As well as being the dominant platform in podcasting and having a growing presence in live sport, it is now the leader in TV and streaming in the US
Brittany Broski was working at a bank in Dallas in 2019 when she got her first taste of internet stardom. She had posted a brief, funny TikTok video of her reaction to tasting kombucha for the first time, and the clip rocketed around the world. “I went viral by accident,” Broski recalls.
The bank promptly fired her. So she packed her bags and moved to Los Angeles to launch her video career, pursuing a new version of a dream as old as Hollywood.
Since then, she has appeared in a Super Bowl ad, launched a podcast that ranks in the top 50 in the US, and started Brittany Broski’s Royal Court, an over-the-top YouTube series that has featured interviews with celebrities including Brie Larson, Kyle MacLachlan and Fred Armisen. Time magazine named her one of the top 50 content creators of 2025.
“This started in my spare bedroom and now I have a full-blown studio in Burbank” with a team of about 15 people, she says. “We have incoming requests from A-list actors who want to come on the show. I think the sky’s the limit with what this show can be.”
Broski is part of a growing number of YouTube content creators who have launched their own independent studios in the shadow of Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. YouTube executives, led by CEO Neal Mohan, say these creators are at the vanguard of “the new Hollywood” who are transforming the entertainment industry.
The idea of a division of Alphabet — market cap $3.75tn — declaring the dawn of a “new Hollywood” would be jarring to the companies that have long dominated the production of television programmes and films. But it is especially worrying at this particular moment in the old Hollywood, which has been contracting for years due to the pandemic, labour strikes, a flatlining box office — and, most of all, the disruptive impact of streaming.
“For the past year or so everyone in Hollywood has woken up and figured out how competitive, how big YouTube is,” says Michael Nathanson, a veteran media and entertainment analyst at MoffettNathanson, a research firm. “They have all started to pay attention to it. Hollywood people were too dismissive about creators, but these creators are stars.”
In an era when the currency in the entertainment world is the ability to hold the attention of an audience, YouTube has become one of the few essential platforms able to knit together new content that appeals to an online generation with the sort of programming that was once the backbone of cable TV. For Broski and some of her fellow creators, the key to success has been delivering fresh takes on old TV formulas — in her case the late-night chat show — for audiences raised on memes, TikTok videos and YouTube itself.
YouTube, which turned 20 this year, is already the dominant podcast platform, a major force in music and a growing presence in live sport.
Almost by stealth, it has also conquered the American living room. Since 2024, Americans have been watching YouTube primarily on TVs, not their phones or other devices. YouTube now has the lead in all TV and streaming consumption in the US — above Netflix, Disney and Amazon Prime Video.
Not all of this viewing time is spent watching the work of YouTube creators, however. Like other tech companies working in Hollywood — including Apple, Amazon and Netflix — YouTube is trying to pick off the rights to sports and other live events that still command large audiences on traditional TV. It has secured rights to NFL American football games, and streamed the first NFL game this season for free, live from Brazil.
This month YouTube secured the rights to another event that, at least in the past, has had the power to attract huge TV audiences. Starting in 2029, YouTube will begin to exclusively stream the Oscar awards — ending a 50-year relationship between the ABC network and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
“That was a ‘holy crap’ moment that said YouTube is serious about moving up the ladder in terms of content quality,” says Nathanson.
For YouTube, the Oscars will be a way to draw in a global audience — and provide a platform for its most popular creators as they interview stars on the red carpet. Streaming the ceremony should also be a boost for YouTube CEO Mohan’s stated goal for the platform to be at the “epicentre of culture”, while potentially expanding the audience for the Oscars, which has been declining for decades. Viewership peaked at 57mn in 1998, when Titanic swept the awards, and reached just 19.7mn in 2025.
“We will have creators who will bring in people who might not otherwise have watched the Oscars,” Tara Walpert Levy, vice-president of the Americas for YouTube, tells the FT. “Part of the reason the NFL signed a deal with YouTube was they wanted younger and more diverse audiences. Hopefully we’ll be seeing that success happen with the Oscars.”
YouTube, like Netflix before it, is also trying to wedge its way into other prestigious Hollywood institutions. This summer, YouTube backed campaigns by its creators who hoped to win Emmy awards, the highest prize in American television. For the first time, YouTube hosted a “For Your Consideration” event last summer to draw attention to its nominees. None of them won, but as a statement of YouTube’s designs on Hollywood, the message was clear.
YouTube threw its weight around this year in separate disputes with traditional media groups over carriage fees for sports — the last category where they still continue to draw healthy audiences — and other programming. The clash over how much YouTube pays to carry content on its subscription TV service is similar to the distribution battles media companies fought for decades with cable groups.
Disney and others, including NBC and Fox, sought higher rates from YouTubeTV, claiming that it was undercutting their own services on price.
The fight between YouTube and Disney was the most contentious, with ESPN sports programming halted for 15 days before a new deal was struck.
This more aggressive public posture from YouTube, led by Mohan, has coincided with the moment when two of Hollywood’s legendary studios — Paramount and Warner Bros — had diminished to the point that both became takeover targets. The sales of both companies seemed to accentuate the brutal fact that the traditional film and TV businesses, the lifeblood of Hollywood, have been subsumed by the big streamers.
In August, the 103-year-old Paramount studio was acquired by Skydance, a studio run by David Ellison, whose father is the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, in a deal worth about $8bn. And in early December, Warner Bros Discovery agreed to sell itself to Netflix in an $83bn deal — beating out multiple bids by Paramount. It is now pursuing a $108bn hostile bid for Warner.
The idea of Warner Bros becoming a division of Netflix, the streaming pioneer that is still blamed by many in the movie industry for depriving the cinemas of their audiences, has rattled Hollywood. But there are also concerns that if Paramount prevails, severe job cuts will result as the two studios are merged.
Both scenarios have stirred up anxieties about a looming retrenchment in film and TV production, where executives have long worried about an eventual tech takeover by Apple, Amazon or Google.
For Broski, however, the drama at the old-style Hollywood studios seems like a different world from her life as a YouTube creator. “I’m not beholden to a network. I’m not beholden to anyone,” she says. “I am the CEO, and I am the showrunner, and I am the host, I am the talent. Like, I’m all of it.”
Broski’s comments reflect the law-of-the jungle quality of being a creator for YouTube, where 20mn new videos compete for attention every day. YouTube creators make a video, upload it and are paid only if audiences show up to watch. If viewers visit in large enough numbers, advertisers follow — and YouTube pays the creators 55 per cent of that revenue.
“YouTube plays a different role in this ecosystem,” says Levy, the YouTube executive. “We look at ourselves as building the stage, not the studio.”
Netflix shook up Hollywood by paying talent upfront instead of the old model, which allowed actors and producers to receive “back end” profit-sharing payments tied to the success of their work. YouTube’s model is an even bigger departure from the old Hollywood norm.
“The fundamental thing is Netflix pays for its shows, whereas YouTube gives creators the tools, the platform, the algorithm and the monetisation, from which they can invest in creating content,” says Ben Davis, co-head of digital at the WME talent agency. “It’s absolutely a sea change, one that comes with a lot of opportunity for the talent to have more power and control than they ever have had — at least for those who have an audience.”
In September, YouTube said it had paid more than $100bn to creators, artists and media groups since 2021. In the most recent quarter, YouTube advertising revenues increased 15 per cent to $10.3bn. The number of YouTube channels earning more than $100,000 from connected TVs rose 45 per cent from a year earlier.
The YouTube model has made many creators very rich, none more so than Mr Beast (real name: Jimmy Donaldson) whose stunts and contests have brought him earnings of $85mn, according to Forbes. Donaldson’s YouTube channel has 455mn subscribers who tune in to watch videos such as $456,000 Squid Game In Real Life!, which has been viewed 892mn times. He also has a reality show on Amazon Prime called “Beast Games” that consistently ranks in its top 10 shows.
Still, being a successful creator is hard work: they are responsible for making videos that people want to watch, attracting advertisers and developing sponsorship deals with brands. “They are not just creators, they are entrepreneurs,” says Sean Downey, Google’s president of Americas and global partners.
The good news is that the market is growing. The creator economy advertising market is expected to reach $37bn this year, up 26 per cent from a year ago, according to the estimates by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The group expects the market to rise another 18 per cent in 2026.
YouTube is slowly eating into the sort of programming that has long been the staple of the television networks.
In 2015, Sean Evans reinvented the chat show format for the YouTube era with his show Hot Ones. In each episode, he interviews a celebrity while they both eat increasingly spicy chicken wings. Guests have included Gordon Ramsay, Jennifer Lawrence, Billie Eilish and Shaquille O’Neal, and the show has 15mn subscribers. The show’s parent company, First We Feast, was sold last year for $82.5mn.
Other YouTubers have been inspired by Evans’ show — which is still going strong after a decade — including Broski. She grew up watching the late-night comic Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, but it was Hot Ones that inspired her to start her own chat show, Royal Court, which has reached 858,000 subscribers.
“Hot Ones is king,” she says. “Late-night [shows] worked for decades, but they were just seven white guys all doing the same talk show. There’s a formula and it really doesn’t change.”
These new takes on TV chat shows are gaining a bigger audience at a time when the future of late-night comedy shows on television is in doubt. In July, Stephen Colbert, the late-night comedian who hosts The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, told his audience that his show had been cancelled and would end in May 2026.
The announcement came on the heels of a joke Colbert had made about a $16mn payment by CBS to settle a lawsuit by President Donald Trump’s administration. Colbert labelled the payment a “big fat bribe” in his opening monologue.
“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” Trump wrote on social media at the time.
Then, in September Jimmy Kimmel, Colbert’s counterpart at ABC, was suspended following a comment he made about slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Kimmel returned to work, and has signed a one-year extension to his contract.
The political pressure on the talk show hosts and their networks has led to questions about whether YouTube is a more natural home for them. Many people watch clips of the late-night monologues on YouTube anyway, often skipping the rest of the show.
Julian Shapiro-Barnum, a successful YouTube creator based in Brooklyn, is planning his own version of a late-night show that will launch in the spring.
Called Outside Tonight, the concept is to “take everything that we love about classic late night but that directly speaks to a digital audience”.
“Every single late-night show ends up on YouTube one way or another, but they are not made for digital audiences,” he says. “They often fall short.”
His idea is to have a small team that shows up unannounced in different parts of New York and conducts interviews with celebrities and “the guy who works at the bodega next door”. It’s an idea, he says, that could only work on YouTube.
“What’s so great about working directly with YouTube is that we have the ability to call our own shots,” he says. “I’m not going to cancel myself. If it’s good, it works. And if it isn’t, you change it and you make it work.”
