TJ Walker breaks down Cenk Uygur's success in the "Mad as Hell" documentary, arguing that being an early self-funded pioneer in online video made him billions of views, while his cable TV stints flopped. He compares it to Rush Limbaugh and Larry King finding their audience in new media first.
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Mad as Hell. That's the name of a new documentary out on YouTube phenomenon Jank Uygur. So folks, this is a major documentary put out by a respected filmmaker about Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks. Full disclosure, I haven't seen the movie yet. This isn't a review. It's more of a commentary on Cenk Uygur and his tremendous success. Now, most people don't know who he is, but if you watch the Internet news and YouTube videos and news commentary, you definitely know who he is. He is the most successful political commentator host of all time. When it comes to online video, the Young Turks have more than a billion. I mean, at this point it's probably several billion views. And I give Cenk Uygur a lot of credit. He started early. He started when there was no audience. He self funded. It wasn't like Ronan Farrow just being rich and famous and being handed a plum juicy job at MSNBC when you're 12 years old. Jake Huger had to work for this. He had to struggle. And he's now getting a lot of the benefits of this. I don't know how much money he's making, but it's a lot more than he used to make because there is so much traffic for his online programming Now. It's true that he was not a huge success at msnbc. Current TV really never took off, but those are sort of old school cable TV venues. The Internet is his medium and that's where he's been an undisputed success. Now to me, this is interesting. As someone who follows media and media trends, it's part of a pattern. Anytime someone is first in a medium and they do it in a sufficient enough way and they stick to it, they often benefit. Look at Rush Limbaugh. He's not the first talk show host. He's not the first conservative, but he really was the first conservative syndicated talk show host that took calls back when the regulation and technology made that easy to happen. In the late 80s. Excuse me, in the late 1980s. It's been so long. It seems like the 1880s, but it's since the 1980s. And he to this day is still number one. In part because of talent, but in part just that first position mover status. Larry King is another one. He had the first overnight talk radio show that took calls. In part just the technology made it easy and he was the first. And he had a lengthy career in talk radio and then on TV on cnn. Again, part of it was just being first. Look at Anthony Robbins Yeah, he's been a good speaker for a long time, since, you know, he was 18 years old in the 1970s. But what really made Anthony Robbins was his ability to master the medium of the infomercial in the late 1980s. So when you look at a lot of the most successful people in any medium, part of it is that they saw a trend, others didn't. They latched on and they muscled through the early years when there wasn't much of an audience or much money there. And that's what made them successful. Now, this is true in a lot of businesses. Harvard is the number one school, the first school ever created in the United States, first college. And in most categories, it's still the number one ranking of major universities. Who was number two? William and Mary. No knock against William and Mary, but everyone's heard of Harvard. A lot of people have not heard of William and Mary. So there's something to simply being number one in something new. The New York Times today has a story about a French guy who's become the king of Vine. That's the app that allows people to do videos of just six seconds. Now, I have to confess, I'm not an expert on vine, but this guy has gone from being essentially homeless to being a superstar turning down million dollar deals. Here's the problem with trying to be number one in a new medium. You never know what's going to take off and what isn't. If you were the number one kingpin of CB radios back when I was a kid in the 1970s, that got you nowhere. CB radio didn't really take off. If you're the king of Friendster. Well, Friendster's basically died. So it's not something you can know in advance. It's only after the fact that it seems easy. And that's why I want to congratulate the Young Turks for getting even more attention, more approval, and major documentaries made about them.
