YouTube Stops Being YouTube
Onkel Berni is shooting a late-night show from their Berlin apartment—sketch comedy, interviews, music, the whole format—and YouTube’s bankrolling it. Not taking a cut of the revenue. Literally funding production. For two years. Upfront. This is what happens when a platform decides it’s tired of being a platform.
YouTube realized they’d been thinking about it wrong. Why take a percentage when you could own everything? So they built out 60 channels across 60 countries, committed multi-year development budgets to each one, and started hiring people to make television. Real television. Professional productions. They’d figured out that streaming works now, that the production costs have bottomed out, that there’s no reason to split revenue with amateurs when they could just do the whole thing themselves and keep the money.
There’s a channel about extreme sports called Boneless. Gaming channels with production schedules. Music programming. Documentary series. The infrastructure of a real network, just hosted on the internet. A YouTube executive explained it plainly: you can’t just make good videos anymore, you have to become an entrepreneur. Build your own audience. Market your own channel. Handle the business side. For traditional TV people, that’s weird—they’re used to the network doing all that. For internet creators who grew up making stuff for fun, it’s a complete reorientation.
What gets lost in this pivot is obvious if you think about it. The internet’s golden age in video was wild and strange and deeply uncensored because the barrier to entry was practically nothing. No committee. No brand guidelines. No approval process. You had a camera and bandwidth and that was enough. If your weird thing found its audience, it found it. That scrappiness, that lack of institutional gatekeeping—that’s what made the whole ecosystem feel different from television.
Professionalization kills that. You need business plans now. Production schedules. Metrics. The ability to monetize from day one. The people who can afford to stay are people who already understood the entertainment business, who already had resources, who were already positioned to scale. The amateurs leave. The weirdos get priced out. You’re left with something that looks like internet content but operates like the old television industry. Which is fine, probably. It’s legitimate work. It just isn’t what made anyone actually care in the first place. YouTube realized it could make more money by becoming cable, and it turned out they were right, but somewhere in that calculation the original thing got left behind.