British YouTuber collective the Sidemen
In the early days of YouTube, there were plenty in the TV world who openly scoffed at the idea of creators on the nascent video platform offering serious competition for ad spend. The notion that broadcasters might one day take notes from social media-born stars would have been laughed out of the room.
Yet with YouTube’s ad revenues soaring at the expense of the traditional TV world, and creators becoming an increasingly common presence across the Cannes Lions event circuit, attitudes are starting to change. YouTube and other video platforms are no longer just marketing tools for broadcasters, but are full-on distribution platforms requiring their own strategies. And to form these strategies, broadcasters are using tactics which have been well established by creators.
A recent report from MIDiA profiled this shift, highlighting the ways broadcasters are adapting. Ben Woods, Creator Economy Analyst at MIDiA, points to how several broadcasters are treating YouTube as more of a hub for engaging fandoms of specific IP, using a variety of formats.
“Look at what the BBC’s doing with Bluey, for example,” said Woods. “They’re really leaning into all the different ways in which you can engage with YouTube audiences. You’ve got Bluey Shorts, 24-hour live streams of Bluey content back-to-back, you’ve got spin-off content with Bluey cooking shows and shows around specific characters within Bluey, it goes on and on.”
Beyond a side project
The issue for broadcasters, though, is that social media isn’t as strong from a monetisation perspective, nor in terms of collecting audience data. That an issue for broadcaster, who need to fund splashy entertainment formats and costly news programming. So while social media isn’t just a marketing tool, the ultimate aim should still be to bring audiences back onto broadcasters’ own on-demand platforms.
Woods says that here, too, TV businesses can turn to creators for inspiration, namely UK YouTube collective the Sidemen.
“What the Sidemen do in a nutshell is that they cover all platforms, but they do so in a way that provides slightly different engagement each time, to move their audiences and build fandom,” said Woods. Their ‘Sidemen Reacts’ channel on YouTube, for example, focuses on short-form reaction content and memes; ‘More Sidemen’ is mostly lifestyle, gaming, and challenge content with generally higher production values; and the main Sidemen channel takes a TV-style approach, with weekly releases, longer videos, and content designed to create water cooler moments for their fanbase. Outside of YouTube, the group distributes its big-budget reality show ‘Inside’ on Netflix. The most dedicated fans, meanwhile, are led away from third-party platforms and monetised directly via the paid ‘Side+’ app, which hosts exclusive extra content.
The key lesson for broadcasters isn’t in the content as such. The BBC doesn’t need to spin up an ‘Attenborough Reacts’ YouTube channel just yet. But Woods says that the “engagement engine” built by the Sidemen is a good model for TV businesses to build towards. The idea is to cover multiple platforms, but do so in a way that provides slightly different engagement each time. This means different channels nourish and feed into each other, building fandom while making it easier to move viewers between platforms. For broadcasters, this could ultimately help them more effectively use social media to bring audiences back onto their own streaming services.
TikTok-first commissioning
To make the most of the opportunity, MIDiA’s research highlights a number of other specific tactics which broadcasters can pull from the social world.
Perhaps the most obvious is to work with creators who are native to social platforms. But there’s nuance here.
Some of the earlier (at times clumsier) efforts from the traditional TV world to embrace social media involved simply pulling established talent from YouTube and placing them in familiar TV formats. This approach has risks: while big creators bring their own audiences, if the content itself isn’t a good fit, it won’t necessarily generate much engagement. And broadcasters already have access to plenty of popular talent themselves, who often perform well on social. So understanding formats and what’s popular is perhaps more important than simply partnering with the most popular YouTubers and TikTokers.
Woods suggests a more fruitful way of engaging with creators is to spot up-and-coming future stars, and help take them to the next level. These sorts of partnerships will be cheaper than working with more established social stars, meaning there’s more room for experimentation. “The idea is that you support video creators through incubators, joint format development, access to infrastructure, and launching social-first pilots,” said Woods. “You get an idea of what does and doesn’t work. And when it does work, you can bring that content onto your own BVOD platforms, and create a more fluid movement between streaming and social.”
When it comes to broadcasters’ owned and operated services, Woods says TV companies should look to replicate some of the engagement and retention mechanisms used on YouTube. So in the same way that YouTube lets creators cater to fandoms through specific channels and feeds, broadcasters could mould their BVOD services into fandom hubs for popular IP. And short-form video tabs, which cater to a particular form of viewing while also acting as a gateway to long-form content, could also have a place on BVOD platforms.
We’ve seen some examples of both of these in the streaming world, with Netflix, Paramount, and Disney all launching short-form scrollable feeds this year. To go a step further, Woods says broadcasters could rethink the way they commission content to cover shorter formats too. “As an example, you could commission a short-form series on TikTok for an IP like Doctor Who, and use that to drive fans to the long-form Doctor Who series on your BVOD service,” said Woods.
Embrace the fan edits
There are a couple of other tactics which broadcasters could benefit from, but which perhaps go against their instincts.
One is to be more open to allowing viewers to reuse and remix their content — something which many have historically been wary of due to copyright concerns. The reality of modern media is that fans are now part of the infrastructure of discovery. Live streamers happily pay ‘clippers’ to chop up their content and distribute it across platforms. Yet broadcasters are often still hesitant to embrace clipping culture, even when their fans are keen to clip their content for free.
“If you can get a creator to produce a video featuring your clip, or to express their love and fandom of your content, it’s going to have an outsized visibility, and help drive audiences to your TV show or movie,” said Woods.
He pointed to Glitch Productions, a company which releases TV-length animations on YouTube, for a good example of how to capitalise on fan creation. The studio released a clip from its show ‘The Amazing Digital Circus’ with a green screen background, making it easy for fans to remix the clip and create memes off the back of it.
There have been a couple of cases of big streaming platforms taking this approach. HBO, for example, enlisted TikToker ‘uhbucky’ as a digital content editor after her fan edits for ‘Heated Rivalry’ on TikTok began racking up millions of views. Netflix’s ‘Moments’ feature, meanwhile, lets users share clips from the platform’s shows and films (though these remain within the Netflix platform). Disney had looked set to take a very open approach, allowing audiences to create AI-generated content using its IP via a partnership with OpenAI, though this deal was scrapped following the closure of OpenAI’s video generation tool Sora back in March.
The other uncomfortable shift which broadcasters may have to adopt is loosening some of their production values when it comes to creating and commissioning content for social.
Established TV companies pride themselves on the quality and the polish of their content — and that’s certainly one of their strengths. But as Woods puts it, “if you try to stick to broadcasting production values on social media, you’ll never publish anything”.
Creators learn what does and doesn’t work on YouTube and TikTok through testing. They create videos, iterate at speed, and find formats which land with audiences. That model only works when content is created quickly and cheaply.
For broadcasters, the long-term aim is still to lead audiences back to full-length, highly polished shows on their own platforms. But to do that as effectively as possible, they may need to work in a more lean and efficient manner on the social platforms.
MrBeast taking notes
With all of this said, it’s worth remembering that there’s plenty for creators to learn from the TV world – a point that sometimes gets missed in the public discourse. For evidence of that, just look at MrBeast running his own Upfront-style presentation in New York last week, or the Sidemen’s management company bringing broadcaster-style direct ad sales to YouTube creators. Woods says what we’re really seeing is a convergence between the TV and creator spheres, rather than a one-way shift.
And Woods emphasises that platforms like YouTube in many ways play to TV businesses’ strengths. “Traditional TV shows and movie content do fantastically well on social,” he said. “At times they outperform even some of the biggest creators.”
“But the big question mark is how do you make sure that content washes its face and pays its way on social,” he added. “That’s the challenge, and that’s why we believe broadcasters have to go further than packaging up content and engaging audiences on social platforms. The next step is to make sure it feeds and nurtures your own services, because that’s really where you have the best opportunity to commercialise your content.”
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