YouTube, at 20, Has Hosted 20 Trillion Videos and Launched Superstars. It Wants More—Including Some Prestige

Drive five miles north of the Hollywood sign and you’ll find yourself in Burbank, where they actually make the dreams for the dream factory. Casablanca, Reservoir Dogs, and Euphoria were all shot here. Today, tucked inside an unmarked warehouse in a particularly drab patch of the city, Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal are filming their own contribution to entertainment history: a segment called “Will It Dip?” for their delightfully goofy and imaginative YouTube series Good Mythical Morning. After taste-testing a soupy dip made out of mashed Girl Scout cookies, the duo are presented with a bowl of black goo served under glass. As soon as McLaughlin removes the lid, thick smoke fills the set, which is designed to look like a ramshackle fishing lodge. When the cameras stop rolling, Neal tells the show’s culinary producer, “I do feel like you were trying to kill us a little bit.”

McLaughlin and Neal are friends from small-town North Carolina who met in first-grade detention. They experimented with making films as teens and, at 21, McLaughlin auditioned for The Real World. Unsuccessfully. In 2006 the guys were shooting comic skits and songs after work in a basement when they realized that YouTube, still very much in its infancy, could be a great outlet for their stuff. These days they operate out of this 17,000-square-foot maze, which comes complete with writers rooms, test kitchens, and a prop department full of bizarro pieces from episodes past and future. The Mythical company now makes multiple series and podcasts, as well as having a food website, merchandising, and an investment fund for the next generation of digital creators. Their YouTube channels have a combined audience of 30 million subscribers, and Good Mythical Morning alone has twice as many viewers aged 18 to 34 as Seth, Stephen, Jimmy, and Jimmy combined.

What more could McLaughlin and Neal want? Hollywood awards and a little of the prestige that comes with them, for starters. “Obviously it’s cool in LA when you’ve got a shelf with an Emmy on it,” says McLaughlin, grinning through his thicket of facial hair. “But the main reason is, the awards are designed to recognize what is resonating culturally. Well, we are resonating culturally, so we should be a part of that conversation. Shows that get the awards—there’s this sense that these are the real shows. And we want to be on the same stage because we are competing with them directly.”

“You want to be treated like a real boy?” I say.

“Exactly!” McLaughlin says, laughing.

“It’s an expansion of what entertainment is,” Neal adds. “We’re not trying to kill anything. We’re just trying to be invited to the party.”

Speaking of parties, YouTube is celebrating its 20th birthday this year, and no one could blame it for feeling jubilant. The platform—which has hosted 20 trillion videos since launching in 2005— has overcome rampant underestimation and sporadic demonization to become the second-most visited website in the world (behind its parent company, Google). Two and a half billion people watch YouTube videos every month, and its content has partially, or completely, replaced traditional television viewing for many of them. Smart TVs have made the site so easily accessible that television screens have now surpassed phones and laptops as the primary way people watch it in the US.

YouTube wants to be taken seriously in Hollywood, and they are being taken very seriously. Not so much as a creator of content but as a distraction from the content that Hollywood produces.”

Where a previous generation of families might’ve gathered around the electronic hearth to watch How I Met Your Mother or Survivor, they now communally binge Amelia Dimoldenberg’s swoon-worthy Chicken Shop Date or Michelle Khare’s daredevil docuseries Challenge Accepted.

Khare takes on intense challenges for her series—anything from training to be a chess grandmaster to earning a black belt in 90 days. When she premiered the latter 77-minute episode at the Montclair Film Festival last fall, multiple families approached her. “It wasn’t: ‘Hey, I’m here because my kids like you.’ It was: ‘We’re here because when an episode of Challenge Accepted drops, we all sit down on Friday night to watch it together.”

All of which fuels Hollywood’s long love-hate relationship with the platform. “YouTube wants to be taken seriously in Hollywood, and they are being taken very seriously,” says David R. Craig, a former TV executive turned USC professor and coauthor of Social Media Entertainment: The New Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. “Not so much as a creator of content but as a distraction from the content that Hollywood produces.”

The anxiety has been hanging in the air for years. Back in 2020, Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings asked me rhetorically, “Does creative quality on YouTube just go up and up and up so that eventually it meets [viewers’] needs? Do we get outcompeted by some combination of user-generated ?” He called platforms like YouTube and TikTok his streamer’s biggest “threat-slash-opportunity.” Netflix was also a tech company and relative newcomer at this point, one that had only started presenting original series in 2013. (Remember House of Cards?) Its own entry into what was soon dubbed “the streaming wars” sent the industry into convulsions.

A kind of détente between Hollywood and YouTube emerged as executives realized how useful the platform was for distributing their own wares, whether clips from Saturday Night Live or blockbuster movie teasers. “I speak with all the studio heads on a regular basis, and they recognize YouTube as one of their most important partners,” YouTube CEO Neal Mohan tells me. The studios are eager to create “new business opportunities for their franchises and IP on YouTube,” as well as reaching their fandoms, he says. And in the strictest sense, they aren’t competitors, since YouTube doesn’t actually produce any of their programming—it just provides a stage for creators to do their thing, and shares the advertising money with many of them.

Still, entertainment execs quietly derided YouTube for much of its existence, seeing it as little more than a farm team providing poachable raw talent, including Justin Bieber, Broad City, Bo Burnham, Troye Sivan, Kyle Mooney, and Lilly Singh. When longtime YouTuber Issa Rae started uploading episodes of her 2011 web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, a writer friend advised her to format it like a proper TV show. Invitations to adapt it for prime time soon followed, but as Rae later told The New York Times, “They wanted to make it as broad as possible.” She eventually made her way to HBO, where she cocreated the award-winning Insecure.

McLaughlin and Neal took a different path. Their YouTube channel led to a gig on a short-lived 2011 cable TV series called Commercial Kings. Instead of being their big break, it left them in LA limbo. They churned out scripts and took endless meetings. “The vast majority of things that you put your time into, no one’s ever going to see because that’s just how this town works,” McLaughlin says. Then in their early 30s, both men had small children at home. They ultimately decided to double down on being YouTube creators, with all the freedom and entrepreneurialism that entails.

Streamers like Netflix and Peacock are increasingly eager to scoop up YouTube talent, who come with a built-in global audience.

“The ones who do it the best build a real community, and then it’s not about: What can I sell them? It’s: What can I create to expand my reach?” says Oren Rosenbaum, a partner at United Talent Agency and cohead of their Creators division. “There’s many examples of creators who started with us doing one thing and now have written a book, gone on tour, created a podcast, launched a consumer product. If you’ve built this loyal audience, and you find a thing that makes sense for you and for them, it’s a home run.” And, as USC’s Craig points out, YouTube creators can do more than just make money off of their followers: “They can also persuade them to vote in certain ways and care about certain causes.” That includes a number of right-wing podcasters and conspiracy theorists who’ve built nests on YouTube.

Streamers like Netflix and Peacock are increasingly eager to scoop up YouTube talent, who come with a built-in global audience. But when Hollywood comes knocking, successful creators increasingly consider it a side gig. Why give up total control over your project when no one knows as much about your viewers as you do? Superstar creator MrBeast (a.k.a. Jimmy Donaldson) recently launched a reality competition called Beast Games for Amazon Prime. Although Amazon says it was their most-watched unscripted series ever, it’s unlikely Donaldson will forsake his digital kingdom. “All of these creators tend to think about how to use what they’re doing off platform to drive [viewers] back to home base,” says YouTube VP Tara Walpert Levy. She was delighted to see a list of mantras on the wall of MrBeast’s studio. At the top of the list: “YouTube first.”

While YouTube toasts to 20 years of memes and memories, the traditional entertainment industry is in agonizing flux. “On the more traditional side of things, it’s all about cost cutting—barely anything is getting made,” says Ali Berman, partner at UTA and cohead with Rosenbaum of the Creators division. “It’s so ironic, because on our side of the business, it’s all about increasing staff, creating writers rooms, hiring producers. Our creators are building the media companies of today.”

Mohan, YouTube’s CEO, likes to call the legion of creator-led studios popping up “the start-up economy of Hollywood.” That goes for Burbank denizens like the Good Mythical Morning gang as well as Alan Chikin Chow, a mastermind of candy-colored teen skits who recently opened a production hub there. But some of the new studios are nowhere near LA: Kinigra Deon, a purveyor of family-friendly shorts and feature-length videos, is building a production hub in Alabama; MrBeast operates from a 50,000-square-foot studio in North Carolina; and Dude Perfect just unveiled an 80,000-square-foot space in Texas. Even farther afield, the rural Indian town of Tulsi is known as YouTube Village, because more than a quarter of the population is involved in creating videos, inspiring the local government to establish a state-of-the-art studio.

YouTube now offers its creators the ability to arrange their videos as distinct series with bingeable episodes. The argument goes that if it looks like TV and acts like TV, surely it should be rewarded—and awarded—like TV?

Some of the bigger American creator studios combine amateurs and professionals. When Khare needs to mount a particularly epic production—like learning how to do Harry Houdini’s most dangerous stunt—her team can balloon to 80 people on set. She thinks of her show in terms of seasons and arcs these days, which she hopes will make it easier for Hollywood to see the well-produced work she does as Emmy-worthy or even Oscar adjacent. YouTube now offers its creators the ability to arrange their videos as distinct series with bingeable episodes, and YouTube Premium is rolling out the option to watch at 4X playback speed. The argument goes that if it looks like TV and acts like TV, surely it should be rewarded—and awarded—like TV?

YouTube programs have won some Emmys, but only in ghettoized Interactive Media categories. Hot Ones, Chicken Shop Date, and Good Mythical Morning all made it onto Emmy ballots last year, but none snagged nominations. Mohan is pushing hard for the TV Academy to be more welcoming of creators. “If you’re trying to recognize creativity that comes out of the cultural zeitgeist, then how can you exclude this enormous class of content?”

The Oscars and Emmys themselves partly sprung out of fledgling industries’ desire to drum up legitimacy, capital, and cultural respect. Craig suggests that YouTube has similar reasons for wanting to be included. “In 1981 the head of the FCC referred to television as ‘a toaster with pictures,’ ” he says. “Those same kinds of condemnations are leveled at social media platforms. So YouTube has a very strong reason to want to gain more legitimacy from the greater society, so that they don’t find themselves lumped in with other social media platforms being accused of destroying civilization.”

While traditional TV studios have humans vetting content and applying strict standards, however, YouTube is a largely unregulated environment ruled by algorithms. Trolling, scamming, racism, and sexually inappropriate material float through the ether—think PewDiePie’s antisemitic videos or Logan Paul’s infamous footage of what appeared to be the body of someone who’d died by suicide. Tales of radicalization, like Caleb Cain’s, are not uncommon either. Mohan points out that YouTube tries to strike a balance: It has community guidelines, and often takes appropriate action, but it is first and foremost an open platform. “Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world,” he says. “There isn’t a gatekeeper or a standards body exercising their judgment, and that’s fundamentally the power of YouTube.”

Mythical’s Neal acknowledges that YouTube was once a Wild West, but notes that as it’s grown in influence, creators have upped their game in terms of content and production values: “More and more creators are doing that because the audience now is turning on their television and they’re seeing the YouTube icon right next to Max and Netflix. They don’t want to see somebody leaning up against their bed with a handheld camera.”

The question of whether content is “high quality” enough to merit mainstream approbation strikes YouTube’s Levy as completely irrelevant. “Viewers vote with their time what they perceive to be the most high quality, which sometimes aligns with how we traditionally in the industry would have defined and picked it, and sometimes doesn’t,” she says. “I really believe that viewers have erased the distinction between different aspects of our entertainment ecosystem. This is just sort of new TV, and we’re all in it together.”

The majority of YouTubers still don’t aspire to win Emmys, and many of them make videos that don’t fit into any of traditional TV’s categories—which is part of the point. Where else would you find someone like Mina Le, whose videos combine cultural commentary and personal adventures, or the performative music criticism of Anthony Fantano’s The Needledrop? Yet it makes perfect sense that entertainment industry insiders would resist embracing an atomizing platform that has no interest in upholding its strictures and standards. UTA’s Rosenbaum is keeping his eye on the next generation of entertainment executives moving up the ladder. “They’re the ones that are consuming this content,” he says, “and now they’re in the position where they can create change.”

McLaughlin says that lately he’s had a lot more established industry people wondering if they should skip all the pitches and pilots, and make work for YouTube. “You meet someone who has had a lot of success, maybe as an actor or a producer, and they’re like, ‘Man, I wish I could build something like you guys,’ ” he says, “because they’re at the whims of the studio.”

Not that McLaughlin thinks the path he and Neal took was easy. The partners spent a dozen years building up an audience for Good Mythical Morning, not to mention all the videos they made before that. “Yes, it’s over here on YouTube, but it’s an institution,” McLaughlin says proudly. And it gets around. At a recent party, McLaughlin met an actor and they had the inevitable LA conversation. The actor said, What are you working on? And when McLaughlin mentioned his channel, the actor said, “Oh, I know Good Mythical Morning. My urologist showed me a video of you and your friend getting a vasectomy together!”