YouTube's global head of entertainment Alex Carloss has encouraged channel-owners to focus on building 'fanbases' rather than simply audiences on Google's video service.
'An audience tunes in when they're told to, a fanbase chooses when and what to watch,' said Carloss at the MIPTV television industry conference in Cannes. 'An audience changes the channel when their show is over. A fanbase shares, it comments, it curates, it creates.'
Carloss' speech was light on YouTube's strategic vision in favour of a roll-call of popular celebrities and channels on the service in recent years, from Susan Boyle and Psy to gamer PewDiePie, who with 25m subscribers is YouTube's biggest channel.
Carloss also cited YouTube as the new 'battlefield' between US late-night talk-show hosts Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O'Brien, suggesting that their existing viewerships had peaked.
'They've realised they're going to succeed they need to find new audiences, younger audiences who don't necessarily spend their nights watching TV. So they've turned to YouTube,' said Carloss, pointing out that in the first two weeks after Fallon took over The Tonight Show in February, his YouTube channel generated more than 90m views.
Kimmel is similarly popular. 'Kimmel now has a tribe of over 4m on a channel with over 1bn views, ' said Carloss, who claimed data shows that 'as a show's views go up on YouTube so do its TV ratings. YouTube is complementary.'
He also praised Simon Cowell's You Generation brand, a YouTube-focused global talent show, and Disney for the way it encouraged fans of its film Frozen to post their own cover versions of its songs on YouTube. One by musician Alex Boyé has been watched more than 30m times.
'The studio could have very easily issued copyright claims against this video and any others and taken them down, but they made a different choice: a fan-friendly choice. They chose to let those videos stay,' said Carloss, suggesting that the buzz around Frozen on YouTube contributed to its strong performance at the box office.
'Creators everywhere can make the choice Disney did. Allow fans to pay tribute, and you will see the incredible benefits of their passion.'
YouTube is keen to stress the potential for videos to reach global audiences - well, fanbases - claiming that on average, 60% of views for channels come from outside their home countries, and that for many the figure is much higher. That includes the Psy effect: before the global success of his Gangnam Style video, Korean pop (K-Pop) videos had been watched 2bn times on YouTube. Now that figure has risen to 7bn.
'Today, the lion's share of people watching K-Pop videos live outside of Asia - 91% of them outside Korea,' said Carloss. 'For so long language has served as a barrier between cultural exchange, but thanks to the power of video and the internet, those barriers are breaking down entirely.'
Carloss shared his keynote with Shane Smith, chief executive of Vice Media, which has built its video business on YouTube, including its latest, food-focused channel Munchies, which debuted this week. Smith hailed the global reach of YouTube, citing past comparisons of Vice to established media companies MTV, ESPN and CNN.
'If you look at what you can do online internationally and how you can reach people, I'm not going to be the next CNN, I'm not going to be the next ESPN, I'm not going to be the next MTV,' said Smith. 'I'm going to be 10x CNN, I'm going to be 10x ESPN and 10x MTV. Because the number of video views are now in the billions. That's the disruption. That's the revolution.'
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