Original Article: Fast Company, by Ainsley Harris, August 23rd, 2023

YouTube’s Game Day

The Internet’s Biggest and Most Vibrant Culture Factory is Planning to Reinvent Television, with an Assist from The NFL.

College football’s brightest stars, dressed in their snappiest suits, assembled beneath gray skies and the Beaux-Arts grandeur of Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri, this past April for the first day of the 2023 National Football League draft.

As Roger Goodell, the NFL’s longtime commissioner, revealed each team’s pick and called rookies to the stage, a roving camera crew hovered around the velvet sofas in the sprawling room inside the station where top players sat with their families.

“I bring me. I’m bringing a man of God. I bring a leader,” quarterback and two-time Heisman Trophy finalist C.J. Stroud said after being selected second overall by the Houston Texans, tears in his eyes and diamonds in the shape of a 7 around his neck.

Live footage of Stroud’s comments played on oversize screens for thousands of fans gathered on the lawn outside Union Station. But an even bigger audience surveyed the scene from a distance via the world’s largest video platform: YouTube, home to 2 billion–plus monthly active users. On the NFL’s main channel, which has more than 11 million subscribers, nearly 600,000 people watched the live coverage, and millions more the highlights. On ESPN’s YouTube channel, commentators livestreamed their reactions, attracting more than 1.5 million views. A similar stream from Bleacher Report surpassed 260,000 views. That was only the beginning of the NFL draft’s ricochet around the internet-native culture factory known as YouTube. More than a dozen creators sponsored by YouTube hyped the event on their own channels, packaging it alongside reviews of Kansas City barbecue and encounters with star players. Elsewhere on YouTube, Madden gamers shared their best scoring plays executed with first-round picks, and sports analysts weighed in on how Stroud’s addition will help the Houston Texans’ rebuilding strategy. The Texans franchise even took 60,000 viewers behind the scenes with Stroud as he fielded a call from one of his new coaches.

Of course, the 2023 draft aired on ESPN, ABC, and the NFL Network as well. But those broadcasts hit the dead end that is the traditional linear TV living room. On YouTube, the draft became the raw material for endless reactions, remixes, riffs, and rebuttals.

Starting this fall, YouTube is going even further, delivering the OG of NFL content—actual live football games. YouTube secured the rights last December to bring NFL Sunday Ticket, a subscription service for viewing out-of-market Sunday afternoon games, into people’s homes. The deal will cost YouTube about $2 billion a year for seven years—a hefty, if manageable, sum for a platform that brought in $40 billion in revenue for the 12 months ending in March. (DirecTV, which previously held the rights, paid an estimated $1.5 billion a season for the past eight years.) YouTube, in turn, is charging viewers between $299 and $439 for Sunday Ticket subscriptions.

Sunday Ticket is the first major initiative to be overseen by CEO Neal Mohan, who took over when Susan Wojcicki stepped away in February after nine years atop the company. YouTube already contains multitudes, from unboxing videos and highlight reels to variety shows and documentaries. Now, under Mohan, it’s expanding to embrace a full spectrum of video formats, from seconds-long clips to multihour live broadcasts. It’s also tinkering with fancy product features—even as some of its Hollywood competitors are just focused on keeping the cameras rolling.

Sunday Ticket’s debut comes at a time when diversifying revenue is imperative for both YouTube and its parent company, Google, which is on high alert now that AI is threatening its ad business and reshuffling the tech landscape. “Our goal is to be a one-stop shop for multiple types of video content,” Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, told investors during Alphabet's Q4 2022 earnings call in February.

Shorts, a short-form, vertical video format designed to mimic TikTok, has been the most prominent (and divisive) of these efforts. Though Shorts accounts for 50 billion daily views, some creators have bristled at the way they believe it dilutes their audiences and limits monetization.

On the other end of the spectrum is appointment viewing, YouTube-style. After years of being seen as a repository of videos best suited for waiting in line or procrastinating while doing homework, YouTube is making a play for the living room. It can now say that it reaches half the country on TV screens. Put another way, YouTube is the most popular destination on connected TVs: In May, it accounted for 8.5% of TV watch time, besting Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and everyone else. Meanwhile, YouTube TV, the company’s bundle of live TV channels, has been growing at a brisk pace. While other cable, satellite, and internet TV providers have been stagnant or shedding subscribers, YouTube TV reportedly hit 6.3 million active subscribers in Q1 2023—adding 1.4 million in just a year.

YouTube has made these milestones a centerpiece of its pitch to marketers. An overall slowdown in ad buying has hit YouTube for three of the past four quarters. But amid industrywide stagnation, the platform has been building credibility with advertisers, who were initially wary of creators and their freewheeling approach to content. Sunday Ticket provides YouTube with the ultimate content cornerstone for that advertising effort. “YouTube’s consumption is heavily, heavily fragmented,” says former streaming executive and author Matthew Ball. “Everyone watches YouTube, but very few people watch the same things.” The antidote to such fragmentation: an NFL game, which draws a vast (and older) audience to their living room television sets.

ON YOUTUBE, THE BARRIERS THAT SEPARATE OLD AND NEW MEDIA FADE, ALLOWING FOR AN ECOSYSTEM THAT, TO YOUNGER VIEWERS, IS SIMPLY TV.

YouTube is hardly the first digital media company to make a big bet on live sports. Amazon secured rights for the NFL’s Thursday-night games in 2021, agreeing to pay $1 billion per year for 11 years. (This followed short-lived experiments by the NFL to stream games on Twitter and through Yahoo.) But Sunday Ticket is arguably the bigger trophy. When the league’s deal with DirecTV expired at the end of the 2022 season, YouTube beat out Apple and others, in part, by leaning into its knowledge of internet-era viewing habits and tastes.

“[The NFL] knows that we’re really committed to innovation, and that’ll manifest itself in all kinds of fan-engagement opportunities,” says Mary Ellen Coe, YouTube’s chief business officer. She and Mohan co-led the negotiations with the NFL.

In one meeting, Mohan painted a vision modeled on his son’s behavior: watching the game in a living room while texting with friends and checking out highlights on his phone. Sunday Ticket, in other words, is a chance for YouTube to do what it does best: intermingle content and fandom, creators and legacy entertainment brands. On YouTube, the barriers that separate old and new media fade, allowing for an ecosystem that, to younger viewers, is simply TV. YouTube’s promotion of Sunday Ticket and its plans for the service’s launch—saying it will put creators in the locker room and on the sidelines, giving them access to both teams and footage, just as it did during the draft—suggest that the company intends to press this advantage. "Think about tailgating and game-day prep, and all the things that you could do around that if you’re a marketer," says Coe. "The leaping-off points from an advertising or marketing perspective are pretty limitless."

Underpinning all of this, importantly, is YouTube’s analytics. A creator like MrBeast, who is partnering with YouTube to deliver Sunday Ticket content to his 169 million subscribers, can learn overnight which of his videos are hits and which are duds. Data on click-through rates and view counts makes it possible for him to evolve in step with his audience. If one video falls flat, another, better one is always right behind it—and the NFL will be taking notes.

Last year, the NFL’s highly orchestrated—and highly successful—game broadcasts drew, on average, 16.7 million viewers across TV and digital channels. But why stop there? Deestroying, a YouTube creator known for organizing gladiator-esque one-on-one face-offs between amateur football players, attracts virtually the same number of viewers with just a tiny fraction of the production cost. Is it any wonder that brands like the NFL are lining up for a dusting of creator star power?

When the Masters Tournament rolls into Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club each April, the ranks of spectators are studded with VIPs from the broader sports world who turn out to see the first major golf championship of the year. This spring, those VIPs included Goodell—and five former Texas A&M roommates who are known to their YouTube fans as Dude Perfect. Their family-friendly channel, which has 59.5 million subscribers, blends comedy and sports with slapstick, tween-style challenges. In 2022, the dudes were the first creators invited to film at Augusta National, where they shot an episode of their “All Sports Golf Battle” series, launching Nerf Vortexes, Frisbees, and tennis balls from pristine fairways toward Augusta’s fabled Amen Corner.

Dude Perfect is also behind a successful NFL alternate telecast that aired on Amazon Prime Video alongside a handful of Thursday-night games last season. (Such telecasts are broadly popular: Peyton and Eli Manning’s Monday-night show on ESPN2 and ESPN+, better known as Manningcast, draws millions of fans and won an Emmy last year.) Roughly 1 million Amazon viewers tuned in to the four telecasts, which were also featured in highlight videos on the NFL’s own YouTube channel. Similar to a gamer stream, the on-field action appeared alongside the Dude Perfect studio with its living room vibes (that is, if your living room contained five identical gray armchairs and a dunk tank). The core demographic was 8-to-14-year-olds and their parents. “The goal is not to appeal to the football purists. Same with the Masters; that was not to entertain the golf purists,” says Chad Coleman, chief brand officer for Dude Perfect and its small empire of business interests. “The goal was to bring in new audiences.”

When Goodell spotted the Dudes in the Augusta clubhouse, he invited them to join him and his wife for a chat. Coleman, there with the Dudes, was expecting a five-minute conversation—after all, Goodell is one of the most powerful and feared leaders in sports. Instead, the commissioner spent two hours in deep conversation with the creator team. “We’ve become pretty good friends,” Coleman says.

A few weeks after their Masters tête-à-tête, Goodell was joined on stage at the draft by three of the Dudes—Tyler Toney and twins Cory and Coby Cotton—who at the behest of YouTube did a comedy bit designed to gratify the many Kansas City Chiefs fans in attendance. As they stepped aside for the Philadelphia Eagles to name their draftee, Goodell, grinning, gave each Dude a fatherly clap on the shoulders.

While Sunday Ticket represents a major evolution of the partnership, YouTube has been a laboratory for the NFL for nearly a decade. Through YouTube, the NFL has learned that its audience likes game previews as well as recaps, and that fans want to hear directly from their local team. It’s part of an effort “to meet audiences where they are,” says Blake Stuchin, VP and head of digital media business development for the NFL.

“YouTube is the keeper of the sports algorithm,” says former ESPN executive John Kosner, president of Kosner Media. “They know more about what every fan coming in is looking for, based upon sport, based upon team, based upon athlete. The addition of NFL [intellectual property] and the Sunday Ticket package only enhances that understanding.”

Professional sports leagues are eager to reach new (and preferably younger) audiences. Witness Drive to Survive, Formula One’s “helmets off” Netflix documentary series, which transformed drivers into compelling characters. Or Major League Soccer’s estimated $250-million-a-year deal with Apple, which features superstar Lionel Messi, newly installed at Inter Miami. Or the National Basketball Association’s mobile app, which streams games and might soon allow viewers to insert their avatar into live play. For the NFL, which is a media property as much as a sports organization, the focus has been on new distribution partners and storytelling formats. When Amazon Prime became the exclusive host of Thursday Night Football last fall, viewership increased 11% in the 18-to-34 age bracket but declined by 28% overall, according to Nielsen data. Stuchin points to the twentysomething demographic as “a really promising sign that something is working.”

Streaming services have their own agendas. Amazon plans to use Thursday Night Football to boost e-commerce sales (a Black Friday game will stream for free in November). Apple’s deal with Major League Soccer is designed to sell its hardware and services. For YouTube, it’s all about promoting creators—and reframing their cultural reach and relevance.

No one seems to know for sure what marrying the immediacy of a live NFL game and the cultural savvy of YouTube’s creators will yield, but the platform has seven years to figure it all out.

Dylan Lemay’s ticket to influencer fame started with a simple 47-second clip of him mixing caramel, chocolate chips, and pretzels into a scoop of vanilla ice cream to create a salty-sweet treat at a Missouri Cold Stone Creamery that he managed. He uploaded the February 2021 video on YouTube as a Short, and kept going, eventually amassing nearly 5 million subscribers—as well as enough outside investment to open a storefront of his own, dubbed Catch’N Ice Cream, in lower Manhattan. “It’s a blessing for me that my niche on the internet is ice cream,” he says.

Lemay’s videos put the viewer in his shoes as he crafts custom ice cream cakes and forms his signature ice cream balls, which staff toss over the counter to customers’ bowls with hibachi-style flair (get it? Catch’N). Lemay had a first taste of ice cream–football crossover appeal when he filmed a member of the Detroit Lions’ front-office staff sampling one of his creations in 2021. That YouTube Short racked up 56 million views. “I think part of the reason why I went viral is because I made a joke referencing the fact that the Lions typically haven’t done so well,” Lemay says. (The team hasn’t won a playoff game since 1992.) So when YouTube came calling this spring, asking Lemay to bring a similar approach to a promotional video for Sunday Ticket, he was ready. The result, a 10-minute video titled “Multitasking Ice Cream—Football Edition,” follows Lemay around his store as he makes a green ice cream cake shaped like a football field, an ice cream football, and a waffle cone football. Along the way, he also makes a plug for Sunday Ticket. “It has to make sense for not only me but also my audience,” Lemay says of his approach to sponsored content. “My audience loves ice cream. As long as I hit that nail on the head, they might learn something about football in the process.”

If YouTube’s NFL push rests atop its creator ecosystem, the engine propelling much of that endeavor is the company’s carefully designed revenue splits, which typically give creators 55% of net revenue from ads on their long-form videos. Established more than 15 years ago, the YouTube Partner Program isn’t perfect, but it is transparent and reliable, and it has produced many a millionaire. Creators, sometimes in spite of themselves, keep coming back. But for Lemay, who pours most of his energy into Shorts and operating his brick-and-mortar store, the formula for success on YouTube looks very different.

Lemay is one of a new breed of Shorts-first creators, part of the company’s larger effort to claw back some of the younger users who have been migrating to TikTok in recent years. (According to one study, minors and teens aged 4 through 18 in the U.S. spent an average of 113 minutes daily on TikTok last year, compared with 77 on YouTube.) While YouTube introduced a monetization program for Shorts earlier this year, the payouts so far have been paltry. When Jim Louderback, the former CEO of top creator conference Vidcon, did the math on the program, he estimated that Shorts minutes are worth just 3% of long-form minutes, based on payouts.

It’s no surprise, then, that a lot of traditional YouTube creators are dragging their feet when it comes to making Shorts videos, which top out at 60 seconds. Some are frustrated that YouTube is not using Shorts as a pathway for audiences to discover longer content. “The [company’s] focus has been around Shorts, but there’s a lot of hope that some of the attention will be more evenly distributed moving forward,” says Ali Berman, head of digital talent at United Talent Agency. Her clients include Emma Chamberlain and Tik-Tok stars Charli and Dixie D’Amelio.

Creators are also worried about Shorts’ broader effect on the beating heart of their businesses: their audience. YouTube’s most successful creators don’t just make polished videos—they make polished videos for a highly specific viewership that they have carefully cultivated and deeply understand. Shorts, which emulates TikTok by feeding viewers a stream of attention-grabbing videos from disparate, seemingly random sources, undermines the very idea of community. “My clients don’t even really care so much about the money as [they do] the integrity of their channel,” says Gil Kruger, a talent manager for creators and the founder of Best Regards Media. Some of his clients are avoiding Shorts altogether.

One of YouTube’s defining features has been its almost gravitational force in the digital content world, drawing in anything and everything; even rival Netflix promotes its own shows on a YouTube channel. That is because, to date, YouTube’s corporate incentives have so closely aligned with those of its creators and media partners: more views, more dollars. Though today’s particular grumblings over Shorts may fade, interest in short-form videos will not, especially among younger users. Even as YouTube pushes further into people’s living rooms, it will also have to engage with viewers who would like to spend a 15-minute halftime show watching 15-second Shorts. YouTube chief business officer Coe, at least, is bullish: “We expect that there [will] be very vibrant monetization on Shorts.”

On a warm May evening in New York City, hundreds of ad industry executives and media buyers arrived at Lincoln Center for YouTube’s annual showcase, known as Brandcast. Dressed in some combination of blazers and jeans or pleated pants and heels, they entered David Geffen Concert Hall, an emblem of postmodern elegance and restraint, after filing past a towering replica of YouTube’s play-button logo, shimmering in red sequins. Like television studios’ up-front presentations, Brandcast is a chance for YouTube to tell its story—which, as ever, is interwoven with its creators.

Inside the concert space, past the DJ spinning Beyoncé’s “America Has a Problem,” attendees were treated to performances including a closing set from a catsuit-wearing Doja Cat, who grew a following on YouTube before breaking through as a singer. YouTube CEO Mohan took to the stage, declaring that “these are truly profound times” for video entertainment. “Viewers have come to love the interactivity of YouTube, and we’re bringing the whole YouTube experience to the big screen,” he said, hinting at new product features in Sunday Ticket.

One thing these ad executives didn’t see at the Brandcast proceedings: picketing Writers Guild of America members, who had gathered in protest outside the presentations of other networks and streamers that same week—NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Disney, among them. YouTube plays by an entirely different set of rules than traditional Hollywood studios. It relies on a less protected pool of talent. And, as Mohan and other executives made clear throughout their Brandcast presentations, it can meet the moment by quickly serving the content that any given viewer most desires. “Today, people’s viewing habits may be complex, but reaching them on YouTube isn’t,” said Sean Downey, president of the Americas and global partners at Google.

If all goes to plan, Sunday Ticket will be the ultimate embodiment of YouTube’s agile approach. The platform plans to experiment with interactive shopping and live chat functionality that seamlessly connects TV screen and phone. There will be catch-up highlights that bring viewers who tune in late up to speed, plus other bells and whistles for the stat-obsessed. Every instance of viewer engagement is a potential opportunity for YouTube—and its advertisers—to adapt. Marketers eager to show off their creativity and make an impact will have Sunday Ticket in their sights, says Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia, a cross-channel platform for TV ads.

The most striking and potentially transformative feature set to go live in Sunday Ticket’s first year on YouTube will be a mode that the company is calling “multiview.” In it, viewers will be able to watch as many as four NFL games simultaneously. YouTube is able to do this thanks to custom silicon chips that it built for the express purpose of transcoding video. The effect will be like having a sports bar playing different broadcasts, all contained within one television screen.

YouTube is testing these features on select live events this summer, including the Women’s World Cup, says Christian Oestlien, VP of product management. The initial response from viewers, he says, has been “overwhelming.”

Multiview has the potential to allow YouTube to go where no other platform can. Think of an event like Coachella, which livestreamed on YouTube earlier this year: With multiview, fans might one day be able to see the live performers, the backstage hangs, the fashion standouts, the best parties. But multiview also has the potential to fragment viewer attention—at the very moment when YouTube is trying to corral all sorts of audiences together in a single arena, and just when its parent company, Google, may need those audiences more than ever.

Back at Brandcast, the industry crowd let out a hearty cheer for the news that they would be receiving free access to Sunday Ticket. But the biggest roar came when Downey announced that the platform would be introducing nonskippable 30-second TV ads. In a world controlled by the algorithmic eternity of the endless scroll and multidimensional multiscreens, Madison Avenue lives by the same ethos as creators, legacy brands, and everyone in between: Nothing is more precious than a chance to monopolize our attention.