1. Mr. Beast Goes Down On Amazon

The wave of negative publicity and lawsuits around Mr. Beast’s upcoming Amazon series (if it is indeed ever released, given all the drama) is the latest example of a somewhat troubling phenomenon—the inability of "Creators" to break out of that sub-genre and find audiences elsewhere. Rewind to 2017 and "Scare PewDiePie," and you'll see what I mean.

It matters because social media audiences are fickle. And they grow up. As in there are a whole bunch of 24 year olds who thought PewDiePie was hilarious when they were 15. But not so much anymore.

Granted, second acts are not easy and the lack of them is not limited to social media stars. As in WEHT to the cast of Lost which dominated TV 20 years ago.

But that was Lost. The Office, which was the other big early '00s TV show, gave us Steve Carell and John Krasinski, both of whom went on to have successful post-Office careers.

Which is why second acts still carry so much weight—those movie careers make the rights to those TV series that much more valuable.

Why It Matters

It matters because the industry is trying to figure out just what box to put the social media Creatorverse in. Is it just an evolution of television, another genre that can be co-opted and incorporated into the machine, or is it an entirely separate beast altogether. (See what I did there?)

And more importantly, if it is a separate beast, how does that impact the current TV ecosystem?

Since definitions are important in this industry, let’s define what constitutes “Creator” content which often falls into the “we’ll know it when we see it” category.

The key characteristics seem to be that it is primarily short form (15 minutes or less), shot with lower production values than a network TV series or Hollywood movie, and, most importantly, is centered around a Creator (or several Creators) who are playing themselves. Creators generally also write, direct and produce all their own material.

The question as to whether this is a form of television or something else comes up a lot, given that Nielsen’s The Gauge continually shows us that YouTube is watched on an actual TV more than any other streaming service, and that, when it’s not busy putting its fingers in its ears while chanting “I can’t hear you!”, the industry tends to dismiss what is watched on YouTube as “cat videos” unworthy of serious consideration.

The question then becomes what to do with Creators if we believe they are part of the TV ecosystem. 

Do agencies and SSPs start selling ads against them and is that even possible—many creators operate on a system of sponsorships and similar deals, versus relying on the ads Google might place on their shows.

Which, of course, is the next issue—Google owns all that inventory. It is, after all, their platform. Ditto Meta and Bytedance.

So there’s that too.

Then there’s the fact that YouTube is a giant hub of innovation, much of which can’t easily be categorized.

Take, for instance, the genre we’ve been calling “Pro-Am”: scripted web series created by people who have experience in show business, shot with high production values. These shows usually clock in somewhere around the 20 minute mark, so about two minutes shorter than a network sitcom.

And unlike Creator content, several of these have successfully made the transition to television.

It’s much easier to argue that these types of shows are “television” but here again, they don’t always fit into a neat bucket—some are unscripted, some have much higher or much lower production values, some are a mix of Hollywood talent and outsiders.

And more importantly, Google doesn’t separate them out.

What You Need To Do About It

If you’re YouTube, you can probably help the industry—and yourself—by starting to create some kind of taxonomy for your programming, one that separates the 90-second cat videos from the 20 minute comedies and both from the Mr. Beasts of the world . I’m not saying you need to expose that taxonomy to consumers, but for advertisers and people who do ratings and measurement, it will help. Immensely.

If you’re the television industry, you’re likely still wrapping your head around existential questions related to the future of the industry, like will sitcoms become like 8-tracks? Will the 25 episode season return? What’s the right balance of subscription and ad-supported? And what to do about all that stuff the kids watch on YouTube?

I can’t answer the first several questions, but I can answer the last one. Do not even think about trying to recreate YouTube on your service. You can, and should, however, look to harness the power of YouTube stars. That means being smart about it, however. Mr. Beast has many millions of followers, but also, a very specific niche. And you know, in your heart of hearts, that it is very hard for anyone who is in that niche to have a second act.

A better move would be to find Creators who have that certain something that does actually translate across various media and place your chips on their number. They’re definitely out there. The challenge is to find them. 

And if that sounds way too hard, remember that the music industry’s been doing this for a while now, frequently to great success.

Go get ‘em.

If you’re the rest of the industry, especially the ad-related part, then my advice is to take this one day at a time. Everything is evolving rapidly, the government is all over Google at the moment, and there is little certainty as to how this will all play out. So hold your cards close and place your bets carefully.

How’s that for ending on a metaphor?

2. New Data Illustrates The Streaming/Linear Disconnect

There’s an interesting piece in Colin Dixon’s nScreen Media this week about three different surveys of the TV landscape, each of which offers an overview of how the streaming versus linear battle is shaping up.

For our purposes though, I’m only going to focus on two of them— Nielsen’s The Gauge and Settling The Score, a new report from Comscore/ESHAP, as together, they serve to illustrate something I’ve been harping on as of late, which is that ad dollars are not following eyeballs to streaming and that’s a problem. 

Why It Matters

Nielsen, which is measuring total time spent viewing—the amount of time the TV is on and has a body in front of it—has the linear/streaming split at 41% streaming and 47.8% linear (broadcast and cable). 

If you noticed that does not add up to 100%, that’s because Nielsen has an outlier category called “Other” which measures things like gaming done on a TV set, which they include because, they argue, when the TV is being used to play Madden 2025, it’s not being used to watch TV. (And while I’d probably make a strong counter argument for eliminating that category, the reality is that it doesn’t dramatically affect the skew between streaming and linear.)

Comscore/ESHAP, OTOH, are looking at the amount of time people spend viewing ads. Not shows or news or sports, mind you. Just ads.

And they find that there’s a whole lot of ad viewing on linear—87% versus 13% (those numbers actually do add up to 100%.) 

Break that linear number down further and ad viewing time is pretty evenly split between broadcast and cable (43.7% and 43.3%).

So to review, even though around 40% of all viewing is on streaming, only 13% of ad viewing is.

Now to be fair, there are three significant asterisks for that stat:

• Ad-supported viewing only makes up around half of all streaming viewing

• Streaming services have significantly lower ad loads than linear. Something I am reminded of every time I watch a linear channel.

• There’s not a 1:1 correlation between the amount of time people spend watching ads and the amount of money being spent on them.

But still that gap is way too wide not to walk away with the notion that ad spend on streaming isn’t what it should be. Especially given the amount of time the most valuable consumers are spending on streaming, there should be more ad dollars flowing in that direction. Especially given all the clever ways, both data-driven and contextual, that streaming ads can be placed.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are the ad side of the streaming industry, you need to get your act together. Make things easier for ad buyers. Work with each other. Even simple things like what constitutes a view would help. Give buyers the sense that they are working with people who want to help them succeed. Not leave them dazed and confused.

Think about selling premium inventory and non-premium inventory across both linear and streaming—the former via direct sales, the latter via programmatic. 

Realize your enemies are not the other big media companies, but rather, Google, Amazon and Meta. 

Work with organizations like the IAB Tech Lab—they’re only trying to help.

But more than anything, don’t bury your head in the sand and pretend it will all just fix itself. 

Because it won’t.

And one more thing—keep the ad loads on streaming low. Because if there’s anything that will drive people away, it’s five minute ad blocks.

Filled with pharma ads.