Traditional media outlets are under-monetizing their YouTube channels
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Earlier this week, John Oliver published a tweet that angered a significant portion of his online fans. “I know I usually share a link to our main story here on Mondays, but HBO has decided they’re going to wait until Thursday to post them to YouTube from now on,” he wrote. “I hope they change their mind, but until then, you can see our piece about the Supreme Court on HBO, on MAX, and on YouTube in a few days.”
A bit of follow up reporting in the Hollywood Reporter revealed that HBO did this to drive more subscriptions to the Max app. “When Last Week Tonight With John Oliver premiered on HBO, the convenience of watching on Max did not exist, so YouTube allowed flexible viewing for the main story as well as promotional exposure,” a spokesperson told THR. “We are now delaying that availability and hope those fans choose to watch the entire show on Max.”
Out of curiosity, I checked out the YouTube channel for Last Week Tonight and was pretty astonished by what I saw.
First, some context: Last Week Tonight has been running for around 26 Sundays a year for roughly a decade. While it begins with a few short segments, the vast majority of each episode is devoted to a single topic delivered in monologue form. The topic is often serious in nature — focusing on some sort of predatory institution or industry — and Oliver makes it intensely watchable by sprinkling in enough jokes and funny images to keep you entertained. His most famous monologues have eviscerated everyone from televangelists to MLMs to the Miss America Pageant.
Now, most late night comedy shows package segments from the previous night’s episode and post them to YouTube. The Tonight Show, for instance, has published 21 videos in just the last seven days alone. John Oliver’s show, on the other hand, only publishes the 30-minute monologues, which means it uploads a mere 26 videos a year, give or take.
Despite this relative lack of posting consistency, Last Week Tonight racks up some monster engagement. Over the course of 431 videos, it’s generated 9.36 million subscribers and 3.8 billion channel views.
Now compare that to the YouTube channel of The Daily Show, Oliver’s previous employer. It has 10,8 million subscribers and 5.5 billion channel views, but that’s spread out over 5,632 videos. In fact, if you compare Last Week Tonight’s per-video average to every other late night show, it has far and away the highest engagement:
Last Week Tonight: 8.7 million views per video
The Daily Show: 984,000 views per video
The Tonight Show: 1.7 million views per video
The Late Show: 888,000 views per video
Jimmy Kimmel Live: 2 million views per video
But want to know the craziest part? HBO is doing absolutely nothing to directly monetize John Oliver’s show.
That’s right. I clicked through several of his videos, and it appears that HBO doesn’t even have basic programmatic ads enabled, which means that the network isn’t even accepting the free money that YouTube would otherwise send its way. No wonder it’s so concerned about the YouTube channel cannibalizing viewership of the Max app.
And while Last Week Tonight is somewhat of an outlier with its complete lack of YouTube monetization, I do think it fits within a much larger trend of traditional media outlets under-monetizing their YouTube channels, especially when you compare it to the level of monetization from creators native to the platform.
To better understand what I mean, consider the case of Johnny Harris. He spent five years as a video producer for Vox, with a significant portion of that time devoted to hosting a YouTube series called Borders. During the pandemic, he started regularly uploading videos to his own channel, and when Borders was officially canceled in late 2020 he pivoted to becoming a full-time YouTuber.
As far as I can tell, Harris has at least six business models for his channel:
Programmatic ads: He’s part of YouTube’s Partnership program and often allows both pre-roll and mid-roll video ads to play within his videos.
Sponsorships: Almost every video of his has one direct sponsor for which he records a short segment, usually near the beginning of the episode.
Patreon: He has nearly 5,000 members paying between $2 and $8 a month.
Nebula: He belongs to the Nebula streaming service and not only gets paid based on his number of views there, but also for the number of paid subscribers he drives there from YouTube.
Bright Trip: He runs a company that sells online video courses geared toward international travelers.
Now compare that to the YouTube channel for The New York Times. While it did have programmatic pre-roll ads turned on, I couldn’t find evidence that it monetized the channel in any other way. The same could be said for most other publisher YouTube channels I checked out, including the Washington Post, Vogue, and Time Magazine.
Most of these media companies have substantial ad sales operations, and yet for some reason they consider it beneath them to sell sponsorships into their YouTube videos. The same can be said for their other social channels like Instagram and TikTok.
And it’s not like brands aren’t willing to spend money on this content — they already shell out billions of dollars a year on “influence marketing.” If anything, they’re much more willing and excited to pay for native, in-video sponsorships than they are for programmatic display ads, yet most traditional publishers prioritize the latter in their sales strategies.
That’s not to say that no media outlets have taken advantage of this opportunity. For instance, look at the YouTube channel for Johnny Harris’s previous employer, Vox. When I spoke to someone on Vox’s video staff a few years ago, they told me that the business team had shown very little interest in selling direct video sponsorships, but when watching this video published yesterday on whether AI could help predict extreme weather, I was pleasantly surprised to see a mid-video ad read for Microsoft’s AI tool Copilot.
I get that publishers are wary of building revenue streams on top of platforms they don’t control, but if you’re going to go through the trouble of producing the content, you might as well get paid for your efforts. And given YouTube’s dominance across mobile phones, web browsers, and even connected TVs, I think it’s extremely shortsighted to view it as little more than a marketing channel for a media company’s owned and operated business.
I doubt this is a factor, but I personally hate it when things I am reading online are interrupted by ads. I sometimes don't read past the first ad, I find it so irritating. Of course, there might be subtler forms of advertising than a big block of highly visual ad copy, which to me (psychologically) signals the actual article is over. Could there be a subtler form of advertising (which might be choosing to pay more for copy without ads).