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PORTSIDE CULTURE

YOUTUBE JUST ATE TV. IT’S ONLY GETTING STARTED  
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Alex Weprin
October 15, 2025
The Hollywood Reporter
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_ In two decades, the app has grown from a user-generated circus into
the most powerful platform on earth. CEO Neal Mohan on his $100
billion vision for YouTube’s future and the disruption it’s left
in its wake. _

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan (center) was photographed Sept. 16 in New
York City with creators (from left) Kinigra Deon, Michelle Khare,
Marques Brownlee, Adam W Waheed, Cleo Abram, Trixie Mattel, Katie
Feeney, Jesse Jesser Riedel, Brittany Broski and Dhar Mann,
Photographed by Jake Chessum

 

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
[[link removed]] 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.

Photographed by Jake Chessum

***

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.”

From left: Katie Feeney, Kinigra Deon and Jesse “Jesser”
Riedel Photographed by Jake Chessum

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.

***

SNL’s “Lazy Sunday” sketch in 2005 paved the way for YouTube to
become a destination for media channels.

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 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_. “ 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 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.

Clockwise from top left: Michelle Khare, Brittany Broski, Trixie
Mattel and Marques Brownlee. Photographed by Jake Chessum

“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.

Cleo Abram (top), who focuses on tech explainers and has
6.73 million subscribers, hangs with (from left) Adam W
(20.8 million subs) and Dhar Mann (26.1 million). Photographed by
Jake Chessum

***

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.

YouTube’s Brandcast event was the culmination of this year’s
upfront week in New York. Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

***

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, and the
former Jefferson County school building will make for a critical piece
of the puzzle, with so many of her shows and scenes set in schools.
Scrolling through photos of the project on her phone, Deon shows off
the construction that includes a creator lounge, a place where the
actors she casts in her shows and videos can conceptualize and create
their own content.

“The goal is to cast more in Alabama, to make Alabama more of a hub
for filming and entertainment,” Deon says. The state, in turn, has
revamped its entertainment incentive program, which went into effect
Oct. 1, upping its annual production cap to $22 million.

Deon is a textbook example of how YouTube is shifting the center of
gravity away from Los Angeles, spreading it across the country. Just
as MrBeast has turned Greenville, North Carolina, into a veritable
company town, Deon wants to turn Birmingham into a true production
hub.

Her next big bet is a feature-length movie, backed by Kevin Hart’s
HartBeat and the Amazon-funded Spotter. “What I’m hoping for when
we release that movie is that it sends a widespread message that you
don’t have to wait to release something that you’re passionate
about. You just have to do it,” Deon says.

Scott Purdy, the U.S. media industry leader at KPMG, says that more
traditional studios and platforms will ultimately pursue deals with
scripted creators, though it may take time for some to emerge.
MrBeast, for example, isn’t stopping with just Amazon. His company
recently hired Corie Henson, the former head of unscripted at NBC, to
lead his company’s new studio, which includes animation and scripted
content.

In some cases, however, that jump is being made more out of necessity.

“A lot of YouTubers feel as if they have a lot of control over their
work and their time and their content, and that’s true to an extent,
but algorithm changes can have a significant impact on your
success,” says one creator who has spoken to other streaming
services about licensing content, explaining why they are exploring
options.

“We’re proud of the fact that YouTube is this epicenter of
culture, and it looks like other companies have noticed that as
well,” Mohan says with a smile when asked about interest from other
companies in creator-led content. “But I would also say that what
creators always tell me is that their home is YouTube, so I love the
fact that they use their success on YouTube to create these other
opportunities for themselves.”

Perhaps the most significant things that need to happen for scripted
content to break out, multiple sources across the creator ecosystem
say, is for ad dollars to migrate from prestige TV (or at least linear
TV) toward scripted creators, and for the user experience to match.

“Brands need to recognize the opportunity that’s happening with
YouTube — which they are — and that’s going to cause CPMs to
start to rise,” Mann says, explaining his thesis. “At a certain
point, you get to an inflection point where the cost of creating
content is cheaper than the amount of revenue that you can generate
because CPMs are going up, costs are going down. And then ultimately,
it’s whoever can build the biggest community.”

And YouTube is building out a TV experience that is better suited for
that model, rolling out a redesign on TVs that is, frankly, more
Netflix-like in appearance, allowing creators to structure their
channels around shows and seasons in pursuit of a more traditional TV
experience, albeit supplemented with YouTube traits like comments.

“YouTube doesn’t feel like a scripted environment quite yet,”
one business-side source says, adding that ultimately, the
“monetization plus user experience will get there.”

There are signs that media buyers and marketers are trending in
that direction.

“I’ve brought chief investment officers and chief marketing
officers to some of these studios, and they can start to see how big a
business and how scaled the opportunity is for them,” says Sean
Downey, the executive who oversees YouTube parent Google’s sprawling
ad sales business. “When you bring 10 clients to see MrBeast in
North Carolina, you can start to see the creativity, how they can lift
the business, how they integrate their brand into the consumer
viewing; you start to see the light bulb go off.”

It’s another way of saying that the platform believes that its $36
billion-plus in annual advertising revenue is still at the early
stages of a long runway.

That is also reflected in YouTube’s conquering of what was once a
flagship event of the broadcast TV era: upfront week. The annual
spectacle, with thousands of media buyers and advertisers
crisscrossing Manhattan to be wooed and pitched by TV networks, has
already transformed into something more corporate. Disney pitched
every piece of its media empire, not just ABC; Paramount exited the
week altogether; and Netflix and Amazon shoved their way in as they
seek more ad dollars.

But YouTube has settled in as the week’s culminating event, taking
over Lincoln Center with its Brandcast event and delivering a show
with more assuredness and confidence than its competitors, analog or
digital, multiple media buyers said. This year’s show, presided over
by Broski, saw MrBeast doing a stunt with former NFL stars Rob
Gronkowski and Julian Edelman and _Hot Ones_ host Sean Evans making
an appearance. The platform, Mohan told the buyers in attendance, is
the only place where viewership can be measured in billions, with a
“B,” a scale unmatched by any competitor. The event concluded with
a set from Lady Gaga, complete with costume changes and a full band.
“Today, YouTube has become the epicenter of culture,” Mohan said.
“And I don’t mean short-lived fads or a one-off hit show. I mean
culture with a capital ‘C.’ The place where day after day, year
after year, the events, conversations and voices that define the
moment break through.”

Of course, YouTube’s immense scale is also the source of the most
grumbling from its studio and streaming competitors. Many YouTube
creators view the studio executives as gatekeepers, the old guard that
once held sway over what got made and what didn’t. Studio
executives, meanwhile, dismiss YouTube and its growth as something
less than the sum of its parts. Sure, there are big channels operated
by traditional media companies, and some creators are doing good work,
but in terms of raw numbers, most content uploaded to the platform is
anything but premium.

“There’s still a perception, particularly in the traditional space
around YouTube and YouTube culture, that’s probably looked down
upon,” one high-level source who plays in both worlds says. “I
don’t think the audience gives a shit, or at least a segment of the
audience, but I do think there’s a little bit of a hump to overcome
there.”

Yes, Mark Rober is shooting rockets into space, and Kinigra Deon is
filming original fantasy shows, but videos about fixing your
dishwasher and a three-hour feed of a hike through a wooded trail are
there right next to them. There are clips from _Last Week
Tonight_ but also clips from classic David Letterman episodes,
baseball games from the 1970s, gamers playing _Fortnite_ and New
Year’s Eve ball drops from 1956.

It’s a hotbed of creativity “but it’s also, frankly, just a
reflection of humanity,” Mohan says.

While a platform like HBO carefully curates its content, YouTube has
something for everyone and bets that it can use its algorithm to
deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.

But the scale of the platform is also why many creators have sought to
leverage their reach to move beyond it. “The value for is the
platform over the individuals. No one individual, not even MrBeast,
really moves the needle for them,” one source says.

It’s a big reason why creators are leaning into consumer products
like snacks and skin care creams and why people like Mann and Ms.
Rachel are also licensing their content to such platforms as Netflix
and Samsung TV Plus. “I’ve always felt that it’s easier to turn
an audience into dollars than dollars into an audience, and so you
might as well start where someone already has an audience if you want
to run a successful business,” one creator says. For creators,
it’s about minimizing risk, though YouTube can (and does) frame it
as a positive. “The beauty of the YouTube model is you control your
own destiny,” Mohan says. “You own the content, you’re not
licensing the content. It’s yours, you get to choose how you want to
monetize it.”

Sitting on a stool on the stage in the Google New York office after
the creator event, Mohan was asked by Max Klymenko, who hosts a show
called _Career Ladder_, whether the emergence of “creators” as a
career has changed his approach personally as an executive. Mohan
responds in the affirmative, noting the studios that people like Deon
and Mann have built. “It’s personally very important for me to not
just continue to grow this creator ecosystem, but for it to actually
be a viable, respectable and sustainable career path for lots of young
people in this country and really, all over the world,” he says.

The NFL’s Sept. 5 matchup in Brazil was YouTube’s first exclusive
game. Buda Mendes/Getty Images

The moment Mohan realized that the combination of YouTube’s creators
and the NFL’s live games could work well together was at a league
owners meeting, where the CEO had brought Mark Rober to explain what
he does to the attendees.

“All the NFL owners are there, Roger and his team are there, and all
the young people there — the kids and the grandkids — they were
obviously interested in the athletes, but they swarmed Mark rover as
soon as he got off stage,” Mohan recalls. “For me, that was when
it clicked, these YouTubers are a phenomenon into themselves … I
knew at that moment that this bet between the NFL and YouTube was
going to have this greater magic to it.”

Viewers of the Brazil game got a taste of what’s possible: “Watch
With” parties saw creators provide their own live commentary, in
something akin to ESPN’s Manningcast. It doesn’t take much to
imagine a future where games have dozens, or even hundreds, of creator
commentary options. The platform has also used its relationship to get
creators access to the field, to locker rooms, to places that in the
recent past would have been off-limits.

“I feel like the ecosystem is really blending, the creators have
built a new lane in terms of the content they’re making, where each
creator is their own production company and making their own sports
content, and now they’re merging more and more with traditional
sports,” says Jesser.

Many of YouTube’s most popular creators release sports-adjacent
content weekly, from Dude Perfect to Deestroying, Jesser to
iShowSpeed. But in a move that has raised the eyebrows of Hollywood
executives, YouTube has been getting into business with the leagues
more directly.

When YouTube cut a deal to pay the NFL about $2 billion annually for
the NFL Sunday Ticket streaming service in 2022, it stunned the TV
business, signaling that it was serious about sports – the last
frontier of traditional TV domination. In addition to the NFL, sources
say that YouTube has been in the mix for several major sports rights
over the last year or so.

Mohan acknowledges that he was “nervous” ahead of the Brazil game.
“It was a really big moment for YouTube, it was a really big moment
for our partners in the NFL,” he recalls. Luckily, the telecast went
off without any technical hitches, drawing a solid 17.3 million
viewers. “I joined my wife and some friends at a barbecue at a
neighbor’s house afterwards and just had this sense of relief in
terms of how smooth and well things went.”

“They’ve been terrific partners. They brought us a new
audience,” Goodell says. “They bring incredible production value.
These creators are really an element that has been very well received
by our fans — and new fans — people who want to get involved in
the game.”

So why pay for exclusive rights and production costs, in contrast to
almost all other content on the platform?

“The nice thing about sports is, if you use that term creator in the
broadest sense, the NFL is a creator of content, it’s not something
that we’re scripting,” Mohan says. “I think in a fundamental
sense, it’s about the fact that we have hundreds of millions of
sports fans on the platform, and it’s a really important vertical of
content, and we want to be super-serving our fans.”

Indeed, the NFL may be the biggest programming on TV, but the league,
like YouTube, wants more. More female fans, more international fans,
and younger fans that can ensure that the league can thrive 50 years
down the line.

And the league increasingly views the creator ecosystem that YouTube
has sustained as a bridge to that younger audience. “I think teams
and leagues see the value in the reach that content creators
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sports creator Katie Feeney. “The goal is always to build a new
audience, to reach new eyes. I’m a Gen Z creator, my target demo is
in that 18 to 24 demographic, which is a sweet spot for sports, and
especially when you’re looking to build a new fan base, this is the
new generation.”

“It’s very clear that the young fan in particular wants to consume
the live game, is interested in the athletes, but oftentimes they want
to consume the highlights, the postgame and pregame commentary during
the week through their favorite YouTubers and creators,” says Mohan.

It’s a fact not lost on Goodell either. “The thing that always
impresses me is how smart they are, how creative they are, and the
detail they put into their production,” he says of the creators he
has met with.

NFL games garner tens of millions of viewers every week, and the Super
Bowl is a veritable national holiday, topping 100 million viewers
handily year after year. The NBA has become a focal point of American
culture, while the brutalism of UFC is appealing to a larger audience
year after year.

All of those leagues (not to mention media partners like ESPN) have
turned to YouTube as the home base for clips and highlights, but live
games are the final frontier, the glue holding the traditional TV
ecosystem together.

If YouTube does supplant what we think of as “TV” today, there’s
a good chance that the Brazil game is a pivot point. And the
platform’s creators, many of whom have felt the sting of the
traditional studio system, certainly have no qualms about embracing
that future, one that blends professional production and
creator-driven content in surprising ways.

“Prior to , the only way to get a show made was to walk into a room
of people wearing suits, hope that they like it enough to give it a
pilot, hope that they like the pilot enough to give it a season, hope
that they put marketing budget behind it so people know to watch
it,” says Michelle Khare, whose series, _Challenge Accepted_,
pushes the boundaries of what is possible on the platform in terms of
the quality of its production. “Systematically, that is a system
that has failed a lot of people and only allowed so many stories to be
told. I’m excited to be part of a future where the only barrier to
entry is the upload button.”

_This story appeared in the Oct. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter
magazine. Click here to subscribe
[[link removed]]_.

* YouTube
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* television
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* legacy media
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* new media
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