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Maker Studios' Ynon Kreiz, on stage at MIPCOM.
Maker Studios’ Ynon Kreiz, on stage at MIPCOM. Photograph: Stuart Dredge/The Guardian
Maker Studios’ Ynon Kreiz, on stage at MIPCOM. Photograph: Stuart Dredge/The Guardian

YouTube: Maker Studios says short-form stars 'inventing a new medium'

This article is more than 9 years old

MCN’s chief executive Ynon Kreiz: ‘Everybody is running after the millennials, and the millennials are running after us’

Why did Disney agree to pay up to $950m for YouTube multi-channel network Maker Studios earlier this year? The MCN’s chief executive Ynon Kreiz thinks it had little choice.

“They had to do something to remain relevant in that space – the shortform medium – and especially with millennials,” he said, during a keynote appearance at the MIPCOM conference in Cannes.

Disney is an amazing company and Bob Iger is a visionary,” he said. “They saw an opportunity to extend their business into shortform, and for us, the opportunity was to extend our business into traditional media, and leverage the global resources of the Walt Disney company.”

In a bullish on-stage interview, Kreiz cited comScore statistics to show that as a combined entity, Disney and Maker Studios now has the third largest online audience in the US, behind only Google and Facebook.

“Millennials today have more choice than any generation before,” he said. “They control what they watch, when, where, how and why. Gone are the days when you can dictate to the consumer what they will watch next. And millennials watch abot 50% more online videos than the average internet user.”

Kreiz also suggested that many traditional media companies still make the mistake of thinking shortform video on YouTube is “like longform except shorter”, claiming instead that it’s a new and different medium in the way videos are produced, consumed, monetised, marketed and shared.

“We are inventing a new medium. We are doing what has not been done before,” said Kreiz, before talking up Maker’s scale.

“Every day, 10,000 to 15,000 new people want to join our network, of which we pick about 100 a day. That’s still a big number, but it’s a fraction compared to the number of people who want to join,” he said.

Maker Studios, like all its rivals, is trying to make more money from advertising on YouTube, in order to pay for the production costs of its shows and channels. Kreiz denied that the ad rates on YouTube are as far behind television as is sometimes suggested.

“In some cases you’d be surprised: the CPM we get is higher than television,” he said. “But this is still an early, nascent industry that probably now monetises well ahead of where it should be, when you compare it to social, for example.”

Kreiz praised YouTube as “the largest cable company in the world” and pointed to a recent announcement by marketing agency group OMD that it was advising its clients to move between 10% and 25% of their TV budgets to online video. “Change is coming: we are still at an early stage, but it is coming.”

Maker Studios is looking beyond YouTube, including its own Maker.tv website, and even deals with traditional broadcasters. At MIPCOM, the company is selling what Kreiz described as “branded blocks, bringing the best of the Maker network into a structured format of longform shows that we’re offering to pay-TV and free-to-air broadcasters”.

The company is also selling a “Maker Box Set” to online video services, aggregating thousands of the best videos from its network of shows and channels, with Disney’s television sales team handling negotiations.

Kreiz also suggested that traditional television companies can still learn a lot from the world of YouTube content. “Everybody is running after the millennials, and the millennials are running after us,” he said. “Because we have something that they want, which is great content.”

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