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Is YouTube Winning Or Is TV Losing

Another week, another dose of good news for YouTube: according to MoffettNathanson, YouTube is now the world’s largest media company, surpassing all of its traditional TV rivals: Netflix, Disney, Warner, Comcast and Paramount.

This is being heralded by YouTubistas as their own V-E day, proof that YouTube is now the dominant player in the TV industry.

I have a different take though.

It’s not so much that YouTube is winning (though, to its credit, it is doing a lot more than just being in the right place at the right time), it’s that the legacy media companies are losing.

YouTube is what TV looks like in the time of Feudal Media—a combination of creator content, studio content, a vMVPD, a music service, a sports app and more. 

Whereas the others, save (more or less) Netflix, look like what they are: paragons of the old order trying to find their place in the new one.

Why It Matters

As James Faris points out in Business Insider, the past year saw a shift of around $4B from the legacy TV companies to YouTube. 

Meaning that one is growing and the other is not.

And since much of that growth seems to come from ad revenue, it’s worth exploring why that is.

Is it that YouTube has more relevant, brand-safe programming and larger more involved audiences?

Or is it that the legacy media companies make it so hard to actually buy anything at scale that media buyers just find it easier to default to YouTube, which provides them with easy to understand stats and beautiful four-color charts.

(Hint: it’s the latter.)

There’s another big reason too—YouTube is, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly. You buy YouTube and you’re done.

It’s similar to why it’s easier for small businesses to stick with Meta’s self-serve ads than to try one of the new platforms that will let them put their ads on TV: there’s just one Facebook and one Instagram. Maybe you’d add TikTok, but otherwise one click and you’re done.

Versus TV, where you need to navigate a labyrinth of streaming and linear companies, local and national vendors, programmatic and direct sales teams… and then struggle to make sense of the reporting on where your ad actually ran.

This is the exact same issue that big agency media buyers face too: attempt to reach “CTV” viewers by cobbling together an unwieldy collection of buys, none of which are actually measured the same way, and then attempting to figure out some formula for the sort of apples-to-apples comparisons their clients expect from them.

Versus just putting most of the money into YouTube and getting those beautiful, easy-to-follow four-color charts back in return.

That said, the infighting among the major media companies should not take away from the impressiveness of YouTube’s other accomplishments.

They have correctly identified the myriad ways that we consume media these days. Understood that all those people predicting the death of the actual TV set were wrong. Understood that in the post-monoculture world, viewing was not going to be done in 30 or 60 minute chunks. Or 30 and 60 second ones either.

And getting that more than anything, media buyers, content creators and consumers all crave one very basic thing: simplicity.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are YouTube, take a bow. 

It is no accident you wound up here and you’ve done a stellar job reading the room.

There’s a list of things the rest of the industry wants from you—everything from greater transparency to less disruptive ad breaks to better policing of hate speech and libel. 

From a business POV, those are largely in the nice to have bucket, though fixing them would do a lot to help improve your reputation. Meaning people would have your back in any sort of government-initiated beef.

If you are the legacy media business, I will repeat two pieces of advice I frequently offer:

First, remember the words of Ben Franklin: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately.”

Meaning stop viewing the other media companies as rivals and start cooperating. Measurement is a critical first step as once you have a standardized system of measurement everything else will flow from there. 

Remember that your rivals are Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple. Not each other. 

So act accordingly.

It may not, to be fair, save your business in the long run. But it will make the decline slower and the landing much less bumpy.

Because in the age of Feudal Media, a collection of small, constantly warring fiefdoms will almost always lose to a larger, more organized kingdom. 

Which is what the YouTube story is really about.

TVREV At Marketecture Live III

For those of you who missed it, TVREV programmed the CTV track at Marketecture Live III in NYC on Wednesday. As with all our tracks, we set out to tell a cohesive story so that you walk away with “actionable takeaways” aka things you can put to use in your day-to-day job.

The theme for our track was (surprise) the collapse of the monoculture and the rise of Feudal Media. And how that played out across advertising and measurement. Why sports was the last vestige of the monoculture. And how YouTube became television.

Why It Matters

Ad tech audiences are generally less interested in broader changes to the market than in very specific takeaways, so we made that sort of granularity a must throughout.

The track opened up with my keynote on The Fall of the Monoculture and the Rise of Feudal Media, which laid out the overall thesis that we are in an age of massive media fragmentation where old ways of looking at television are no longer relevant and where the lack of a single source of truth makes it much harder to get a message out, whether that is a brand message or a political message… and how to adapt to it.

That set up our next session “How To Reach A Mass Audience When There's No Mass Media”, a fireside I did with James Wilhite from our track sponsor, Index Exchange. Wilhite explained that mass audiences still exist—you’ve just got to do a little work to find them. One key way to do this is to make use of contextual targeting—targeting ads to what is on the screen versus who is watching. Which is now possible due to better show-level data. (Look for a full write-up of the session next week.)

That session was followed by “Inputs & Outcomes: Two Truths and a Lie About the Trends Reshaping CTV” where Jason Damata joined iSpot’s Julie Van Ullen and Horizon Media’s Maikel O’Hanlon to discuss how, and more importantly, what to measure when TV has gotten so fragmented. Best line of the session was from Van Ullen who noted that “not every ad is designed to generate a click.” (She was talking about “outcomes”.)

After one of the best conference lunches I’ve had, Cathy Rasenberger and I sat down to discuss sports, in a session called “Not Your Father's Sunday Sports: Ushering in a New Era of Fandom.” It was a wide-ranging discussion veering from how sports is the last vestige of the monoculture to how streaming—FAST in particular—is changing that. Rasenberger, who (among other things) owns a company called FreeLiveSports, explained why Gen Z is so reliant on clips and how niche sports are starting to develop real fan bases now that they are on TV.

Next up was Tubefliter and Streamy Award founder Josh Cohen who discussed why “Social Video Is The New TV” with Jason Damata. Cohen gave us a quick tour of the evolution of social video, starting off with an old clip of him interviewing very early days Gary Vee. From there, the conversation veered to how YouTube is starting to dominate TV viewing today, what length content does best on TV and how the industry’s view of YouTube and social video in general has shifted fairly dramatically over the past few years.

To end the track, Next in Media’s Mike Shields joined me on stage while Damata played Phil Donahue in the audience, for a round of Analyst Improv where audience members shouted out suggestions and Mike and I gave our opinions. Topics ranged from the prospects for self-serve platforms to the viability of ad-supported Netflix to the role of the TV OS and its role as a gatekeeper in the age of Feudal Media.

What You Need To Do About It

If you missed the sessions, there will be video. Or, even better, a chance to catch us live at StreamTV Europe and StreamTV Denver.

If none of the above is an option, keep reading TVREV. We will keep you up to speed.

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