The Medium
Member Mailing: Is YouTube Forcing Creators to Be Too Brand Safe?
In Q1 2023, PARQOR will be focusing on four trends. This essay focuses on "The definition of scarcity is continuously evolving away from linear. What happens next?" and "Hollywood’s future lies in the creator economy, but who is the talent?"
Upfronts are two months away, and the most-reported story for upfronts has been a competition between alternative currencies to Nielsen that measure cross-platform viewing. Currencies are an agreed-upon standard of measurement for paying for the performance of an ad campaign.
The need for new currencies has emerged as more advertisers and media agencies are demanding a tabulation of audiences with narrower characteristics than age or gender. The needs of advertisers in an increasingly programmatic world have evolved well past linear TV’s measurement capabilities. There are no guaranteed winners as the market sorts itself out: Warner Bros. Discovery just announced that it was dropping iSpot.TV and would rely on Comscore and VideoAmp, but iSpot.TV has a major alliance with NBCUniversal to measure video audiences.
The other takeaway is that all this messiness points to the best and broadest solutions winning, and YouTube currently offers one:
- Reach of 135 million people on Connected TVs in the U.S., according to Nielsen
- NFL Sunday Ticket across YouTube TV and YouTube (and highlight clips on YouTube Shorts), and
- A sophisticated ad-targeting platform.
Despite these advantages, two funny dynamics have played out for YouTube over the past two weeks.
Key Takeaway
The mixed signals of YouTube's story leading into Upfronts might suggest flaws in its strategy and execution. Or it may reflect a market misalignment changing the TV and digital video ad marketplace in real-time.
Total words: 1,300
Total time reading: 5 minutes
The first is that it offered the marketplace its own standards for video currency provider measurement, and unsurprisingly has found itself butting heads with broadcasters. The second emerged in last week’sThe Colin & Samir Showpodcast for creators, where they complained about missing “ ...