Everyone said the movies were dying. Attendance was in decline year after year as people watched at home, studios were hemorrhaging money and getting swallowed in mergers, and a string of flops from A-list filmmakers and stars led people to publicly worry that movie theaters could become a thing of the past. But then a trio of young filmmakers from outside of the system got their hands on the keys, and shocked the industry by making a bunch of runaway blockbusters on modest budgets.

I’m talking, of course, of the 1970s, and the rise of Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola, as well as films like Easy Rider, Halloween, and Rocky, which led to massive returns and signaled a new way forward for the movie business. But it sounds a lot like the last few weeks, when Markiplier, Curry Barker, and now Kane Parsons have launched a thousand thinkpieces about the rise of YouTube filmmakers and a new formula for success.

Movies are hard to kill, because they’re still the most widely accessible and affordable form of communal entertainment we have. As long as we have teenagers needing someplace to go with their friends, or couples or families looking for something to do on a weekend, a good movie’s still hard to beat.

What’s changed the last twenty years is that movies have now also become in-person gathering places for fandoms, and the communities that organize and sustain them online. This is a big reason Marvel ruled the box office the past two decades, and video game IP movies are now on the rise—they can tap into deep and passionate fanbases for first week audiences, and live or die in the following weeks on their word of mouth and wider appeal.

Genre entertainment, especially horror and sci-fi, has always had its fans—and everything that goes with them, like niche magazines, conventions, and merch—but they also now have always-on, connected communities talking and sharing, and some of those fans become creators and filmmakers themselves, and start building their own fanbases online.

The new auteurs may have earned their chops via YouTube instead of NYU or USC, but they come with those built-in fanbases that turn into their early evangelists and promoters, first gathering on premiere weekends as must-attend community events, then spreading the word to wider audiences: the diehard genre fans, then moviegoers at large. Since the creators are fans themselves, they already represent a wider community and potential audience for their work than the cumulative number of subscribers or views on their channels. When we see a movie like Obsession go bigger and bigger every weekend—the first movie to do that since Spielberg’s E.T.—we’re seeing the phenomenon in action of each group of movie fans activating the next larger one.1

My good friend has been thinking about fan communities for years—and building them for shows like Doctor Who and movies like A Complete Unknown at his agency , where I’m an advisor. Kenyatta has long talked about the power of dense, tightly woven communities to platform things to ubiquity, like in this 2018 Verge article:

“The internet doesn’t actually love cats. But there is this very dense, highly connected internet cat industrial complex — people who really love cats who are super well-connected to each other across several platforms, such that if you put just the right cat video in front of somebody, they can get it out to so many cat lovers that all of a sudden you’ll see it replicated 10 times in your Facebook feed.”

Some other recent examples of the power of creators’ fanbases and the broader communities they touch include Dropout’s blockbuster Kickstarter campaign, the Sidemen’s sold-out Wembley charity match, and Milana Vayntrub’s fundraisers for LA fire victims.2

Creators’ fan communities exist within constellations and clusters of adjacent and often larger communities, as things like Jeremy Miller’s TikTok map or ’s Creator Economy map illustrate.

Breakout creators like Markiplier, Parsons, and Barker are inherently skilled at making things that can travel across those communities and spark passion and participation—in part because they’re really talented, but also because they came up in those fan communities themselves. And this makes them not so different from Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola, also lifelong movie fans who ended up giving the business new life.

More to read:

• Mystery is the best marketing ()

• The YouTuber Hollywood gold rush (Ryan Broderick/Garbage Day)

• YouTube + Filmmakers = Yindie Film ()

• ‘Obsession,’ ‘Backrooms,’ and What YouTube Can Teach Movies ()

This week’s video: a very funny Martin Herlihy film, mercilessly cut-for-time from the SNL season finale.

If you haven’t seen it yet, every episode, Kareem hops into a cab and asks the driver to take him to their favorite place, and to keep the meter running while they enjoy it. In their expanded format, Kareem and producer get to go deeper then they did in the original, and in the packed Metrograph theater for the premiere, there was lots of laughing and cheering, especially five minutes into the first episode, when Kareem stripped down to his boxer briefs in a Russian sauna with his new friends Eugene and Rustam.

Kareem gets emotionally naked in these episodes, too—he puts himself out there with no vanity, sharing his insecurities and regrets, which gives his new friends the chance both to share wisdom and advice and mock him mercilessly. You can see them having a profound impact on him in real time, and it serves the show’s purpose of showing how much value there is in every person you meet.

The spirit of Bourdain is strong in this show—like Tony, Kareem can have a great conversation with anyone, which is what makes his breakout project Subway Takes so much fun; he has a love for the working class (his parents were Egyptian immigrants and his dad was a cab driver); and he’s a bit of a punk—Kareem’s band Tiny Gun1 is noisy and arch and has great taste, like a New York band should. Unlike Bourdain, Kareem didn’t need a green light from the Food Network or Travel Channel to reboot this show—he spent seven months trying to develop the show with CNN, where Anthony Bourdain ended up, but walked away from the talks—he’s famous and successful enough now that he could find backing from AND Media and support from YouTube finding sponsors, and make the show on his terms, with his friends.

Keep the Meter Running is just good TV, and fact that these friends could make it together, something so humanistic and personal and laugh out loud funny, with no network or integrated brands to give them notes, and put it up on YouTube for anyone in the world to watch it for free, makes it even better. Adam said at the screening, “If this is a web series, then so is every show on Netflix, and every show on HBO Max, because it’s all the Internet now.”

I wrote a little while back about YouTube’s new studio era, and noted Kareem as one of the more exciting creators building in the space, along with and Feed Me. Seeing Emily beaming in the front row, and a theater full of creators like Amelia Dimoldenberg and Jack Coyne and journalists like made it feel like a happening. I said as much to Emily coming out of the show, though we’d only just met: “Wow. This was a moment, right?”

In Emily’s really smart piece about the night, she writes:

This was something we thought about all the time in the early days of Next New Networks and YouTube—most of us started out in the space to have fun, and knew we had an edge if we could keep doing it—when you’re having fun, it shows up on the screen and it’s impossible to replicate.

There was one other night about ten years ago that felt like this one—the premiere of Lilly Singh’s Unicorn Island—and it’s usually the first thing I remember when people ask me what my favorite moment at YouTube was. The movie was one of the first YouTube Originals, and the brilliant marketing team (many of the same who sponsored Kareem’s party this week) had rented out the iconic Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. We’d worked with Lilly quite a bit at this point—she was one of the first creators featured in a YouTube brand campaign, with billboards and outdoor ads across major cities—and the premiere felt like the celebration of a new era. Tons of top creators at the time came out to walk the carpet and cheer her on. “Coming to to see the premiere of a friend's own movie is a whole different feeling,” Jay Sean says in a video TCL produced where you can see all the creators marveling over the moment. Lilly made the movie with Astronauts Wanted, the production company helmed by legendary MTV CEO Judy McGrath, a hero of mine who mentored me when I first got the job developing YouTube Originals. I remember standing with Judy on the red carpet, then later at the afterparty as Lilly danced with her family and friends, and we talked about how these creators had so much more control over their destinies than many of the artists, performers, and filmmakers we’d worked with before, and that it felt like a moment had come where Hollywood would never be the same.

The creators of our current moment came out for this one, along with comedians like Eric André and Devon Walker and, most winningly, most of the longtime cab drivers featured in the show, with their dates and families. At the afterparty, two of the most memorable conversations I had were with Mary Shalaby, the comedian and actress who broke out on TikTok and Instagram and was just cast in a new NBC series, who made me feel like the future of comedy was in great hands, and an even longer one about food, travel, family, and love with Seth Goldman, the cab driver and Greenwich Village poet who took Kareem to David’s Brisket House in the original series. Something like that could only happen in the world Kareem and his friends are creating.

Elsewhere:

The YouTube-to-theaters pipeline: Glitch Productions’ The Amazing Digital Circus has surpassed $7.5M in movie ticket pre-sales in 5,000+ theaters, breaking records for Fathom, hot on the heels of Markiplier’s Iron Lung success.

The kids are alright: A new poll of Gen Z kids has only 5% wanting to be creators or influencers—a welcome change from those polls a few years back listing it as the top career aspiration. (via After School / )

notes that Alphabet/Google is now the second most valuable company in the world, and shares a little of his life as a creator: “CREATOR” IS A JOB, MOTHERF*CKER

has the recap on a busy week in creator events leading up to Brandcast, including Cannes and the Scalable Summit in LA: Cannes Lions’ Creator Boom Meets 2026’s Budget Buzzkill. Looking forward to her posts this week about Brandcast and Kareem’s premiere.

As a counterpoint to all the future of TV stuff above, Garbage Day has a piece on YouTube being “Like Television, But Worse.” They’ve also been covering the massive traffic decline on right-wing YouTube channels, which is interesting reading, and relates to Vulture’s much-discussed piece this week on clipping and other paid promotion in social media, “The Feed is Fake.”

Thanks for reading bonus video: hey/ya (elliott smith’s version)

“Want to come out to Lisbon in April and talk about all this?”

asked me this on a 20 degree morning in January, over breakfast at the building formerly known as the Time Warner Center, as we talked about what we thought creators and media could offer each other, and how rapidly everyone’s business models were converging into a new one.

I’d been catching him up on my work on the board of Electrify, a London-based company that invests in, operates, and scales creator-founded brands, as well as conversations I’ve had with a number of CEOs and execs of both traditional and new media businesses the past year.

What struck me was how many of these companies had begun programs in earnest to find new ways to partner with creators from YouTube and other platforms—deeper collaborations than influencer campaigns to promote a series, or casting a top influencer on a reality show. In the past year, we’ve seen FOX hire Billy Parks to lead their creator studios, Sony Pictures bring on Matt Ford for digital originals and creator partnerships, and creator partnership initiatives from Nat Geo and The Washington Post, as well as BBC’s new deal to put original shows on YouTube, after already having a long-running creator studio.

Evan told me a number of those companies from across Europe would be attending the StreamTV show in Lisbon, and it would be a great chance to connect with more of them. And of course, Lisbon sounds especially appealing when you’re enduring New York’s coldest winter in a decade.

I made my way out there this week to participate in a roundtable with my longtime friend , one of the OG creator-entrepreneurs; producer , whose Open Gardens is one of my favorite newsletters; and Mel Tsiaprazis, whose company GYST is building tools to support creator-founded businesses. I’d recently written about YouTube’s studio era, and thought the four of us were there to be a fun bit of interest programming during a show that would largely be devoted to the more traditional concerns of streaming and TV.

I was so wrong. As it turned out, in nearly every talk and panel, and every conversation I had over meetings, meals, and networking breaks, creators and social platforms were top of mind.

Evan set the tone the first morning with a fun and provocative keynote, where he told a cautionary tale of two nepo babies—one investing heavily into the new attention economy, the other trying to own the old one. Evan pointed out that fragmentation is the new norm, and companies that understood fandom, affinity, and engagement were best poised to survive as audiences age, and attention moves from broadcast to social media.

He also included a case study on Duolingo, based on his post last month, and gave me a very kind shout out from the stage, noting I’d be on at 4pm, which was likely a reason many of the execs I wanted to meet at the show ended up in our audience later that afternoon.

Evan has been urging media companies to change or die—highlighting the need to work with creators and digital-native businesses in order to better understand how affinity, engagement, and fandom work on the new social platforms. But in my conversations with people at some of these companies, they seemed a bit unsure of their value in the changing landscape. In our roundtable, we all agreed: the media businesses in the room, who might be concerned their three-letter brands don’t resonate with the generations coming up watching YouTube, making TikToks, and playing Roblox, had much to offer creators.

Major media companies have legal teams, biz dev, ad sales, talent programs, research, product development, licensing, libraries, tech—all things difficult and expensive for creator studios to build. They’ll need to be open to new ways of partnering, potentially sharing ownership, revenue, and subscribers with creator studios—but together they can make truly ambitious things to reach wider audiences, and better serve their current ones.

A roundtable that followed was a brilliant case in point, all about a new partnership between French news creator Gaspard Geurmonprez and broadcaster TF1, who are partnering to create a longform interview format for the upcoming elections.

Gaspard was clear on the value from his perspective — he’s gaining access to TF1’s full archives of past reporting on the candidates, something he’d never have access to on his own. And despite having 1.7M subscribers, he’s already seeing noticeable audiences coming from on-air mentions from TF1. On TF1’s side, they get the benefit of connecting with new audiences through Gaspard, and gaining understanding of how to reach them. Julien Laurent, the Chief Digital Officer at TF1, said incredibly, “We never wanted to mimic creators. We didn’t want to cosplay them.” Working with Gaspard G lets them connect with a new generation without the risk of looking like Steve Buscemi with a skateboard.

Even after an hour-long passport control line, I left Lisbon in good spirits—I’d barely gotten any time to wander its streets (though I got to do that at length with Derek Muller the previous year, while he told me the story that he’d tell everyone in his amazing Christmas Eve video) or eat much that wasn’t grabbed from a tray at the conference (thanks to Ben Odell for making a break with me for a great dinner one night), but I think we’re going to see some exciting collaborations between creators and three-letter organizations in 2026, and everyone I talked to from those places was incredibly smart and committed to getting it right. There’s another StreamTV around the corner in Denver in June that will draw more of a North American crowd—I’ll be there, as will Evan. You should join us.

Unlike the last time humans left low-Earth orbit fifty years ago, we now have the Internet and social media, and things like iPhones, GoPros, and digital SLRs, which means the crew has been sharing livestreams, vertical videos, and photos of their journey on every platform (except TikTok).

Hank Green made a video breaking down the incredible photos taken by the Artemis II crew, and the impulse people have to capture those moments, and it’s a fantastic watch about what it means to have people, with cameras, out in space instead of the probes and landers we’ve mostly been sending out.

The Artemis II crew are of course the most experienced and skilled pilots and engineers in the world, not professional content creators — but astronauts have always served as the public faces of NASA, and that’s taken on a whole new level with the ability to livestream in 4K thanks to brand new laser-based comms and immediately post mind-blowing photos of Earth from their iPhones.

As we gear up to build permanent bases on the moon and send the first people (and mascots) to Mars, cameras and social media will be going with them, and we’re likely to have an amazing amount of space content in our future—low-G stunt videos, 360 VR walkarounds of lunar and Martian surfaces, and probably some fun food videos (I’ll happily watch someone make the first bowl of ramen on Mars). And we’re just beginning to see what artists and filmmakers can make beyond the full force of Earth’s gravity, like last month’s amazing video from The Dorothy Project.

Recent sci-fi underplays the role online media will have in space. The Expanse explored a time hundreds of years from now when people live out in the Kuiper Belt, but it seemed to be a future where most people don’t make or share content, or prop their transparent hand terminals against the nearest wall in Ceres Station to record a TikTok dance.

No phones allowed at work in Severance. None needed anymore in Pluribus, though it would be fun to have a scene where Carol gets bored and asks the whole world to start making Shorts again. For All Mankind, a show I love, just started its fifth season, now taking place in the 2010s of their alternate timeline—peak YouTube era in ours —and introduced a bunch of new teen characters, but it’s not clear yet if they’re on social media. Whenever we actually put teens in space, they’ll be the most famous humans in the universe.

That said, beyond the complexity and dangers of getting there, and the effects long term low gravity could have on our bodies, especially developing ones, there’s still one big unsolved problem—galactic cosmic rays—that would make it pretty unethical to send kids to space anytime soon. Until we solve that, Moon Joy will have to just be for consenting adults.

Other good things this week:

When Ian Schafer told me last year that Issa Rae, who made the first great breakout series on YouTube before going on to film and TV, was working on microdrama scripts, I got unreasonably excited. She’s calling them “minute soaps” and doing them directly with TikTok, as opposed to the mobile game industry-derived, paid marketing-driven business model most microdrama apps use, is a game-changer. Hats off to Ian, Issa and the HOORAE team. Here’s their first trailer.

explained why the new WGA contract won’t change the reality for working scriptwriters — and why he’s building in public, making a new web series with AI.

has your shopping list if you’re looking for video podcasts to buy post-Open AI buying TBPN, while has an emergency press conference with TBPN president Dylan Abruscato.

Been completely missing out on and her podcast Bandsplain. 4+ hour episodes on the Stone Roses, Portishead, Elastica, Jesus and Mary Chain? Guests like ? Incredible. Also she sells things like this Robert Smith + Mary Poole t-shirt. Enjoy.

But also, when consumer brands are competing in our feeds every day to grab attention as the most provocative or unhinged, we’re already exhausted by April, and it might feel better to take a break.

We have two of my alma mater, Duolingo and YouTube, to thank for much of this. At YouTube we staged the most elaborate April Fools videos any tech company had ever done (most orchestrated by my longtime partner in crime Ben Relles), including one year when we made the entire site available for 360º viewing in Snoopavision.

When I joined Duolingo in 2018 and started building an in-house producing team for our original content, one of the first things we did was bring a little of that energy to Duolingo for an April Fools collab with the marketing team. Marketing lead Michaela Kron, who'd already done a couple successful April Fool’s stunts for Duolingo, had a great idea for a fake product., Duolingo Push, that went beyond notifications and had Duo the owl show up in person at your house. We were leaning into popular memes of the past year reacting to Duolingo’s sometimes passive-aggressive sounding notifications, depicting Duo as a murderous intruder that had broken into your house, or showed up with a gun. There was some concern inside the company — “do people think we’re evil??” — but we had a theory that it was all love, which was proven when the video hit 7 million views and led to Duolingo’s all-time biggest week to date in usage and revenue.

We filmed the video in and around Duolingo’s Pittsburgh office, with Duolingo employees in all the roles, and the suit, which had mainly been used at all-hands meetings and parties, was falling apart while we made it. I asked to turn monetization on for the channel since I thought we might get more views, and co-founder Severin told me if we made any money on the video I could buy a new Duo suit. It definitely made some money, and paid for the much nicer suit that would later pick up to lasting social fame and industry renown.

Zaria’s first year of posting with the Duo suit, along with a deliberate strategy of being the first brand to comment hilariously on trending TikTok posts, created a gold standard for brand-as-creator: Zaria had no real budget, no team besides those of us she could rope into helping out with videos (I drove her and Duo in a U-Haul van to the Dua Lipa concert), just resourcefulness and creativity. As the account grew to 10M followers, creators would reach out to collab — no need to pay for influencer posts — and the social marketing team and its budget grew, but would always stay relatively small and scrappy.

As Duo blew up on social, friends reached out to me thinking I was behind it, and I would tell them the only thing I could take credit for was not saying no to Zaria, and having her back, which was true for all of the exec team. Much of the seeming takeaway was that Duolingo was successful on social because we were “unhinged,” but the real secret was that no matter what Zaria and the team did on social, they always did it with the goal of reminding you that Duolingo was on your phone, and you should do a lesson. Everything connected back to Duolingo’s mission of learning, so Duo the owl could get away with murder, since everyone knew we had good intentions. It would be nearly impossible to get away with a video where Chester Cheetah was kidnapping and torturing people.

There are a lot more companies now investing in original, social-first content, and the most effective ones aren’t trying to replicate Duolingo’s style, but finding ways to express their own mission and connect with their communities in a way that feels right for them.

FIGS, just featured in a great Rachel Karten interview with FIGS CMO Bené Eaton, has built an in-house production team focused on films celebrating health care workers that live and breathe on social.

Red Bull has been fully invested in online content for years—they led the charge of brands creating on YouTube, and their 2012 Felix Baumgartner Space Jump was more spectacular than anything on TV at the time. But they’re still finding ways to extend their brand to younger audiences, like partnering with YouTube daredevil Michelle Khare as an official Red Bull Athlete.

A24 has taken the traditional biggest hurdle of movie marketing—having to build (and buy) awareness for every movie as a separate campaign—by building a social brand with millions of followers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube that can host anything from a fake Marty Supreme marketing brainstorm to unnerving trailers to Zendaya giving relationship advice.

So here are some rules for brands wanting to make things worth watching, build an audience, and win at the whole brands-as-creators game:

1. Stay in your lane. This starts with having a clearly defined mission and brand promises. For Duolingo, it’s getting people to have fun learning every day. For FIGS, it’s celebrating and serving health care workers; Red Bull, it’s enabling athletes and artists to push their limits. If you can connect what you’re making to your mission, you can get the license to do it in any number of creative ways.

2. Listen, and lean into what’s working. Social at Duolingo originally only focused on Duo, but more and more people started posting fan art of Lily, the emo teen character. Eventually, a Lily suit and trending TikTok dances followed, as well as original content like a dark live action sitcom and (after my time) regular animated Lily vlogs.

3. Collab and participate. The ability to post collab videos to multiple accounts on every platform now is a game changer, but before that, algorithms were able to detect guest appearances in videos and promote them to both audiences. Collaborations with creators or brands with compatible missions is a win-win, and only really happen when you’re mutual fans — so it pays to spend as much time being part of the community as you are making things — following, commenting, promoting the ones you love.

4. Finally, put your money where it counts. Part of the Duolingo account’s charm was that it had almost no budget and was scrappy, but when they hosted collab days for creators in Pittsburgh, they rolled out the red carpet—including gifting custom shoes. This also means, don’t use AI — too much of your audience is against it, and they know you can afford to support animators, like Hermés has been doing, or invest in creating characters like Apple’s Little Finder Guy.

Some other things:

Randy Greenberg examined the amount of money top consumer brands spend essentially renting space on other brands’ media. His conclusion: 5% of the paid media spend of consumer media brands — $3.5 billion — “could collectively be financing a content operation the size of a major streaming platform.”

Speaking of Duolingo, the brilliant media truthsayer Evan Shapiro posted this week about the social team’s incredible death of Duo campaign that took over the internet last year, and how depth is more important than size these days in social.

Max Read considered whether ubiquitous AI writing is truly “inevitable,” and noted that the pressures and incentives to cut corners, plagiarize, fabricate (aka “hallucinate”), and produce content faster at lower quality standards have existed since before AI made it faster and easier to do.

, quoted above, covers the brand/creators beat spectacularly, and her post from a while back, Treat TikTok Like TV with Adam Faze, is still a great read.

OpenAI just bought TBPN, which shows even the most omnipotent companies on the planet see the value of a great content arm. Erik Barmack at the Ankler digs in on why.

For those of you that made it this far, a couple fun videos:

Flea covering Frank Ocean’s Thinkin Bout You on Jimmy Fallon. I don’t know why everyone cheered every time Flea did a certain thing (I won’t spoil it for you if you don’t know what Flea’s been up to), except I also totally get it. (A Plea, his first video from the new album, is fantastic.)

And my old and dear friends The Gregory Brothers put out this great song about the Most Confusing Place on Earth (60th Road, Place, Lane, Street, Ave, Court, and Drive, in Queens, NY).

Alright, please hit me up in the comments with your best brands-as-creators thoughts. And keep on creating.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment an era begins, but nearly fifteen years ago to the day, on March 7, 2011, YouTube used the word “creator” in an official announcement on its blog for the first time,1 in a post that hard-launched the creator era. I’ve been thinking about that the past few weeks— about what that time was like, and all we hoped to accomplish back then, and where we might be going now. More than anything, I’ve been thinking that YouTube is now in its studio era, and while creators are still at the center, what it takes to compete at the highest levels on YouTube has been evolving and changing for a while, and seems to have crossed a threshold in the past couple years.

The blog post that marked YouTube’s last big shift was the announcement of YouTube’s long-rumored acquisition of Next New Networks, the company I co-founded, as part of the creation of YouTube Next, a “global team of experts” tasked with accelerating the growth and success of YouTube’s partners. Until that day, YouTube used the word “partners” for users in their rev sharing program (only a few thousand at that moment), and other words like “uploaders” or “YouTube stars,” which was a bit of a backhanded compliment. I don’t remember exactly how we got the word “creator” into the blog post, but I did co-write it with my new boss, the great Tom Pickett, and creator was a word we used extensively at Next New Networks. I’m sure we put it in there as a trial balloon for the shift we were all hoping to create at YouTube. Two months later, our CEO Salar Kamangar published a post entitled “Welcome to the future of video” where he more explicitly marked the moment—using the word creators extensively, and with the full expansion of the term we were going for: a creator could be Michelle Phan, but the term could also apply to Amy Poehler, Pharrell Williams, or Jeffrey Katzenberg, all of whom would create channels in the next couple years.

It’s worth noting that YouTube didn’t really decide to invest in its native talent for some kind of punk rock or revolutionary reason, or because the company loved creators at its core at that moment. If anything, they were sometimes an embarrassment to the company.2 YouTube was coming out of its video era — in 2011, YouTube was widely regarded as a viral video sharing site, the home of Charlie the Unicorn, Star Wars Kid, Chocolate Rain and unauthorized uploads of Lazy Sunday, and while that was an incredibly fun place to be, our efforts to court the traditional brand advertisers, mainstream music artists, and film and TV rights holders that we needed to ultimately make the site a money maker were blocked by this perception that YouTube was low quality UGC—or “cats flushing toilets,” as people would often say to us.3 The top two most-viewed videos worldwide for all of 2010 were Bed Intruder Song and The Key of Awesome’s “Tik Tok” parody, both published by Next New Networks. And we were the ones they tasked with “up-leveling” creator videos.

YouTube invested in creators for economic reasons—it couldn’t pay TV rates for content, as it didn’t have the TV ad rates to pay for it—but if we didn’t change the perception of YouTube’s content quality, the advertisers would never come. Hence, investing in programs and features that would up-level the quality of what creators could make, and the size of the audiences they could build. (YouTube has made huge progress here, but even some of this year’s reporting reads a lot like stories from back then.)

We also hedged our bets—investing $100 million in grants for hundreds of original channels from traditional and upstart media producers like Vice, Buzzfeed, and Awesomeness TV and top creators like Hank and John Green, Rhett and Link, and Felicia Day, in the hopes that some of those channels would build sustainable businesses on YouTube (and all of the aforementioned ones did, for a while).

The shape that most new media brands are taking, fifteen years later—a highly profitable YouTube channel, reaching millions with regularly programmed, television quality (or better) shows; diversified revenue streams including sponsorships, memberships, licensing, and merch; multi-platform presence including podcasts and newsletters—was something we envisioned back then when we made those investments. The idea of a pure-play studio creating this kind of business wasn’t even a new idea—that’s what Next New was, as well as Maker Studios, Machinima, College Humor, and many others—we were all just a bit early, making digital pennies instead of dollars while we waited for the audiences to get big enough, and the sponsors to come. But as my partner Fred would like to say, those pennies would soon be nickels, and then quarters, and then the dollars would come.

What makes this YouTube’s studio era now is a shift that’s happened little by little over the past ten years—as creators built bigger and more capable teams around them; as sponsorship rates climbed; as audiences and algorithms shifted to preferring longer and more engaging content; as consumption moved increasingly to smart TVs; and as ambition and competition grew in the level of storytelling on the platform. We also saw the discovery surface shift outwards and increasingly off-YouTube — Snap, TikTok, and Instagram collapsed creation, upload, and discovery to one app, making everyone with a mobile phone a potential creator, and made scrolling the feed as easy as swiping a dating app—while playing loose with the same kind of addictive, slot machine-like variable rewards that YouTube in its maturity was trying to avoid.

Now, if you’re a new creator trying to build a voice and an audience, it’s crazy to try to do it on the YouTube home feed, where you’re competing with creator-founded studios like Veritasium and Simpli that can make everything from Emmy-worthy, hourlong documentaries to Mr Beast’s gonzo, high-concept competition formats, as well as podcast studios and media brands that offer a steady stream of A-list stars and musicians in beautifully lit sets. The place to try new things, make something viral, and find an audience now is on TikTok, or Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts—and then once you’re ready, like Kareem Rahma just did with Subway Takes, you go more ambitious, and longer-form, on the big show of YouTube. Increasingly, you can build a great brand with just a newsletter on Substack—no studio needed to start, just a great voice and a lot of hard work—then you can introduce video podcasts, or more ambitious shows, and start building a foothold in social video and YouTube. Some of the creator-founded businesses I’m most excited about, like Feed Me from Emily Sundberg, are starting there, and feel destined to be big everywhere.

Everything from the creator era is still here—it’s just moved outward from YouTube to a wider ecosystem, while the new studios—often founded by creators like Mark Rober, Kinigra Deon, Dhar Mann, and Mythical, currently sit atop the food chain at YouTube.

So what comes next, and how long can the creator studio era last? Now that the business model of YouTube is well-proven, and revenue and audiences there for longer-form programming, we can expect the libraries of the smarter traditional players and studios to open up on YouTube, as Evan Shapiro has been predicting — and the recent announcement from BBC is one of the first signs of this coming wave (although they’re clear to say this can’t replace their main business model). It’s also not hard to imagine a wave of AI studios coming—there are several already making content with AI that looks and feels objectively pretty cool, as long as you don’t think AI is inherently uncool, which a sizable portion of YouTube viewers do.4

I work with a number of creator-founded studios at Electrify, where I serve as board chair, and what’s exciting to me about their opportunity right now is that they can tap into fandom and the power of their communities in a way that mainstream media companies can’t, and purely AI-powered studios will likely find hard to do. Over years of making great videos, they’ve built up tremendous trust and goodwill, and their fans want them to be around for the long haul, in part because they’ve often created communities their fans love to be a part of. Those fans will show up en masse for live events and livestreams; they’ll buy memberships and merch; and they’ll push their new projects, like games or apps or movies, to the top of the charts. It will also make traditional brands like Nat Geo want to come to them.

The same skills that helped creators take over the world in the first place—their ability to make great entertainment with limited resources, to adapt constantly to competition and change, and to build deep relationships with their audiences—are also their best defense against all the incoming players that want to take their spot in the economy they built. With everything changing so quickly, and fast adoption of new tools like vibe coding, gen AI models, robotics, rapid prototyping, and augmented reality, the next fifteen years might be unimaginable—but I’m still bullish on creators.

Ten years ago today, Justin Bieber’s What Do You Mean? was uploaded to YouTube, a glossy, rain- and neon-soaked short by movie director Brad Furman, referencing movies like Out of Sight and The Game and randomly starring John Leguizamo. The video got 12M views in its first day, then debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100—the first no. 1 hit for the first pop star discovered on YouTube, even though the song hadn’t had gotten much radio play. That was because since February 2013, YouTube views were counted in the Hot 100, pushing everything from Harlem Shake to Wrecking Ball up the charts when they blew up on the site. For Justin Bieber, it was an an amazing turnaround after a few years of being mostly banned from the radio, and kind of great that it happened on the site.

[Watch all the videos mentioned in this post here.]

If you look at the other top music videos of 2015, you see a maxed-out movie vibe—we also had Wiz Khalifa’s See You Again (still the #2 most viewed of all time), The Weeknd’s I Can’t Feel My Face and The Hills, Adele’s Hello, Sia’s Elastic Heart. So many videos that year felt big and high-concept: WTF, Alright, Lean On, Worth It, Hotline Bling, Hey Mama, Stitches… The music industry had started to rebound from a 15 year post-Napster slump and was investing in ambitious videos to push songs up the charts. Most ambitious of them all that year: Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood,” a full-on superhero film from Joseph Kahn with a huge cast of famous actors and performers (including Selena Gomez, the subject of Bieber’s song) and a feature from Kendrick Lamar.

There was one video in YouTube’s top 10 that year that looked completely different than the others—Silentó’s “Watch Me (Whip / Nae Nae),” which cut in videos from a dozen different YouTube channels dancing to the song. Other songs had blown up before thanks to viral dance memes, like Harlem Shake and Gangnam Style, and both the Whip and the Nae Nae dances had already been trending on Vine and YouTube for a year or two. But for this single Silentó collaborated with Madonna-founded startup DanceOn, who worked with 50 dance channels in their network to make dance videos with the song. Those videos got over 250 million views, and the official video went to over 500 million.

You can’t watch the video now and not see TikTok and all the dance challenges coming.

Big budget music videos on YouTube would drive Hot 100 charts for years more—a few more of the most-viewed videos of all time came out in 2016-2018, like Despacito and Shape of You (and… Dame Tu Cosita?), and also videos everyone talked about like Formation, Lemon, Green Light, thank u, next, Malamente, HUMBLE, Sicko Mode, and This is America.

None of the top 25 most-viewed videos of all time, however, are from post 2018, and no video since 2018 is on pace to crack the top 25 anytime in the next 10 years. The kind of gonzo, widescreen videos that were everywhere in 2015 are truly rare now. What did happen in 2018 was TikTok’s merger with Musical.ly, and the app hitting #1 in the app store that year. Spotify also hit nearly 100M subscribers, Apple Music 50M, and YouTube Music relaunched, all signs more people were starting to listen to music on paid mobile apps than a free YouTube browser.

By 2019 songs like Old Town Road were becoming mainstream hits on TikTok before YouTube, thanks to dance challenges and audios. By the time Doja Cat had a music video for Say So on YouTube, it had her doing the dance challenge for the song. Nowadays, it’s more about the shorts fans make than the music videos the artists make, for better or worse.

As for Justin Bieber: for his next music video, Sorry, he abandoned movie sets or even appearing in the video at all, opting for… a dance video, choreographed by Parris Goebel, and made in two days with two New Zealand dance crews on a white background. Uploaded in October 2015, it passed 4 billion views yesterday, is still Bieber’s most-viewed video, and sits comfortably as the #15 most-viewed music video of all time.

Some footnotes I couldn’t fit anywhere in here:

1. You might have seen the news in June that Silentó was sentenced to 30 years in prison for manslaughter. It’s really sad, and hard not to watch the video now without thinking about that, too.

2. When I was at YouTube and we began funding original programming on the site, we were well aware of how important dance was, and funded a number of channels in the category, including DanceOn, who did the Watch Me challenge, Jon Chu’s DS2DIO, and Pharrell’s I Am Other (which led to the seminal 24 Hours of Happy). When I needed to get approval for our first hour-long drama series and biggest investment to date, Step Up, I asked some analysts on the team if we could get an estimate of how many watch hours dance videos had been responsible for in the history of YouTube. The number they came back with was larger than any of us imagined—and an amazing thing to put in our presentation, along with a number of videos to illustrate the point, including Watch Me and Sorry.

3. This post was originally titled YouTube Time Machine, after the name of a brilliant website that I wish was still up by my good friend and colleague Justin Johnson was still around. You can read about it here.