2025: The year TV has to get to grips with YouTube
Includes a list of YouTube channels for you to explore over Christmas.
Now we are on the slide into Christmas and Hogmanay, I thought this final post of 2024 should be about YouTube, because it is the one thing guaranteed to be important for TV in 2025. And 2026. And 2027.
As tempting as it is to do a chin-scratching data-heavy post, I thought instead to cherry pick some inspirational fodder for you to scroll through while stuffing the turkey or hiding from the in-laws. Most of these examples are YouTube channels for obvious reasons, although there are a few TikTok and Instagram examples in the mix too.
Thanks to all of you for signing up to this newsletter which started in April and has been weekly since the end of August. I’m going to take a break over Christmas, so the next email will be on Friday, January 10th.
Hope you all have a relaxing break!
A quick intro: The latest on YouTube at the end of 2024
The word convergence has been bandied around for decades as a thing that will happen to traditional TV and the internet at some point in the future. Well, that future is here and now. All metrics show YouTube’s significance, and crucially, it has ceased to be a separate entity to the TV ecosystem.
Last week YouTube published this post: Smash that replay button: A 2024 recap of YouTube on TV. It has some key points, which I’ve summarised as follows:
More people are watching YouTube on TV than devices - 50% of viewing in the UK is on a connected TV
There are more ad revenues when YouTube is viewed on a TV than on other devices
People watching on TV watch for longer than those watching YouTube on other devices.
And separately, advertising CPMs are reportedly higher for longer form content on TV than shorter form content on devices.
This eMarketer chart below from September illustrates the point. Obviously this is within the bubble of ‘ad funded streaming’, which excludes linear TV.
I’ve done several posts about YouTube and its importance, for example:
And indeed many other commentators have been screaming from the rooftops for TV to engage properly with it as a platform. Most notably,
has been banging the drum about YouTube for a while now. His last post of the year predicts that 2025 is the year of YouTube, and includes some typically punchy advice for TV people:“… If you are a television professional, you do not have to like that YouTube is now the most powerful TV platform in the world. But you do have to accept it. More importantly, in 2025, if you don’t make moves to incorporate YouTube into your overall television strategy, you will likely regret it.”
Last week, ITV finally got onboard the YouTube train, announcing it is joining the YouTube partner programme with hundreds of hours of shows being published to the platform and ITV’s commercial team selling advertising around this content. This is in contrast to Channel 4’s longer history with YouTube, which launched 4oD (catch up and archive) on YouTube in 2009. However five years later in 2014, all full length shows were removed to focused on the owned and operated 4oD platform itself. In 2022, Channel 4 re-engaged with YouTube, announcing more shows would be published, however not the comprehensive offering it was back in the late noughties.
If you fancy a bit of archaeology, the following observation is from a Wired article in 2014 when Channel 4 pulled its long form content from the platform:
YouTube seems to come off worse here, as it will clearly lose out on advertising revenue, although it's hard to know how many people are still watching Channel 4 shows on Youtube these days, now that the 4oD app is widely available and widely known about.
Similarly, YouTube is not known primarily as a provider of long-form content and the short-form content Channel 4 will continue to put on its channels now is more in-keeping with the other content YouTube generally offers and is best known for.
This can be filed under ‘my goodness, how times have changed’ (or alternatively, ‘futurology is hard’). I wonder what re-reading this post will feel like in 2034?
In summary, it isn’t just that people are watching content on YouTube which diverts them away from TV output, they are watching it on their connected TVs, and the content they are watching increasingly is a little bit like TV. So while it is tempting to look at the examples below and think ‘well, that isn’t up to professional TV standards’, this would be to miss the point. To many users, the content they are watching on YouTube is TV to them. This isn’t a world apart from TV - this is TV.
Examples from across genres, talent and themes
These examples are intended to help producers and creatives get beyond the ‘we should do something about YouTube’ mindset (as that is obvious) and instead move into the process of coming up with content ideas for specific audiences, niches and formats. These examples of course are just the tip of an enormous iceberg - and many genres, regions, demographics and subject matters are not represented.
If you squint, many of the examples I’ve chosen could have worked as talent, genres or subject matters on TV. While it might be tempting to see these examples as research for future TV pitches, instead to be able to get to grips with YouTube it is important to focus on how and why these channels have flourished because they aren’t TV shows. Is it the subject matter or the format? The publishing schedule? The specific niche? The hosts? Duration? Hook? The thumbnails? Partnerships? The way the hosts are highly engaged with their audience? Right place right time and went viral?
A quick note on the data points below:
Views, subscribers (followers and likes on TikTok and Instagram): A highly simplistic approach; other engagement data is more meaningful however isn’t publicly available
YouTube advertising revenue estimate: Used an average CPM of £10 (it can be higher or lower depending on the content or the audience and the sell through rate). Net of YouTube’s revenue share. Based on total income for the life of the channel, not a monthly or yearly estimate. In other words - massive pinch of salt.
Other income sources: many have multiple revenue streams - sponsorship, other social platforms, merch, books, ticket sales and so on which are not included
Launch dates: Some of these are new channels, but others are older - however that doesn’t mean that these older channels have been publishing week in week out for a decade. Often their launch date is simply when the owner created an account on YouTube.
Views: 283m
Launch date: 2011
YouTube net advertising estimate: £4m
Subscribers: 2m
Caitlin Doughty’s channel is described as “Funeral Industry Reformer. Green Death Advocate. Morbid History Club.” And that is basically what it is - a channel that covers everything from macabre stories from history and true crime, to what happens to a body during a cremation. Her most popular video is about JFK (below), which has had 11m views.
TikTok followers: 162m
Likes: 2.5bn
Maybe a little obvious as he’s so successful, but I thought I’d include Khaby for those not on TikTok. During lockdown (and after losing his job at an Italian factory) he started creating non-verbal videos to send up the absurdity of many social media trends. As of 2024, his deadpan mockery of over complicated life hack videos has made him the most followed person on TikTok. The New York Times wrote in 2021 “The secret to Mr. Lame’s success is his universal exasperated everyman quality.” He is reported to make $750k per video and figurines of him are available in Walmart.
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Views: 864m
Launch date: 2011
YouTube net advertising estimate: £4.7m
Subscribers: 6m
Johnny Harris is a filmmaker and journalist who previously worked for Vox and The New York Times. He and his team make documentaries on subjects such as broken Macdonald’s ice cream machines (13m views) or the war in Bosnia (9.4m views). They are highly engaged across a range of platforms, both producing content and interacting with their followers. He and his wife now have a team of 16 people and a monthly overhead budget of $100k. They won an Emmy in 2022 for a video with The New York Times.
For more on Johnny Harris and his business model, this recent podcast is worth a listen.
Views: 727m
Launch date: 2010
YouTube net advertising estimate: £4m
Subscribers: 4.7m
Wendover Productions’ channel is focussed on explaining how our world works. Their most popular video is one about how aircraft carriers work, or they have numerous on subjects such as the logistics of plane travel or German reunification.
Views: 76m
Launch date: 2022
YouTube net advertising estimate: £418k
Subscribers: 748k
Wendover Productions have a second channel called ‘Jet Lag: The Game’ which is format where three friends play a game of tag across a country or region. Their most popular video ‘We Played a 72 Hour Game of Tag Across Europe’ has had 4.7m views.
YouTube
Views: 20,000
Launch date: 2017
YouTube net advertising estimate: 0
Subscribers: 67
Instagram
Followers: 36,000
TikTok
Followers: 147,500
If you want evidence of content working on some platforms and not others, then Holly and Brooke’s sketch comedy channels are a great example. On YouTube, they’ve published very little content and it has had limited impact, however over on Instagram the video below has had over 1m views, and 1.3m on TikTok. This is also a great example of how important WhatsApp is to viral content - this Instagram clip came to me via a WhatsApp group and not social.
Views: 48m
Launch date: 2016
YouTube net advertising estimate: £264k
Subscribers: 216k
Tom is an antiquarian bookseller with a channel about rare books and manuscripts: indeed you can buy rare books on his website. He does all sorts of videos - largely as shorts - about rare books, including this video below about the original publication strategy for Game of Thrones.
One TikTok sensation in the last year was this series of 50 videos where ReesaTeesa tells her story of being married to someone she dubbed a pathological liar. The tale had multiple twists and turns and by March 2024 had over 400m views. Since then the rights have been bought by Natasha Rothwell’s company Big Hattie Productions.
This type of microdrama narrative content is having a moment, largely driven by a huge growth of the trend in China (this recent C21 article quoting
is worth a read ‘Can shortform storytelling capture Hollywood’). And while broadcasters have tested it in previous years to greater or lesser success (never mind the failure of Quibi), the bitesize nature of short serialised episodes have always been hugely appealing to audiences as long as the story hooks people in. As the Times said about Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: “…think of it as a soap opera, to be taken in daily doses like The Archers.”
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Views: 516,000
Launch date: 2022
YouTube net advertising estimate: no ads, but if it did have ads would be £2,800
Subscribers: 31,500
Full Moon Matinee is hosted by a man in Ohio showcasing full feature film noirs from the golden age of Hollywood, while dressed as a whisky drinking gumshoe. It carries no advertising, and in the comments you’ll find people all over the world sharing their love of classic films.
Views: 64m
Launch date: 2012
YouTube net advertising estimate: £350k
Subscribers: 163,000
This travel and road trip channel involves meandering road trips across America, visiting museums, diners and sites of interest along the way - all with the same older gentleman host offering a running commentary. Below is his most popular video with 1.7m views.
Views: 166m
Launch date: 2012
YouTube net advertising estimate: £913k
Subscribers: 1.3m
Karolina Żebrowska specialises in commentary on vintage fashion and period drama costumes, often amusingly spotting inaccuracies. The video below where she critiques a ‘100 Years Of Fashion and Hair video’ has had 3.7m views.
Views: 217m
Launch date: 2009
YouTube net advertising estimate: £1.1m
Subscribers: 1.39m
This Montana science teacher has over 1m subscribers and makes all sorts of science videos for students and teachers. He’s also launched his own online store selling products to help teachers to encourage learning and critical thinking. One of the reasons why this channel will have done so well is duration - so from the start his videos are evergreen subjects (like the brain video above), and also are over 10 minutes long, which the algorithm likes.
Views: 1.3bn
Launch date: 2016
YouTube net advertising estimate: £7m
Subscribers: 6m
Mark Laita is a photographer who interviews and takes portraits of the human condition: "…people who are frequently invisible in society—the unhoused, the sex worker, the chronic drug user, the runaway, the gang member, the poor and the sick". The ethics of this type of content has been the subject of much discussion.
Views: 995m
Launch date: 2011
YouTube net advertising estimate: £5.2m
Subscribers: 4.96m
This channel by Australian food scientist and dietician Ann Reardon is a mix of baking as well as exploring (and often debunking) food science trends and fads.
Views: 1.1bn
Launch date: 2015
YouTube net advertising estimate: £6m
Subscribers: 10.9m
This channel is about the hobby of building things in the wild completely from scratch using no modern tools or materials. The challenge is to see how far someone can go without using any modern technology. The host, Queenslander John Plant, has a book out this year.
Views: 150m
Launch date: 2020
YouTube net advertising estimate: £6m
Subscribers: 2.3m
There is a growing trend for what are called ‘faceless YouTube channels’, which we will start seeing a lot more of as they can be easily produced using AI tools. Although this will also trigger a rise in so called AI slop that will swamp YouTube unless the poor quality channels are downgraded.
One quality faceless YouTube channel is Fern TV, which describes itself as ‘Armchair documentaries, almost weekly’. They are similar in subject matter to Johnny Harris - so unsolved crimes, hacking, intelligence and the like.
Commentaries and explainers
Beyond the very well established behaviour of watching games being played and explained, another key trend on YouTube are commentaries or explainers of other content.
Two examples include Red Letter Media’s epic 70 minute Phantom Menace review (in short, they really, really, really didn’t like it). It is a classic of the genre, and has clocked up 11m views in 12 years.
Or this Penguin video where historian James Holland (brother of Tom) and co-host of ‘We Have Ways’ podcast, breaks down WW2 movies - it has had 4.5m views in three years.
Lastly a daft example for how something serious can take on a whole new life on social. This video from The Rest is History got 477k views, which is way more than double the views of the vast majority of their videos on Instagram, and only a video about the Titanic (568k) appears to have got more (although whenever you see something go viral it always worth asking yourself the question did it happen naturally or was there any paid activity promoting it?).
I’m hoping these examples are of use to you. I deliberately avoided the more chatty, product review, gamer or podcaster channels. However, it would be great to know if this was of interest and if you would like to see more. So before disappearing off for Christmas, can I ask you to fill in the poll below (or indeed, drop a comment below).
Have a lovely break, and see you in 2025.
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For my 6 year old nephew and 7 and 10 year old nieces all they would watch if they were allowed by their parents is YouTube. I babysit them sometimes and it's such a drag for them to be only allowed to watch Netflix, Disney+ and Plex.
Thank you for the name check, was engrossed and reading along and it totally took me by surprise! 🙏