{"id":851157,"date":"2025-05-26T00:13:05","date_gmt":"2025-05-26T05:13:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/26\/youtube-at-20-has-hosted-20-trillion-videos-and-launched-superstars-it-wants-more-including-some-prestige\/"},"modified":"2025-05-26T00:13:05","modified_gmt":"2025-05-26T05:13:05","slug":"youtube-at-20-has-hosted-20-trillion-videos-and-launched-superstars-it-wants-more-including-some-prestige","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/26\/youtube-at-20-has-hosted-20-trillion-videos-and-launched-superstars-it-wants-more-including-some-prestige\/","title":{"rendered":"YouTube, at 20, Has Hosted 20 Trillion Videos and Launched Superstars. It Wants More\u2014Including Some\u00a0Prestige"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Drive five miles north of the Hollywood sign and you\u2019ll find yourself in Burbank, where they actually make the dreams for the dream factory. Casablanca,<\/em> Reservoir Dogs,<\/em> and Euphoria<\/em> were all shot here. Today, tucked inside an unmarked warehouse in a particularly drab patch of the city, Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal are filming their own contribution to entertainment history: a segment called \u201cWill It Dip?\u201d for their delightfully goofy and imaginative YouTube series Good Mythical Morning<\/a>.<\/em> After taste-testing a soupy dip made out of mashed Girl Scout cookies, the duo are presented with a bowl of black goo served under glass. As soon as McLaughlin removes the lid, thick smoke fills the set, which is designed to look like a ramshackle fishing lodge. When the cameras stop rolling, Neal tells the show\u2019s culinary producer, \u201cI do feel like you were trying to kill us a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n

McLaughlin and Neal are friends from small-town North Carolina who met in first-grade detention. They experimented with making films as teens and, at 21, McLaughlin auditioned for The Real World.<\/em> Unsuccessfully. In 2006 the guys were shooting comic skits and songs after work in a basement when they realized that YouTube, still very much in its infancy, could be a great outlet for their stuff. These days they operate out of this 17,000-square-foot maze, which comes complete with writers rooms, test kitchens, and a prop department full of bizarro pieces from episodes past and future. The Mythical company now makes multiple series and podcasts, as well as having a food website, merchandising, and an investment fund for the next generation of digital creators. Their YouTube channels have a combined audience of 30 million subscribers, and Good Mythical Morning<\/em> alone has twice as many viewers aged 18 to 34 as Seth, Stephen, Jimmy, and Jimmy combined.<\/p>\n

What more could McLaughlin and Neal want? Hollywood awards and a little of the prestige that comes with them, for starters. \u201cObviously it\u2019s cool in LA when you\u2019ve got a shelf with an Emmy on it,\u201d says McLaughlin, grinning through his thicket of facial hair. \u201cBut the main reason is, the awards are designed to recognize what is resonating culturally. Well, we are resonating culturally, so we should be a part of that conversation. Shows that get the awards\u2014there\u2019s this sense that these are the real<\/em> shows. And we want to be on the same stage because we are competing with them directly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou want to be treated like a real boy?\u201d I say.<\/p>\n

\u201cExactly!\u201d McLaughlin says, laughing.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an expansion of what entertainment is,\u201d Neal adds. \u201cWe\u2019re not trying to kill anything. We\u2019re just trying to be invited to the party.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Rhett McLaughlin (L) and Link Neal. (R), hosts of Good Mythical Morning<\/em>, on the set they use to produce multiple series, podcasts, and other ventures that garner an audience of 30 million YouTube subscribers.<\/span>Courtesy of Good Mythical Morning.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

Speaking of parties, YouTube is celebrating its 20th birthday this year, and no one could blame it for feeling jubilant. The platform\u2014which has hosted 20 billion videos since launching in 2005\u2014 has overcome rampant underestimation and sporadic demonization to become the second-most visited website in the world (behind its parent company, Google). Two and a half billion people watch YouTube videos every month, and its content has partially, or completely, replaced traditional television viewing for many of them. Smart TVs have made the site so easily accessible that television screens have now surpassed phones and laptops as the primary way people watch it in the US.<\/p>\n

Where a previous generation of families might\u2019ve gathered around the electronic hearth to watch How I Met Your Mother<\/em> or Survivor,<\/em> they now communally binge Amelia Dimoldenberg\u2019s swoon-worthy Chicken Shop Date<\/em><\/a> or Michelle Khare\u2019s daredevil docuseries Challenge Accepted<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Khare takes on intense challenges for her series\u2014anything from training to be a chess grandmaster to earning a black belt in 90 days. When she premiered the latter 77-minute episode at the Montclair Film Festival last fall, multiple families approached her. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t: \u2018Hey, I\u2019m here because my kids like you.\u2019 It was: \u2018We\u2019re here because when an episode of Challenge Accepted<\/em> drops, we all sit down on Friday night to watch it together.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of which fuels Hollywood\u2019s long love-hate relationship with the platform. \u201cYouTube wants to be taken seriously in Hollywood, and they are<\/em> being taken very seriously,\u201d says David R. Craig, a former TV executive turned USC professor and coauthor of Social Media Entertainment: The New Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.<\/em> \u201cNot so much as a creator of content but as a distraction from the content that Hollywood produces.\u201d<\/p>\n

The anxiety has been hanging in the air for years. Back in 2020, Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings asked me rhetorically, \u201cDoes creative quality on YouTube just go up and up and up so that eventually it meets [viewers\u2019] needs? Do we get outcompeted by some combination of user-generated [content]?\u201d He called platforms like YouTube and TikTok his streamer\u2019s biggest \u201cthreat-slash-opportunity.\u201d Netflix was also a tech company and relative newcomer at this point, one that had only started presenting original series in 2013. (Remember House of Cards<\/em>?) Its own entry into what was soon dubbed \u201cthe streaming wars\u201d sent the industry into convulsions.<\/p>\n

A kind of d\u00e9tente between Hollywood and YouTube emerged as executives realized how useful the platform was for distributing their own wares, whether clips from Saturday Night Live<\/em> or blockbuster movie teasers. \u201cI speak with all the studio heads on a regular basis, and they recognize YouTube as one of their most important partners,\u201d YouTube CEO Neal Mohan tells me. The studios are eager to create \u201cnew business opportunities for their franchises and IP on YouTube,\u201d as well as reaching their fandoms, he says. And in the strictest sense, they aren\u2019t competitors, since YouTube doesn\u2019t actually produce any of their programming\u2014it just provides a stage for creators to do their thing, and shares the advertising money with many of them.<\/p>\n

Still, entertainment execs quietly derided YouTube for much of its existence, seeing it as little more than a farm team providing poachable raw talent, including Justin Bieber, Broad City,<\/em> Bo Burnham, Troye Sivan, Kyle Mooney, and Lilly Singh. When longtime YouTuber Issa Rae started uploading episodes of her 2011 web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,<\/em><\/a> a writer friend advised her to format it like a proper TV show. Invitations to adapt it for prime time soon followed, but as Rae later told The New York Times,<\/em> \u201cThey wanted to make it as broad as possible.\u201d She eventually made her way to HBO, where she cocreated the award-winning Insecure.<\/em><\/p>\n

McLaughlin and Neal took a different path. Their YouTube channel led to a gig on a short-lived 2011 cable TV series called Commercial Kings.<\/em> Instead of being their big break, it left them in LA limbo. They churned out scripts and took endless meetings. \u201cThe vast majority of things that you put your time into, no one\u2019s ever going to see because that\u2019s just how this town works,\u201d McLaughlin says. Then in their early 30s, both men had small children at home. They ultimately decided to double down on being YouTube creators, with all the freedom and entrepreneurialism that entails.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ones who do it the best build a real community, and then it\u2019s not about: What can I sell them? It\u2019s: What can I create to expand my reach?\u201d says Oren Rosenbaum, a partner at United Talent Agency and cohead of their Creators division. \u201cThere\u2019s many examples of creators who started with us doing one thing and now have written a book, gone on tour, created a podcast, launched a consumer product. If you\u2019ve built this loyal audience, and you find a thing that makes sense for you and for them, it\u2019s a home run.\u201d And, as USC\u2019s Craig points out, YouTube creators can do more than just make money off of their followers: \u201cThey can also persuade them to vote in certain ways and care about certain causes.\u201d That includes a number of right-wing podcasters and conspiracy theorists who\u2019ve built nests on YouTube.<\/p>\n

Streamers like Netflix and Peacock are increasingly eager to scoop up YouTube talent, who come with a built-in global audience. But when Hollywood comes knocking, successful creators increasingly consider it a side gig. Why give up total control over your project when no one knows as much about your viewers as you do? Superstar creator MrBeast<\/a> (a.k.a. Jimmy Donaldson) recently launched a reality competition called Beast Games<\/em> for Amazon Prime. Although Amazon says it was their most-watched unscripted series ever, it\u2019s unlikely Donaldson will forsake his digital kingdom. \u201cAll of these creators tend to think about how to use what they\u2019re doing off platform to drive [viewers] back to home base,\u201d says YouTube VP Tara Walpert Levy. She was delighted to see a list of mantras on the wall of MrBeast\u2019s studio. At the top of the list: \u201cYouTube first.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Neal and McLaughlin facing their crew and studio set up, which is housed in a 17,000-square-foot warehouse in Burbank, California.<\/span>Courtesy of Good Mythical Morning.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

While YouTube toasts to 20 years of memes and memories, the traditional entertainment industry is in agonizing flux. \u201cOn the more traditional side of things, it\u2019s all about cost cutting,\u201d says Ali Berman, partner at UTA and cohead with Rosenbaum of the Creators division. \u201cIt\u2019s so ironic, because on our<\/em> side of the business, it\u2019s all about increasing staff, creating writers rooms, hiring producers. Our creators are building the media companies of today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mohan, YouTube\u2019s CEO, likes to call the legion of creator-led studios popping up \u201cthe start-up economy of Hollywood.\u201d That goes for Burbank denizens like the Good Mythical Morning<\/em> gang as well as Alan Chikin Chow, a mastermind of candy-colored teen skits who recently opened a production hub there. But some of the new studios are nowhere near LA: Kinigra Deon, a purveyor of family-friendly shorts and feature-length videos, is building a production hub in Alabama; MrBeast operates from a 50,000-square-foot studio in North Carolina; and Dude Perfect just unveiled an 80,000-square-foot space in Texas. Even farther afield, the rural Indian town of Tulsi is known as YouTube Village, because more than a quarter of the population is involved in creating videos, inspiring the local government to establish a state-of-the-art studio.<\/p>\n

Some of the bigger American creator studios combine amateurs and professionals. When Khare needs to mount a particularly epic production\u2014like learning how to do Harry Houdini\u2019s most dangerous stunt\u2014her team can balloon to 80 people on set. She thinks of her show in terms of seasons and arcs these days, which she hopes will make it easier for Hollywood to see the well-produced work she does as Emmy-worthy or even Oscar adjacent. YouTube now offers its creators the ability to arrange their videos as distinct series with bingeable episodes, and YouTube Premium is rolling out the option to watch at 4X playback speed. The argument goes that if it looks like TV and acts like TV, surely it should be rewarded\u2014and awarded\u2014like TV?<\/p>\n

YouTube programs have won some Emmys, but only in ghettoized Interactive Media categories. Hot Ones<\/em> and Good Mythical Morning<\/em> made it onto Emmy ballots last year, but none snagged nominations. Mohan is pushing hard for the TV Academy to be more welcoming of creators. \u201cIf you\u2019re trying to recognize creativity that comes out of the cultural zeitgeist, then how can you exclude this enormous class of content?\u201d<\/p>\n

The Oscars and Emmys themselves partly sprung out of fledgling industries\u2019 desire to drum up legitimacy, capital, and cultural respect. Craig suggests that YouTube has similar reasons for wanting to be included. \u201cIn 1981 the head of the FCC referred to television as \u2018a toaster with pictures,\u2019\u2009\u201d he says. \u201cThose same kinds of condemnations are leveled at social media platforms. So YouTube has a very strong reason to want to gain more legitimacy from the greater society, so that they don\u2019t find themselves lumped in with other social media platforms being accused of destroying civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

While traditional TV studios have humans vetting content and applying strict standards, however, YouTube is a largely unregulated environment ruled by algorithms. Trolling, scamming, racism, and sexually inappropriate material float through the ether\u2014think PewDiePie\u2019s antisemitic videos or Logan Paul\u2019s infamous footage of what appeared to be the body of someone who\u2019d died by suicide. Tales of radicalization, like Caleb Cain\u2019s, are not uncommon either. Mohan points out that YouTube tries to strike a balance: It has community guidelines, and often takes appropriate action, but it is first and foremost an open platform. \u201cOur mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world,\u201d he says. \u201cThere isn\u2019t a gatekeeper or a standards body exercising their judgment, and that\u2019s fundamentally the power of YouTube.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mythical\u2019s Neal acknowledges that YouTube was once a Wild West, but notes that as it\u2019s grown in influence, creators have upped their game in terms of content and production values: \u201cMore and more creators are doing that because the audience now is turning on their television and they\u2019re seeing the YouTube icon right next to Max and Netflix. They don\u2019t want to see somebody leaning up against their bed with a handheld camera.\u201d<\/p>\n

The question of whether content is \u201chigh quality\u201d enough to merit mainstream approbation strikes YouTube\u2019s Levy as completely irrelevant. \u201cViewers vote with their time what they perceive to be the most high quality, which sometimes aligns with how we traditionally in the industry would have defined and picked it, and sometimes doesn\u2019t,\u201d she says. \u201cI really believe that viewers have erased the distinction between different aspects of our entertainment ecosystem. This is just sort of new TV, and we\u2019re all in it together.\u201d<\/p>\n

The majority of YouTubers still don\u2019t aspire to win Emmys, and many of them make videos that don\u2019t fit into any of traditional TV\u2019s categories\u2014which is part of the point. Where else would you find someone like Mina Le<\/a>, whose videos combine cultural commentary and personal adventures, or the performative music criticism of Anthony Fantano\u2019s The Needledrop<\/em><\/a>? Yet it makes perfect sense that entertainment industry insiders would resist embracing an atomizing platform that has no interest in upholding its strictures and standards. UTA\u2019s Rosenbaum is keeping his eye on the next generation of entertainment executives moving up the ladder. \u201cThey\u2019re the ones that are consuming this content,\u201d he says, \u201cand now they\u2019re in the position where they can create change.\u201d<\/p>\n

McLaughlin says that lately he\u2019s had a lot more established industry people wondering if they should skip all the pitches and pilots, and make work for YouTube. \u201cYou meet someone who has had a lot of success, maybe as an actor or a producer, and they\u2019re like, \u2018Man, I wish I could build something like you guys,\u2019\u2009\u201d he says, \u201cbecause they\u2019re at the whims of the studio.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not that McLaughlin thinks the path he and Neal took was easy. The partners spent a dozen years building up an audience for Good Mythical Morning,<\/em> not to mention all the videos they made before that. \u201cYes, it\u2019s over here on YouTube, but it\u2019s an institution,\u201d McLaughlin says proudly. And it gets around. At a recent party, McLaughlin met an actor and they had the inevitable LA conversation. The actor said, What are you working on?<\/em> And when McLaughlin mentioned his channel, the actor said, \u201cOh, I know Good Mythical Morning<\/em>. My urologist showed me a video of you and your friend getting a vasectomy together!\u201d<\/p>\n

This story has been updated.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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