Inside YouTube’s 5-year program to help creators that you’re just now hearing about

For the past five years, there’s been a cadre of YouTubers working closely with the company to shape the tools and features creators are using. And it’s not until now that YouTube is pulling back the curtain on its findings and on the program itself. YouTube’s Creator in Residence launched in 2016 as a way for a select group of creators to stress test new additions to the platform and give feedback on the user experience directly to engineers, designers, and product managers. Ten creators are handpicked by the Creator in Residence team for six-month terms that include weekly meetings and, at times, team members visiting creators in their homes and studios to see how being a YouTuber affects their lives on and off camera. Renato Verdugo, a user experience researcher at YouTube an co-lead of Creator in Residence, says typical UX research stops after a week or two with a specific focus on workshopping a product, website, or app. “The more time we started spending with creators without a product agenda, the more we learned [about] their everyday life in a way that allows us to better understand the role that the platform plays in a specific creator’s success, in a specific creator’s business,” Verdugo says. “The residency came from the spirit of, how do we spend time with creators beyond one research session? ” Part of the reason the Creator in Residence program stayed under wraps for five years was to ensure that time with creators was as unfiltered as possible. Renato Verdugo [Photo: courtesy of YouTube] “For this to be effective, the creator needs to know that they’re not here to be a spokesperson, that they’re here to be honest and raw,” Verdugo says. “Giving time to work without the public spotlight and [creators not having] people put pressure on them like, ‘You’re talking to YouTube? Can you also raise this other thing?’ It just creates space to breathe.” Verdugo and his team select creators based on who they deem are doing something “unique or cool” and “really creative” with their channels, regardless of the size of their following Read More …

Inside YouTube’s 5-year program to help creators that you’re just now hearing about

For the past five years, there’s been a cadre of YouTubers working closely with the company to shape the tools and features creators are using. And it’s not until now that YouTube is pulling back the curtain on its findings and on the program itself. YouTube’s Creator in Residence launched in 2016 as a way for a select group of creators to stress test new additions to the platform and give feedback on the user experience directly to engineers, designers, and product managers. Ten creators are handpicked by the Creator in Residence team for six-month terms that include weekly meetings and, at times, team members visiting creators in their homes and studios to see how being a YouTuber affects their lives on and off camera. Renato Verdugo, a user experience researcher at YouTube an co-lead of Creator in Residence, says typical UX research stops after a week or two with a specific focus on workshopping a product, website, or app. “The more time we started spending with creators without a product agenda, the more we learned [about] their everyday life in a way that allows us to better understand the role that the platform plays in a specific creator’s success, in a specific creator’s business,” Verdugo says. “The residency came from the spirit of, how do we spend time with creators beyond one research session? ” Part of the reason the Creator in Residence program stayed under wraps for five years was to ensure that time with creators was as unfiltered as possible. Renato Verdugo [Photo: courtesy of YouTube] “For this to be effective, the creator needs to know that they’re not here to be a spokesperson, that they’re here to be honest and raw,” Verdugo says. “Giving time to work without the public spotlight and [creators not having] people put pressure on them like, ‘You’re talking to YouTube? Can you also raise this other thing?’ It just creates space to breathe.” Verdugo and his team select creators based on who they deem are doing something “unique or cool” and “really creative” with their channels, regardless of the size of their following. “We have no hard requirements,” he says. “We’ve reached out to people who have a couple hundred thousand all the way to the well into the millions. It’s much more about doing interesting things on the platform.” For example, Anisha Dixit, a creator based in Mumbai whose aim is empowering women, particularly in India, in approachable and comedic ways. “She talks about things that could be considered taboo, like menstruation,” Verdugo says. “She mixes her own experience of growing up as a woman in India with the experience that her younger audience is going through.” To get a better sense of Dixit’s workflow and life, Verdugo spent a week in Mumbai shadowing her creating content, doing press, and so forth. “That ethnographic research is really not necessarily about any specific feature of the platform. I don’t show up with like a suitcase full of prototypes like, let’s try new things,” Verdugo says. “It’s an opportunity to open that window into what is everyday life. What is it like to wake up in the morning and be a YouTube creator and go to bed and still be a YouTube creator?” That said, there are occasions where Verdugo gives creators the opportunity to test, and ultimately shape, new features on the platform, such as the revamped YouTube Studio, the hub for creators to manage their accounts; and YouTube Stories, which originally launched as Reels in 2017 but not without some necessary guidance from creators in the program who were flown to New York City to participate in a scavenger hunt as a fun way to test the feature Read More …

This startup lets you make money like an Airbnb host—for screening movies

Back in early March of 2020, Christie Marchese was feeling good. She’d just received a $100,000 investment for a new company that was set to launch that month. Her plan was to apply the Airbnb model to the movie industry and turn individuals into movie screening “hosts” who would be given the tools to organize film screenings in places like churches and community spaces. This would bring smaller, independent films to areas of the county they might not normally travel to, and also allow filmmakers and others to help build a bigger audience for a film that, say, was only destined for streaming.   “Our thought was, can you have a movie theater chain that distributes independent films, foreign-language films, to a much wider network of theaters that aren’t traditionally theaters? Where you don’t have to show a movie five times a day for three weeks to barely break even?” says Marchese, who’d already dabbled in the entertainment space as the founder and former CEO of Picture Motion, a social impact agency that builds campaigns around TV shows and films. “So can we use mixed-use spaces? And can we create a financial model that encourages entrepreneurship or that taps into that—to sound super cheesy—gig economy? Where someone could make $500 hosting a movie one night a week? That’s pretty good money.”   [Image: Kinema] Then, of course, COVID-19 hit. Suddenly a company built around in-person gatherings was an unsustainable proposition. Marchese’s dream of disrupting the movie theater business was put on hold. But rather than wait the pandemic out, she turned to her CTO, Tim Knight, and asked, “can you build a virtual cinema?”   After all, people might not be able to attend a live, screening of a film, but they could attend one digitally. Knight came up with a prototype for a digital platform with built-in, live text chat and video broadcasting capabilities so that after a film is streamed, audiences can participate in a panel discussion or virtual chat with a filmmaker Read More …

Why Amazon’s $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM should be blocked

In Tuesday’s announcement of Amazon’s $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM—the historic film studio behind the Rocky , Legally Blonde , and James Bond  franchises—Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, naturally dropped two major Hollywood buzzwords.   “The real financial value behind this deal,” Hopkins said, “is the treasure trove of” —ding-ding-ding— “ IP in the deep catalog that we plan to reimagine and develop together with MGM’s talented team. It’s very exciting and provides so many opportunities for high-quality” —ding-ding-ding— “ storytelling .” Yes, in the latest proposed media merger, intellectual property will be married with innovative storytelling to create a company like no other. This has never been done before . . . if you don’t count Disney, Comcast, Sony, ViacomCBS, or the 10-day-old prospective merger of Warner-Discovery. Indeed, just as Marvel and Star Wars spin-off TV shows now populate Disney Plus, prepare yourself for a Rocky -themed reality-TV show (with real boxers!) and as many Bond prequels as Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson (the highly protective producers of the franchise) will allow for, to roll out on Amazon Prime Video.   What is more worrisome, though, is the even greater monopolistic foothold that this deal gives one of the world’s richest and most powerful companies, one whose market cap is not in the billions but trillions. Now, beyond just selling its own products, like baby oils, in its own marketplace and thus edging out smaller, independent businesses, Amazon will be doing the same thing with movies and TV shows at a scale of 10 times what it’s currently been doing in entertainment. Read More …

The blockbuster global success of ‘F9’ exposes the myth of streaming’s inevitability

As COVID-19 has turned Hollywood upside down, leading to new levels of disruption-seeking, what constitutes “radical” thinking seems to have no ceiling. Most notably, WarnerMedia decided to throw its entire 2021 slate onto HBO Max (alongside their theatrical release), a move that precipitated the $43 billion spin-off of WarnerMedia with Discovery last week. Other studios may be less audacious, but every studio in town is treating movie releases like advanced calculus, hauling in the analysts and Harvard MBAs to try to divine the best strategy to launch their precious, $200 million pieces of intellectual property out into the COVID-tattered world. Generally, the answer lies in a tepid solution—a hybrid of streaming and theatrical—that attempts to cut losses but, at least this far along in the pandemic, tends to give some kind of a boost to new streaming services.   Given this environment, Universal’s decision to release F9 in theaters only last weekend—with no streaming option—is perhaps the most radical move of all. Yes, that’s right: putting a movie in a theater where people can sit in a socially distanced way to eat their popcorn and enjoy the show is suddenly the new vanguard. [Photo: Universal Pictures] Even bolder: The “wild” experiment worked. Last weekend, the latest in the Vin Diesel-fueled action franchise racked up $162 million in foreign markets including China, Korea, and Hong Kong, a number that is not that far off from “normal” box-office figures in those areas for a Fast and Furious film. This makes it not only a COVID-19 anomaly, but the first and biggest sign yet that studios can start nudging the MBAs toward the door and start to re-embrace the good ol’ fashioned but still proven box-office model. Read More …