YouTube isn't a new platform — it's a gatekeeper harsher than the TV networks
Comedian Adam Conover says Hollywood, chasing Netflix, destroyed cable with its own hands and handed 60% of television to YouTube for free — and YouTube's algorithmic gatekeeper is less negotiable than CBS, because no one is accountable for it.
The video won't play here. Listen to the audio instead:
The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
"Creator" is an exploitation script invented by the platforms
Conover refuses the word "creator," and not out of pedantry: he says it was coined by social media companies to trick people into signing a wildly unequal economic contract — promising "Mr. Beast made a billion, so can you," then getting you to work for them nearly free for the rest of your life in hopes of one day receiving a sliver of ad revenue. He compares it to Avon or Mary Kay calling their salespeople "entrepreneurs": you think you're building a business, when the label actually conceals what the platform has done to your entire industry. He'd rather call himself a writer, a performer, Hollywood labor.
— Adam ConoverHollywood handed 60% of television to YouTube for free
Conover says that for the past two years, every conversation he's had in Hollywood has started with the same line: did you know YouTube is now the biggest streaming service on television? His mechanism: after Netflix hit television directly, every company assumed it needed its own little $15-a-month HBO, a model that was never going to work. In the chase for Netflix, they destroyed cable — and never solved, on streaming, roughly 60% of television content: news, talk shows, lifestyle programming, travel shows, weather. Those categories were ceded to YouTube, and now when people want to watch someone talk about renovating a house, or about the Knicks, or about the news, their first instinct is YouTube — and it's all free.
— Adam ConoverGame shows died on the metric of "binge a season in a weekend"
Conover tells the story of his own pitch: he brought a big IP to a streaming platform to sell a game show, and was turned down with "we can get someone to watch one episode, but we can't get them to watch a whole season over a weekend." He realized on the spot that the platform's entire business model rests on "binge a season in a weekend," and that is not how people watch game shows. What makes this point valuable is that it shows how streaming's metrics systematically eliminate whole content categories: the show isn't bad, it just doesn't fit the subscription-retention model. The result is that game shows, along with other formats, were ceded to YouTube — and comedy-variety writers like him, people doing non-fiction comedy in the vein of The Daily Show, no longer have those jobs produced by the networks at all.
— Adam ConoverThe cable ledger used to add up
Conover breaks down why the old model could support a middle class: everyone in the country paid for cable, MTV got a cut no matter what it aired, so it could afford writers' rooms, camera crews, union contracts, accountants, health insurance, and a highly paid CEO. His own show was "on the profitability line" — what it cost to make, how much advertising it sold, at what ad rate, what share came back from the cable company; the math came out black, so it ran for five years. He raises two questions: first, streaming no longer knows how to make a show profitable, and can only do strange math like "how many people subscribed to Apple TV to watch a certain series"; second, they threw away decades of business-development accumulated in the advertising business — CBS could command a certain rate because it had been negotiating with Johnson & Johnson for a hundred years. Netflix convinced the entire industry that advertising was gone forever, everyone tore that business down, and now they're rebuilding it on Peacock.
— Adam ConoverThe algorithm is the gatekeeper, and worse than a person
To the counterargument that platforms let a kid in the Midwest be seen, Conover's response is: then you are the gatekeeper, and the algorithm is the gatekeeper. It used to be NBC, CBS and ABC; now it's YouTube, Instagram and TikTok — and because YouTube's business model is different, it barely competes with the other two on long-form, so if you want to make broadly appealing content, you effectively have one option: YouTube. He thinks this is worse than the old gatekeepers, not because it's more concentrated, but because no one is accountable: you go tell Netflix a show is a good idea, and they say the algorithm says it isn't. In the old system there was at least a specific human being you could persuade, could win over. He also says good shows appear precisely when "the exception gets made."
— Adam ConoverYouTube wants to be the cable company, not the channel
Conover offers a theory of his own: YouTube doesn't want to be a channel, it wants to be the cable company, with "The Adam Conover Channel" as the cable channel — brand integrations negotiated by the creator, business development done by the creator, YouTube just the pipe, skimming a big cut off the top. So YouTube gives no one money, but it has started promoting shows more, holding its own upfronts, and connecting creators with advertisers, trying to light this pilot light without putting in capital, infrastructure or investment. Netflix's model is the reverse: pour money into production, make premium content. He calls this a contest between two giants, and estimates it will be around the time he's 60 that this model might take shape.
— Adam ConoverHe took the Worldcoin job, then refunded the money and deleted the video
Conover revisits that controversy: Sam Altman's orb company approached him to shoot a video at an event and post it, for a lot of money. His judgment was that the product looked like garbage, but "the audience will hate it, so what" — the money could fund the content he actually wanted to make. At the event, listening to the keynote, his assessment was that this was the most comical vaporware he'd ever seen, something that could never ship. After the video went out, the audience reaction was fierce, because the product's premise itself carries a disturbing surveillance flavor. He ultimately deleted the video and returned the money (he was never paid), and instead made a 25-minute video about how absurd the product was, and did not monetize that video at all. His conclusion: a lot of creators go through this moment, and sometimes you cross the line and only realize it afterward.
— Adam ConoverThe organizing target isn't YouTube, it's MrBeast's company
Asked how creators fight the platforms, Conover gives a counterintuitive answer from the perspective of a labor organizer: the organizing target isn't YouTube itself, it's the channels. He says the biggest YouTubers aren't individuals at all, they're companies — Adam Savage is essentially making a cable show every day, and Hank Green has a whole crowd of people behind his videos. So the viable path is organizing MrBeast's employees (he mentions reports that they are severely exploited and underpaid), and getting top channels big enough to negotiate a revenue split with YouTube. He concedes this is more like B2B bargaining, similar to the carriage-fee wars between cable channels and Spectrum or Charter, and may not benefit every worker on the channel. What truly can't be organized is the "dark matter": people promoting a dental practice, or hoping for a staff job they will never get, who will never be paid anything, and who in the end can only be protected by government regulation of gig workers.
— Adam ConoverIn their own words · checked verbatim
I feel the word creator was created by the social media companies as a way of tricking people into entering into an extremely inequitable economic bargain
Adam Conover5:15
every single conversation I've had in Hollywood in the last two years. I have started with, did you know that YouTube is the largest streaming service on television sets
Adam Conover8:21
when Netflix said, tricked the entire industry into thinking there's not going to be any advertising again, ever again. And they all destroyed those businesses.
Adam Conover13:37
they have more power than anyone who ever worked for CBS or ABC ever did. And it's actually worse because people aren't in charge of it.
Adam Conover42:32
the media ecosystem now is more concentrated, more closed off than it ever was before. The only difference is now anybody can upload anything for free and YouTube will host it for you.
Adam Conover43:34
the most pernicious lie the tech industry tells is about its own inevitability
Adam Conover1:05:27
half of it is just mark zuckerberg lying to people over and over again so we don't need to accept it as some as some law of the universe
Adam Conover1:06:29
Figures
| Episodes of Adam Ruins Everything | 65 | 10:25 |
| Share of television content abandoned by streaming | about 60% | 8:21 |
| Cost Conover paid out of pocket to shoot a stand-up special | five figures in dollars | 24:57 |
| Length of Conover's video criticizing Worldcoin | about 25 minutes | 55:58 |
| Conover's full-time employee count | 1 | 3:05 |
Glossary
- AVOD
- Ad-supported video on demand: the free, ad-monetized video model, as opposed to subscription.
- vaporware
- A heavily hyped product that keeps failing to ship and may never be released.
- upfronts
- The annual events where TV networks presell next season's ad inventory to advertisers.
- carriage battle
- A negotiating conflict between cable channels and distributors over per-channel bundling fees.
How to listen
Founders and investors building in content, platforms or media; anyone who wants to understand platform take-rate structures, the algorithmic-gatekeeper mechanism, and the real ledger of the creator economy.
The two ad reads at the top and the three sponsor breaks in the middle can be skipped.