What’s the difference between YouTube and TV? Two decades ago, that would have been a very easy question to answer. TV was the stuff that was on – you guessed it – television, with its budgets, scripts, multiple camera angles and lights. The first video ever uploaded to YouTube, meanwhile, could never have been mistaken for it. “All right, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants,” a pixelated young man told the camera. “The cool thing about these guys is that … is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks.” The video was uploaded on 23 April 2005 and marked the true launch of the video-sharing site.
This February, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan declared: “YouTube is the new television.” He was referring to the fact that more and more people watch YouTube videos on the big screen: apparently, users play 1bn hours of YouTube on their smart TVs a day. But at the same time, more and more people are watching TV on YouTube: Disney uploaded the first three episodes of its Star Wars spin-off Andor to the site in March, while ITV has been sharing its shows on YouTube since December.
Today, TV is on YouTube and YouTube is on TV – some YouTubers have even struck deals with streamers, creating their own shows for the box. Beast Games, a reality competition created by the world’s most-subscribed YouTuber, MrBeast, debuted on Prime Video last December and quickly became the platform’s most-watched unscripted series of all time, generating $100m in profit. So what’s the difference between YouTube and TV? Increasingly, less and less. How did we get here? And where are we going to end up?
“I woke up to a cold email from an employee at Netflix, and then woke up to another cold email from another streaming platform, and then they kind of started trickling in,” says Victor Bengtsson, managing director of Sidemen Entertainment. The Sidemen are seven YouTubers who have accumulated 146 million subscribers with their skits, challenges and reaction videos over various channels. In 2024, they created their own reality competition on YouTube, Inside, earning more than 50m views – that year, the finale of Love Island All Stars attracted just 1.3 million viewers. No wonder, then, that Netflix acquired season two of Inside, which premiered on the platform in March.
This is far from the first collaboration between YouTubers and the mainstream media, even if it did take traditional broadcasters almost a decade to notice the appeal of online celebs. In 2015, the BBC invited beauty vlogger Zoella to take part in The Great Comic Relief Bake Off, while her brother Joe Sugg starred in Strictly Come Dancing three years later. Meanwhile, across the pond, YouTubers were offered their very own shows. In 2016, Netflix released Haters Back Off, a series created by online musical comedian Colleen Ballinger. NBC gave Canadian YouTuber Lilly Singh a short-lived talkshow in 2019, though she herself joked about its unappealing 1.30am slot before it was cancelled two years later.
The trouble with some of these shows is that you can’t just copy and paste a YouTuber and expect them to fit inside a different box; guerrilla content can lose its appeal when it’s moulded into telly’s pre-existing formats. But at a time of crisis in television – senior producers are now taking shelf-stacking jobs due to lack of work – it seems broadcasters are more and more willing to yield to YouTubers’ ways. Bengtsson says the Sidemen feel “respected” by Netflix and is encouraged that “they’re not trying to change what we do. They’re not trying to change who we are.”
Inside’s first season was shot over seven days, edited in nine, and debuted a day later. Working with Netflix for season two meant the team had a lot more breathing room and Bengtsson believes the final product was more polished, but still creatively free. “You put people from their platform in the same room as us and it’s like two worlds colliding, it’s two tsunami waves just crashing in,” he says.
One issue that arose was the length of the content – the first episode of Inside season one was two hours long, while Netflix told Bengtsson its reality shows typically last 45 minutes. As a compromise, Inside season two has hour-long episodes. Netflix also agreed to drop new episodes daily – like Sidemen viewers were used to – instead of all at once. “This super-successful streaming platform and the Sidemen are merged into one, trying to get what the future of reality TV could look like.”
But are execs conceding too much to YouTube talent, who are often used to working with fewer constraints? Beast Games has been branded a “dystopian nightmare” – five of its contestants are suing MrBeast for allegedly “unsafe” conditions during filming. Even if you ignore the lawsuit, the show’s contents have proved troubling. The Guardian’s own Stuart Heritage wrote, “There is a cruel ruthlessness to Beast Games that is truly unpalatable … There is endless pleading and crying and full-blown adult tantrums.” Are broadcasters in a race to the bottom?
“We have a key rule here: it’s not art, it’s entertainment,” says Bengtsson. “Don’t disrespect the format of easy-to-engage content … There is incredible pride in being able to create something that is funny, clever and commercialised.” He adds that the money the Sidemen generate for streamers could “be redistributed to real artists who have real projects”. Of course, the terms “YouTuber” and “artist” are not mutually exclusive: comedian Bo Burnham got his start on YouTube and won three Emmys for his 2021 Covid-themed Netflix special.
While broadcasters increasingly attract YouTubers, YouTube is also increasingly attracting broadcasters – the relationship seems to be more symbiotic than ever before. “There are a lot of platforms that can help you with awareness and reach, but I think YouTube is relatively uniquely positioned in being able to generate revenue,” says Neil Price, a UK partner manager at YouTube who helps traditional broadcasters understand how their content can work on the site. Like any other YouTuber, broadcasters can earn money from ads that are displayed around their content.
Price says that in recent years, broadcasters have gone from posting small clips of their shows on YouTube to episodes wholesale, as well as creating new content for digital audiences. Between 2023 and 2024, Channel 4 tripled its YouTube views by uploading long-standing shows such as Hollyoaks to its “Channel 4.0” while also launching new online-only prank series and gameshows. “It’ll be interesting to see how production entities continue to evolve their thinking,” Price says. “I think the entire industry deserves real credit for what can feel uncomfortable … for being open to the possibility of exploring new things.”
But is YouTube having its cake and eating it – competing with broadcasters by hosting their content, not creating its own? Between 2016 and 2022, the site did try its hand at becoming a more traditional media company, launching YouTube Originals, a division that created new shows and films for paying subscribers. Entertainment executive Susanne Daniels was brought on to head the initiative – she previously helped develop shows such as Dawson’s Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
“Original content allows a company to have a voice,” Daniels says – she is especially proud of an Emmy-winning YouTube special she helped create, Recipe for Change: Standing Up to Antisemitism. But does YouTube want a voice? Ultimately, the company chose to be a platform rather than a publisher; CEO Mohan said the Originals division shut because YouTubers were already producing successful content, “so that eliminated the need for us to do anything.” Daniels left the company in 2022. “YouTube is run by engineers and product executives like Neil Mohan who are focused primarily on their distribution capabilities and have little appreciation for the power of premium content,” she says.
In the US, more people now watch YouTube on their TVs than watch Disney+, Prime Video and Netflix. No wonder Netflix is rumoured to currently be in talks with YouTubers Dude Perfect and Mark Rober, and Disney is apparently searching for family-friendly creators. But Daniels believes that while “YouTube is definitely a competitor in terms of watch time and eyeballs”, it isn’t a competitor in quality. “Is YouTube the democratisation of content? Yes, arguably it is, in that everyone can make their own YouTube show, but everyone can’t make The Crown or The Sopranos.”
Even before they had their own Netflix show, the Sidemen were being watched on TV: more than 45% of the group’s watch time comes from smart TVs. Between 2020 and 2023, the number of YouTube views on TV screens increased more than 130%. This means that while YouTubers may not be making The Sopranos, YouTube videos are becoming more televisual – with bigger budgets, longer watch times and greater production values to fit the big screen. A single MrBeast YouTube video can now cost £3m to make.
Viewers would be forgiven for not being able to tell the difference between YouTube and traditional TV. YouTube is becoming more like TV, while TV is becoming more like YouTube. The differences between the two mediums are eroding, and it is unlikely they will ever be distinct again.
