality TV, where you want to feel like it’s very real and that you’re in the room with the person and you’re looking them in the eyes. That is this evolution of the medium. You want that side shot when you’re watching the Money Heist documentary on Netflix, but you don’t want it on YouTube.

Colin:
But to be honest, I think traditional media is getting better. I think there are more people that are able to help them. Even Jason Kelce’s channel, who I just brought up, it’s actually not that bad. Five years ago it would’ve been way worse. They’re clearly working with someone who understands YouTube and paying attention a little bit.

Samir:
The biggest convergence event is about to happen, which everyone will see play out, which is Beast Games. That’s one of the largest reality competition shows ever, if not the largest. And you have a traditional production crew and this group that’s been making the biggest YouTube videos coming together to make something. So you go like, “Here’s the people who’ve been making TV for a long time. Here’s the people who make the modern version of it. Can they actually make a show that matters?”

Ben Smith:
It’s a really interesting question.

Samir:
We’ll see.

Colin:
Yeah.

Samir:
Yeah, we’ll see.

Nayeema Raza:
We’ll see.

Ben Smith:
Next episode.

Samir:
Yeah.

Nayeema Raza:
You’ll be here by yourself, Ben.

Ben Smith:
Max will be here with me.

Nayeema Raza:
Max will be here with you. You’ll never be alone. Thanks so much, Colin and Samir for doing this. This is awesome.

Samir:
Thank you guys.

Colin:
Yeah, thanks for having us.

Ben Smith:
Thank you guys. This was fascinating.

Nayeema Raza:
Oh, they were great. And here we have Max Tani here with us. See Ben, never alone. Never alone.

Max Tani:
Yes. How’s it going guys?

Ben Smith:
Good. You were listening.

Max Tani:
I was, exactly. It was very voyeuristic experience listening in the virtual booth. It was interesting. It was interesting to hear Samir say that it was weird to play lacrosse in Southern California when he was growing up, which is slightly different from my experience. I feel like there were some lacrosse bros. They existed. It’s more of an east coast thing, but-

Ben Smith:
Wow, you’re really cutting to the heart of this, Max. Did you only listen to the first four minutes?

Max Tani:
No. I just think that, I was just thinking the premise of the whole thing that got this whole media journey started is, I think it’s maybe a little faulty.

Nayeema Raza:
You’re here to backfield fact check Colin and Samir about lacrosse realities.

Max Tani:
Look, I’m just saying, I just think it’s interesting to get a little bit and to question the origin stories. As a journalist, I sometimes still do that. Obviously the creators, maybe they don’t necessarily.

Nayeema Raza:
So let’s talk about that moment because I love that moment where there was a recoiling at the idea that they’re doing journalism in these interviews, which of course is, I mean, they define who they are, so that makes total sense. Were we offended as people who are in the business of journalism?

Ben Smith:
No, I don’t think it’s a matter of being offended, but I do think there’s this real urgency right now, where they know that their audience would like true facts rather than made up facts. Nobody doesn’t think that. And mostly your audience is there, their audience listening, they’re trying to figure stuff out about how to have their own careers as creators. Obviously they want accurate, true facts. And I do think that there’s all this charge language around journalism and news and the media, and yet there are also lots of people in these new spaces trying to do stuff that is really not that different from what we do, or certainly, I mean, if you’re talking about political commentary, what people on cable news do, and I really think there’s an opportunity to rally around some idea that we all want true information, which doesn’t have to be associated with whatever fights about legacy media people like to have with each other.

Max Tani:
Yeah, I mean, I thought that that moment obviously was pretty interesting too, because the reality is that while they don’t consider themselves to be journalists in the traditional sense, if you listen to their interview with Daniel Ek, for example, I was like, “This is so informative. It is serving much of the same purpose as traditional interview journalism, which is just digging in really deep with people with subject matter expertise, interviewing somebody who is genuinely interested in getting into the nitty-gritty with them,” So I think that. But at the same time, I will say it’s very clear why it’s appealing to a CEO who might not want to sit down with the Wall Street Journal, or might have to do a little bit more prep before sitting down with a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, because these guys are, it’s in their mission statement that they don’t necessarily want to be confrontational in the same way. It’s going to be substantive, but not necessarily trying to rip their throats out. Which sometimes it’s true that those of us in the legacy media want to do.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, but by the way, there are many employees of fancy publications who are, it’s called access journalism. It’s fine. That’s totally allowed.

Nayeema Raza:
Yeah. I heard their answer in two ways. One of which was like, there is no agenda to what Colin and Samir are doing, in terms of, they’re not trying to be newsmakers. That the agenda, the purpose they’re serving is to get information for their audience that’s relevant to their audience of aspiring creatives like myself, of creators who are existing businesses of people who are trying to make sense of the media. But the second part of it was a reaction that’s just a cultural moment of, there’s a premium on independence and a discount on anything institutional, right.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, that’s for sure.

Nayeema Raza:
In a real way right now. And that has always been the case. The videos of many YouTubers has been like, “Why I left BuzzFeed.” There’s so many, why I left BuzzFeed videos.

Ben Smith:
So when we were at Buzzfeed it was so annoying that that was the most popular genre of YouTube video.

Nayeema Raza:
Still waiting for yours, Ben.

Ben Smith:
I actually wanted to... I think, weren’t we going to call our first episode of this podcast, “Why I left The New York Times?”

Nayeema Raza:
I mean, I had suggested that to you, but I hadn’t really fully left the New York Times.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I think that was the problem.

Max Tani:
Can I bring up really something that I’ve been thinking about a little bit lately, as we’ve seen a lot of this post-election discussion about YouTube, and at the same time, YouTube has also talked a lot about the things that Colin and Samir were both mentioning, which was viewership of YouTube on the physical TV, the connected TVs in the home? I actually do think that there are some areas where the legacy media and legacy TV networks and cable networks have actually built successful YouTube video businesses. Which is, if you look at what Saturday Night Live does, Saturday Night Live’s built an incredibly big and successful and good business on YouTube.
Comedy Central with the Daily Show, those clips are, I’m sure that they’re getting more views on YouTube than almost any episode that they get in a single night. And so in some ways it’s really interesting to watch some of these TV networks. What I think that Colin and Samir are talking about is really the talk media space has really been run away with by these creators on YouTube. And TV is very, very, very slow to catch up to that. I think in part because investing money and time in that space is not something that they’re necessarily native at.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, it’s the least expensive thing to do and to compete with. I mean, the thing just to get to Saturday Night Live and NBC, it’s also that one of the things NBC really did successfully that Linda Yaccarino was working on before she left to Twitter, was to build this massive advertising sales engine that would sell huge brands. A package that included YouTube, included television, included 19 other things, and got them a much better rate than they would be getting from AdSense, than some creator was getting from AdSense. Which means they can pay their talent more, they can get the great comedians to show up mean. And that’s where great is independence is, their advantages is to the scale of a media company like that.

Nayeema Raza:
Yeah, but I think there’s nothing that competes with the engagement that some of these creators have in terms of their really dedicated audience. It’s one thing to have a big audience, it’s another thing to have an audience that will follow you, and that believes... That has a parasocial relationship with you.

Ben Smith:
Well, that’s actually a great path to Saturday Live though. I mean, these things are convergent.

Nayeema Raza:
Of course, but I think one of the things with Saturday Night Live is the format and even the Daily show, and Late Night is the format is made to be clipped. I think those segments feel wholesome. Forget the advertising part of the equation for a moment and talk about the audience. Do you have a wholesome experience when you’re watching a clip? Yes, if you’re watching those couple of shows, but not if you’re watching a lot of other things where legacy media companies we’re like, “Let’s put a bunch of trailers and things that will make you want to subscribe to our channel to watch the show.” That stuff just doesn’t pay off. Audiences don’t want that.

Ben Smith:
It’s marketing rather than content, in a way.

Nayeema Raza:
Exactly. And what feels like real content is what this community is after on YouTube. And they have tons of it, so you have to compete.

Max Tani:
The last thing I thought, to wrap us up here was that listening to them talk a little bit about the business that they were in and the way that they make money. It’s like, hmm, 10% from AdSense, the rest from sponsorships, and then also some event stuff that they do. That sounds a little bit like our business.

Ben Smith:
I mean, the media is not that complicated a business. And there’s a lot of convergence out there. Yeah, we got to get them at some of our events. That was my takeaway. Yeah.

Nayeema Raza:
All right. Well, for anyone who liked listening today’s episode, you should definitely check out the Colin and Samir Show. You can watch it on YouTube. You can listen to it on your podcast because a show is just a show. It’s not a podcast or a YouTube show or any of that. And you can subscribe to their paper of record, which is called...

Ben Smith:
Publish Press.

Nayeema Raza:
Yes, exactly. Although it’s a non-journalistic paper of record of the YouTube space. I think that was the correction we heard. Thank you for listening to... Oh my God, I forgot the name of our show. Thank you for listening to Mixed Signals.

Ben Smith:
Wow. Foot Out the Door.

Nayeema Raza:
Thanks for listening to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. Our show is produced by Max Tani and Sheena Ozaki. With special thanks, Max Toomey, Britta Gladys, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pozzino, Garrett Wiley, and Jules Zern. Our engineer is Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Billy Libby and our public editor...

Ben Smith:
Our public editor is Joe Posner, who introduced me to Publish Press. A great video producer, creator who straddles these spaces.

Nayeema Raza:
All right, if you like mixed signals, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts and feel free to review us.

Max Tani:
And if you still value the written words, those words that go onto a page or a screen, please subscribe to Semafor’s Media newsletter, which publishes every Sunday evening.