What do children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel, prank collective The Sidemen and dating show Pop The Balloon have in common? They are all people and projects that started on YouTube but have also ended up on Netflix.
The world of content creators has exploded in the last few years and has become the next big battle between two of the behemoths of the entertainment business.
The two companies have been increasingly competing for eyeballs, particularly on TV screens, and to some extent, talent, over the last twelve months.
In March, Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said YouTube was useful for creators to “cut their teeth on” and called the Google-owned platform a “little bit of a farm league”.
“There’s a whole bunch of creators that I would put in the pro-am category that are making really interesting, compelling programming to watch,” he added at the Paley Media Council event. “But YouTube doesn’t give them any money up front to make it, so they’re doing it all at their own risk.”
Netflix wants to help an increasing number of these folk share the risk as it searches for the “next generation of great creators”.
One of the executives leading this charge is Jeff Gaspin, who oversees unscripted content at Netflix, which brought the second season of reality series Inside to the streamer from YouTube in March and is working on a U.S. version and launched a live version of Pop The Balloon, the Arlette Amuli-created series, which began on YouTube, in April.
There’s also been suggestions that the company has held talks with other YouTubers such as Mark Rober, the former NASA engineer who starred on Discovery’s Jimmy Kimmel-produced series Revengineers, and Dude Perfect, the trick shot experts who have been front and center at a number of YouTube events.
“These content creators are even more prolific and more pronounced today than they even were a year ago,” Gaspin told Deadline. “The creativity is off the charts.”
Inside is a Big Brother-style reality series that features prolific influencers locked inside a house, where they compete in a series of challenges for a prize worth up to £1m ($1.3M).
How different were the ratings on the free service versus the paid option? The first episode of the first season of Inside has been watched 15.4M times on YouTube with the second episode dropping to 6.9M (this is wildly down on The Sidemen’s most popular video, which has 115M views). On Netflix, over its first three months, it averaged 17.5M hours viewed and 2.4M views, per the streamer’s engagement report
Gaspin echoed Sarandos’ comments by highlighting that YouTube series are a handy development tool for Netflix. “There’s so much experimenting going on there and it’s so great. It’s great for development, because I get to see something, it’s not just on paper or a sizzle. We were able to watch Inside to know whether it’s a show we were interested in,” he added.
Pop The Balloon (Netflix)
Pop The Balloon, meanwhile, started as Pop The Balloon or Find Love on YouTube from Amuli and her husband Bolia Matundu, who made nearly 50 episodes for the digital service and generated over 100M views to their channel.
The dating experiment sees singles test their chemistry while trying to keep their balloon intact. The Netflix version, which was hosted by Insecure star Yvonne Orji, was one if its first major unscripted experiments in the live arena, an area where it also has series such as Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney and Dinner Time with David Chang.
However, Pop The Balloon Live: Pop It Like It’s Hot didn’t fare so well in terms of ratings. The show averaged 1M hours viewed from 1.2M views.
Gaspin called Pop The Balloon a “really fun format”. But he admitted that it could have adapted the show in a different way. “Honestly, one of the things that we should have done with Pop The Balloon was used more of the essence of Pop The Balloon, and then try to create something bigger and more arcing, over multiple episodes,” he added.
This seems to be the key difference; YouTube allows creators to do whatever they want but Netflix wants to “support more ambitious efforts”, according to Sarandos.
Gaspin added, “The decision that we have to make is, do we just translate it 100% or do we just use the essence of the concept and then try to create something that probably works a little better long form? But the ability to see something that’s basically a pilot for us is really valuable.”
This is not unlike what MrBeast did with Amazon’s Beast Games, turning his YouTube videos into a series that costs exponentially more – in his case, a production budget (including cash giveaways) that total around $250M for two seasons.
MrBeast, otherwise known as Jimmy Donaldson, told Deadline earlier this year, “Truthfully, when you make videos on YouTube, they’re usually not episodic. I’ve just always been really excited about taking the big spectacles we do on YouTube but being able to do it over an episodic series where we could actually get to know the contestants and have more depth and story and get more invested into the challenges and games. The idea was to take what we do on YouTube, but make it 10 times bigger and 20 times better.”
Gaspin compared the current moment to when cable television moved heavily into original content. “Cable was a big inventor from Real World to Unplugged to Shark Week. Cable innovated and zigged when networks were zagging and ultimately took the bulk of broadcast share,” he said.
Middle-aged television executives, however, have always struggled to denote what’s new and cool and Gaspin has a solution: ask your teenagers.
“If you have kids that are between 15 to 25, watch what they’re watching, watch what they’re responding to,” he added.
