YouTube, TikTok attacked for control of audience
The global reach of social media has become essential to the media business but content owners are at the mercy of Big Tech and especially vulnerable to the algorithm, heavyweight US execs told the Royal Television Society in the UK. YouTube came under most fire purely because it’s the platform that media owners can’t do without.
“Social media have the central ability to control the media experience of the audience,” said Kevin Mayer, co-founder and co-CEO of Candle Media at the annual RTS Cambridge Convention.
“YouTube has become more difficult. Monetization is lumpy,” said Mayer. “Sometimes, YouTube decides to take their programmatic ad interface and favor our content. Other times, it takes that programmatic interface and favors competitive content or content that has nothing to do with the family audience that we serve.”
Among Candle Media’s assets is UK-based children’s content producer Moonbug which it acquired for $3bn in 2021. Its kids channel CocoMelon boasts the largest family channel on YouTube with 200 million subscribers.
“YouTube is hard to deal with at times,” Mayer said. “They tweak their algorithm and all of a sudden we get nine million views instead of 12 million views. We go talk to them and say, ‘hey, why'd you do this? And they reply ‘oh we didn't mean to do that, that was unintended, we'll turn it back’. The power and the global nature of those platforms is undeniable [but] you do have to be very careful about it.”
Mayer spent 15 years at Disney before briefly becoming CEO of TikTok and COO of ByteDance. “You launch a video on TikTok and it overnight you can have 5m followers but you can’t monetize on that. For TikTok, it's all about the technology and the algorithm to figure out exactly what every single user wants. If you're a professional content creator TikTok does not offer you money to put you content on TikTok and it’s not going to happen either. Insta, Snap, TikTok spend zero on content and they don’t need to.
“The exception is YouTube. It has created an incredible economy that that has not been replicated by anyone else. The last thing TikTok or Instagram want to do is start taking half their revenue and paying it off to creators.”
Having come of out legacy media, Mayer is now a convert to digital. “There is no age group to which the march toward alternative media consumption does not exist,” he said. “So, if I were investing today, I would use social media as the centrepiece of IP that you create and then you create monetization platforms around that social media storytelling, including traditional media for streaming, TV and movies.”
UK may force YouTube to promote BBC content
The UK government has hinted at plans to force YouTube and other major streamers to ensure content from the public service broadcasters BBC and ITV is given prominence. It has already legislated to give them prominence on Smart TVs, but wants to go further.
“We support [media regulator] Ofcom’s recommendation that public service media should be prominent on major video sharing platforms,” the government minster for culture and media Lisa Nandy told the conference. “If we need to regulate, we will.”
Lisa Nandy, government minister for culture and media
This isn’t just about preserving the future of the PSBs in a sea of digital content and fragmented distribution but to prop up the visibility and integrity of establishment news.
“We want to empower audiences so they can distinguish between news and misleading or false content,” Nandy said. “The lines have blurred in recent years which has eroded trust in our media and democracy.”
“It's about ensuring that the standards we expect from our PSM are reflective across the whole of broadcast media. So that polemic isn't presented as fact and people trust what they see. The lines between editorially curated and user generated content, between content providers and content platforms are no longer clear.”
BBC wants regulatory support and investment
Earlier, BBC Director General Tim Davie has opened the conference by trumpeting the BBC’s leading place on the global stage and urging the UK government to give it a stable platform to continue.
“We spent years talking through the angst of digital transition and despite it all this industry continues to be a success story. But now it does feel a little different. A lot seems at stake,” he said.
He claimed was the world’s most trusted news brand and that, in the UK, trust in the BBC rose last year; “A significant achievement in a fraught election year in polarised times.”
The immediate audience may have been TV execs but Davie’s message was addressed to the UK government. The funding for the public broadcaster, currently a universal licence fee, is under review.
“We don’t want the licence fee just to continue as before,” he said. “We want reform, we want it to modernise.”
AI will cause job losses behind the camera
Two years ago, the event’s theme was Too Much to Watch - a reference to an industry grappling with the challenge of attracting consumers flooded with choice.
“Since then, the pace of change has accelerated and the impact is more immediate and more profound,” said Jane Turton, chair of the RTS. “Discussions about technology, especially AI, have become part of our everyday.”
All three tech titans offered candid if alarming commentary on how AI will impact the industry, both negatively and positively.
“The opportunity for the creative industries is to substantially reduce production cost,” said Joe Ravitch, Co-Founder and Partner at investment group Raine. “Everybody I talk to in film and television is using generative AI. Obviously, that will come at the expense of a lot of jobs behind the camera, but I also think that the underlying value of the IP itself (the story) is where there's a tremendous amount of value.”
The cost of content creation is going to decline substantially at the expense of substantial cost to society, Mayer predicted.
“Some companies are going to be entirely using AI for their production,” he said. “They no longer need physical sets or green screen. Even the advances we made at Disney with Unreal Engine (on Mandalorian) is being leapfrogged by AI. AI creates an environment where long-form content can be made at a substantially reduced price but the flip side of that is that the barriers to entry collapse.”
Mayer is an investor in AI voice synthesizer Elevenlabs. He warned, “AI will make incumbents more efficient in production while also risk rendering them obsolete. If you can create long-form storytelling of the quality that you now see out of [OpenAI video generator] Sora it makes it makes defending your turf as an incumbent very difficult.”
While AI slashes production costs global streaming platforms allow distribution for all.
“There’s been a complete shift in power across the media industry,” said Brandon Baum, CEO and Founder StudioB, a creator with a combined following of 25 million and 16 billion video views. “For the first time ever distribution at scale is free. Suddenly, anyone with access to a phone and the internet is able to create a video, upload it online, and distribute to the world's largest platform on a TV.
“We're going to see talent start-up from across the world, not just the big media in the top cities and people who are able to get into the right rooms to pitch to the right people. Talent is going to spread their stories across the globe.”
Jeff Zucker, CEO, Redbird IMI said the use a company makes of AI was now critical to Redbird’s decision whether to invest or not.
“AI will create new things we want to watch and it won't involve a lot of people in its creation. Having said that, there's still going to be a need for great movie stars and great TV stars. And let's see if AI can really write with the same emotion that the great screenwriters do. I can’t see that it does – yet.”
Nick Clegg warns of internet fragmentation
Nick Clegg, until recently the policy chief at Meta, talked of the “collision” between the worlds of Big Tech and politics.
“West coast Big Tech and governments do not speak each other’s language or understand the pressures and incentive on either side of the divide.”
He said there is no such thing as the internet which is “remorselessly splintering” with unforeseen consequences.
“Something powerful is happening out of sight and out of mind which is the gradual balkanization of the internet. We have a Chinese internet, a Russian internet and a western internet which is itself fragmenting.”
He said the globalization of technology and the deglobalization of politics were on collision course.
“It’s something which hasn't been examined in the detail I think it deserves.”
In a lighter moment Clegg observed that Mountainhead, a 2025 HBO satire about billionaire tech bros, had hit home.
“There’s incredible hubris in Silicon Valley. I have been in conversations exactly like that. In Silicon Valley they believe, not without some reason, that they are great disruptors inventing the future yet it is a stiflingly conventional place. There’s a herd movement to genuflect before Trump.”
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