The Oscars Follow the Audience

The Oscars are moving away from ABC television. In 2029, they will be seen on, get this, YouTube. Now, folks, this is big, big news in the world of not just entertainment, but media elite, gatekeeping. It's hard to imagine a show with more prestige than the Academy Awards. As recently as the 1990s, it had 57 million people watching. Now, it is true in recent years, the audience has shrunk below 20 million, but still, this is a night of the biggest stars. And ABC traditionally aired this program. They have ever since 1976. Well, not after 1929. The Academy of Motion Picture Stars announced that it was moving it to YouTube in 2029, just a few years from now. So what's the real significance of this? Partially, abc, I think, can't give as much money as it used to because audiences are shrinking. Partly, the Academy thinks it can get a better deal from YouTube. They want to reach younger audiences, and YouTube reaches a younger audience. These days, YouTube is reaching everybody. It's now the number one streaming service. It has 13% of all streaming viewers. And that's bigger than Netflix, bigger than hbo, bigger than abc, bigger than cbs, bigger than NBC, bigger than Peacock, bigger than all of them. And it's just growing bigger and bigger every single day. Why does this seem like it's really a major, major earth change? Because I'm on YouTube, you're on YouTube. If you have a finger and a mouse and a laptop or a cell phone, anybody and everyone can be on YouTube. There are no gatekeepers. So who is to define what is prestige? Real TV versus just social media, user generated content. All of those lines are now blurring in a way that is creating a lot of chaos. Now, I, for one, am ecstatic about this. I am of an age where if you were a creator, as I was growing up in the 80s, 90s and beyond, we spent all of our time chasing gatekeepers. When I did my first syndicated TV show when I was about 25 years old in the late 1980s, I had to finish physically drive around to TV stations all around Florida, begging on the doors of station managers, please, please, please air my TV show, the Walker Roundup. And yeah, I finally got it on shows. But it was a motley crew of stations. Different time code, different time zones, different times of the night, different times of the day. And yeah, believe it or not, Florida has two time zones. That wasn't a misstatement there. It was extraordinarily difficult, hard to cobble together an audience and impossible to measure. These days, anyone can measure their audience on YouTube because YouTube tells you you had three views or you had 3,000 or you had 3 million or you had 3 billion. It's all measurable now. Thankfully, I never got the itch to be a filmmaker or a sitcom maker and I never wasted years and years of my life going to Sundance and chasing program directors at the ABC network because that was a tough, tough gig. Very hard for people to do. Very few got through it. Now, are they going to be the king makers any longer? It doesn't appear to be. Now, in recent times we've seen a number of comedians just launch their own so called primetime specials right on YouTube, their comedy specials on, on YouTube. And it has worked well famously. Matt Rife being one of them. It's coming down to this. It used to be one of the top skills you could have as an entertainer is the ability to essentially suck up to network executives, get them to like you, to take a good meeting, to first of all, get your foot in the door at a meeting, maybe attend the right Hollywood parties and sell yourself in a meeting. To a small group of people these days, it doesn't seem like that is the big draw anymore. That's not the defining element of you being seen by thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions or even tens of millions. It's going to come down to can you create interesting content and can you promote your content? It's going to be far more important for Creators Day 1 when they begin their career, to build an email list, to build a platform, to build a tribe, to build a following on social media these days, one of the biggest factors of being successful on YouTube is being successful on all other social media. Taking your short form, putting it on TikTok, sharing your reels on Instagram, on Facebook, essentially being everywhere. That's quite often a function of energy, an organization, not so much being good at politics, being good at taking a meeting. And it's not necessarily a function of getting big money donors behind you. Big, big financial backers, big producers, executive producers who want you to cast their girlfriend in the show. Here's a check that is not going to be as important in the future. So I'm frankly very excited about this new world. Now. Early in my career, I certainly wasn't lucky enough to sell a TV movie or a show or a sitcom to a big network. But I was able to play the game and get on to CNN and MSNBC and Fox sometimes all in the same day 30 some years ago. And not everyone could do it. Part of it was I simply was in New York City. I knew their language, I knew their lingo. I knew how to package my thoughts in sound bites that were exactly what they were looking for for guests. They, well, that's not as important anymore. Times change and you have to adapt to it. So what's the bigger significance? Short term? I think if I were a TV network executive, I would be polishing my resume right now because the days are numbered. If I were a gatekeeper, if I were in charge of talent acquisition or NBC, I would be polishing my resume or starting a YouTube channel right now. Now, this is no big secret. We've seen for years now, whether it's Seth Meyers, whether it is Bill Maher, all the big stars started their own YouTube shows years ago because they saw this coming. They saw the ratings going down every single day. Whether they were late night television, whether they were Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, whether they were on cnn. You turn on CNN on one of your apps on your televisions, the only thing I see them promoting is watch my podcast. Sanjay Gupta, watch my podcast. If you are Anderson Cooper, they're all promoting their podcast. Where are they seen on YouTube. So there's a great democratization going on in the media and some people are going to do well. Most people aren't going to get an audience. Most people are going to talk to five people. Now, I can't find the exact source of this data originally, but I've certainly heard many times the average YouTube video has about three views. So the Academy Awards is not going to be worried about you if you post your video and you get three views. But if you look at any wildly successful YouTuber, whether it's Mr. Beast or the Young Turks, pretty much they all started off with about 3 views the first day. The difference between wildly successful people on YouTube and social media and everyone else is the wildly successful people typically don't mind being wildly unsuccessful every day for year after year after year before they break through. Now, we're all used to the celebrity stories of the young kid, 18, 19, 21, right out of school, moving to New York, moving to la, knocking on doors, going to every audition, getting rejected their first 5,000 auditions. We've heard that story for decades and it's true. But I think now the narrative is going to change. Rather than knocking on doors and auditioning 5,000 times and getting rejected, I think now the litmus test for being a star is, did you make 5,000 YouTube videos even though you had almost no audience before you broke through? So it's going to be more a function of the tenacity of creators. Whether you're in the news business, the news commentary business like I am, whether you're in the feature film business or the sitcom business or the standup comedy business, if you are creating content and there's video or a cartoon or someone speaking, you've got to go to where the eyeballs were. Now that traditionally that meant begging somebody at CBS or ABC or NBC. Please, please, please, please, please give me a talk show. Please, please, please give me a sitcom. Those days are over. Yeah, there'll still be a few more sitcoms, but prediction. Nobody, and I mean nobody's, going to get a sitcom in America anymore unless they first have an insanely popular YouTube show. We're going to see a lot more deals like Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast was already world famous, already huge, had a huge audience, and then Netflix said, please, please, please come do stuff for us. So that's going to be the model, the way of testing yourself, of proving yourself, of refining your craft. It's going to be done in real time. Now, certainly that can be better than performing at, you know, church basement theaters and performing in front of five friends at an open mic. It's drastically superior to that. But I don't want to kid you, it's not going to be easy. It's not going to be get rich quick for 99.999% of creators in the world. But it is going to be different. It you can live anywhere, as some of the top creators on TikTok have proven. You can live in Senegal, you can live in obscure places where you're not in New York City or Los Angeles or London, and you can still make it big in the media. Now, what's going to happen to the Academy Awards? I do watch part of them most years because I like to sort of keep my finger on the tab of pop culture. It's kind of a nice way of getting a little sampling. See some stars that have I, I've admired in the past. But if I didn't see the Academy Awards for one or two years, I don't know that I'd really be bothered by it or miss it tremendously. What do you think? First of all, will you be watching the Academy Awards when they're on YouTube? Number two, are we kind of past the time where we make a difference in our own minds between that's television, it's real, versus that's YouTube, and that's just kid stuff? I think we're kind of past the time of differentiating that way because people are watching YouTube on their big televisions. I know I do at home. It's not just something you look at on your cell phone where you're leaning in versus hbo. You're sitting back and enjoying it. There are plenty of times. Some of the best stand up comedy shows I've seen in the last year were created and posted first and only on YouTube and it looks like that's where the Academy Awards will be as well. Here's my real offer to you. If you've got an interesting idea, if you think you're funny or clever or creative or have an idea for a movie or documentary, stop wasting time chasing the gatekeepers begging for permission. What this does show, what the Academy Awards are showing is that the only person in the world you need to ask permission from in the future if you want to share your vision, your creative vision with the world is yourself. Give yourself permission to create. Then take your mouse and click record.