← The Digiday Podcast
The Digiday Podcast
Inside Michelle Khare's creator playbook, plus Paramount lawsuit, Google faces EU heat and TikTok plots a backup plan
00:46:05
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Transcript60 lines
- [00:00]
Tim Peterson
Foreign.
- [00:09]
Kamika McCoy
Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of the Digiday Podcast, a show about the business of media and marketing. I'm your co host, Kamika McCoy, senior marketing reporter here at Digiday.
- [00:19]
Tim Peterson
And I'm Tim Peterson, executive editor of video and Audio, Digiday Media. What's up, Kimiko?
- [00:24]
Kamika McCoy
I'm all right. How was your July 4th weekend?
- [00:31]
Tim Peterson
Never long enough, but feel so long ago.
- [00:36]
Kamika McCoy
I am in the same boat. Before we started this conversation, we were talking to our podcast producer about how Gen Z has taken weekends, longer weekends, and turned them into micro retirements where you get some time off and you think maybe this is what life is after 65.
- [00:53]
Tim Peterson
Yeah, I get that. I also get the, like, I was having a conversation with my significant other yesterday on just, like, how quickly time seems to be moving. And she educated me on like, well, actually, the Earth has been found to be moving quickly. Like, the Earth's rotation has actually accelerated according to science. Not like, to the point of like, any. An hour is now actually 10 minutes long. But we were also just joking, like, maybe we're just getting older and things just feel like they're moving more quickly because maybe we're moving slower. Yeah. Not to devolve into a whole conversation around the nature of time today, but I guess a lot of existential thoughts these days.
- [01:42]
Kamika McCoy
I think that's 100% fair. So. And a big theme for this episode. Later on in this episode, we're going to talk to Michelle Kare, a YouTuber and creator, and talk about how she makes her extremely ambitious content on YouTube, where she does things like recreating a stunt from Mission Impossible and joins the Secret Service Academy, while she also demystifies, mostly for me, but also for our listeners, the conventional wisdom of what a YouTube video can actually be. But first, this week's juicy scoops. We've got Paramount and the Trump administration, who have finally settled their lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview. But publishers that are pushing back on Google's AI overviews. And yet another update on TikTok, which perhaps a new app. But first, let's talk Paramount and Trump.
- [02:30]
Tim Peterson
Yep. So this was the big news ahead of the Fourth of July. This was kind of the fireworks before the fireworks in a way. So last November, right before the election, Trump filed a lawsuit against Paramount over an interview that 60 Minutes had done with Kamala Harris, who was obviously Trump's opponent in the US Presidential election. Trump didn't like how that interview was edited and sued over that. Which sounds ridiculous. Sounds even more ridiculous now that Paramount has decided to pay to settle the suit. Now, Trump had sued for $20 billion in damages. Paramount's only paying 16 million. So it's come down a lot, but it doesn't seem like a great precedent that's been set here.
- [03:18]
Kamika McCoy
So this follows news back in December in which ABC News ended up paying 15 million to settle a lawsuit over comments made by news anchor George Stephanopoulos that Trump had been found liable for raping E. Jean Carroll. Given, you know, the, the, the, the wording for sexual assault versus rape is what kind of what snagged them there. But to your point, it does set a precedent where if the President's not happy, there could be a lawsuit coming down the pipeline.
- [03:44]
Tim Peterson
Yeah, because when ABC News settled that lawsuit, there was obviously a lot of concern about a news outlet paying, you know, for what was, you know, a factual error. That said, I think it was, like, somewhat mitigated by the fact that, like, ABC News actually made a factual error, like they were in the wrong here. The difference here with this Paramount lawsuit is that Trump just didn't like how 60 Minutes edited the segment. And so this is just taking an issue with, like, actual journalism and reporting as a result of this CB News News has said, like, it's now going to publish, like, full transcripts when it does interviews with presidential candidates, which, sure, in hindsight would have helped in this case, but it still is this precedent of, like, you can go after news outlets and news outlets have been under siege, especially by this administration. When cnn, the New York Times, reported on the Iran strikes a few weeks back afterwards, Trump floated the idea of maybe we forced the Times and CNN to give up their sources, which is something that politicians and companies have tried to do, of forcing journalists to give up their sources and just being really big tests of the First Amendment, which, the freedom of the press. And so that First Amendment just continues to be under siege. Journalism just continues to be under siege. It just continues to be a tough time for media. This is only one side of it, because then on the other side of things, you have publishers having to deal with this existential threat of AI. And so one thing we saw this past week was a group of European publishers filing an antitrust complaint against Google over its AI overviews, which is, you know, Google's basically, you know, like it's TLDR at the top of search results pages to give people the information without needing to necessarily click through to the source of that information, which oftentimes is publishers.
- [06:00]
Kamika McCoy
Yeah. And they're feeling the, the brunt of this Right. You even had like recently reported Daily mail experience of 44% drop in click through rate. The rationale is like, there is some traffic that's growing from chap chat GPT, but it's not enough to kind of offset the declines that they're seeing in in search. So the question then becomes, you know, like, how do you continue to work as a publisher in that landscape? And, you know, publishers over in the EU basically said, we file a complaint and kind of fight back against it. But it's to kind of see publishers on two sides of the coin here. Some have struck deals with ChatGPT perplexity and others, you know, to kind of get on board. You can't beat them, join them and then you've got, you know, others on the other side of the coin saying if you can't beat them, file a complaint.
- [06:45]
Tim Peterson
Right. Yeah, it's kind of, I mean, it feels like damned if you do, damned if you don't. Because it's one thing our senior media reporter Sarah Guleone has reported on is publishers don't like that they can't opt out of AI overviews. That's something I think we talked about like a couple months ago in an episode. And so this, it seems like this lawsuit, like part of what the publishers would want is to be able to opt out of AI overviews, in which case, okay, if you opt out of AI overviews, are you effectively just going to be buried in search by AI overuse? Because invariably there are going to be publishers who say, okay, cool, we'll take that spot. We'll buddy up with Google and provide the information in hope of there being some downstream revenue at some point. In the meantime, we're already seeing publishers suffer from these referral traffic drops like you mentioned in May, Business Insider laid off 21% of employees in large part because of traffic declines. Last week, Geomedia sold off Kotaku and effectively said it's winding down its operations, according to the New York Times. And that had to do. They didn't specifically call out AI or these traffic declines, but just basically it being a shit time for publishing. And yeah, then on the other hand, you have publishers who are trying to embrace AI, but it's just unclear what the long term sustainability of that is going to be from a revenue perspective.
- [08:31]
Kamika McCoy
Yeah, the big question at the end of all of this is kind of like monetization. What does this look like? And how are you able to, you know, turn those clicks views and how do you measure it? And a bunch of unanswered questions that are still floating around. But you know, to the point that I made earlier, it's. And you may also as damned if you do, damned if you don't. So it's interesting to kind of see the split that publishers are taking in. Kind of what this looks like going forward.
- [08:56]
Tim Peterson
Yeah, because it's like the AI version of a subscription paywall of like yeah, okay, you're a publisher, you put up a paywall. We have a metered paywall at Digiday in hopes that people will find the reporting or whatever other content valuable enough to pay for it. But you're also going to have a lot of people are just like, oh well, never mind, I'm going to go elsewhere for this stuff if you're using, you know, so there's this company cloudflare, which is like a backend tech infrastructure company and I think it was Sarah who reported for last week's media briefing on how they announced a new tool that basically is, you know, a one click way for a publisher to block all large language model crawlers from crawling their sites. Okay, great. That can be a way to like prevent a ChatGPT, a Gemini, what have you from training themselves on the publisher's content. But if we do move into this agentic web era where everything is going through a chatgpt Gemini, are those publishers just going to be cut out entirely? It's kind of like if people are getting their news through TikTok and YouTube. If you're not on TikTok and YouTube, where are you? Do you even exist anymore? And so there's no easy. I'm really interested. We're going to have our digital publishing summit in September in Miami and we've decided to theme the entire event around AI. In the past, like we've talked about various things and it was more of a mixed bag of topics. This everything is going to be through the AI lens because it just feels like everything has to be through the AI lens right now. So I'm curious to hear what the publishers there have to how they're thinking about all this.
- [10:45]
Kamika McCoy
It will be an interesting summit, so register for that if you haven't already. Speaking of Tick tock, the saga that never ends. Right. So at this point Tick tock, the ban has been extended through September 17th. Right now that that deadline has been has been put in place a new third extension of deadline. But before that happens, TikTok is reportedly building a new version of the app ahead of its expansion expected sale according to the information. So the report essentially says that TikTok users will eventually have to download this new app to be. Continue to continue, excuse me, using its service. Although the existing app will work until March of next year through the timeline and that could change. So how fun is that? Another app?
- [11:33]
Tim Peterson
Yeah, I mean it's. You can kind of read the tea leaves because also Trump is saying this week he's expecting to talk with China about a potential TikTok deal. There was a, I think it was a Reuters story quoting like a spokesperson for China's Foreign Ministry that basically gave like a no comment comment on that. So it's hard to ever know to what extent like things are actually happening versus being said that they're potentially happening sometime soon. But the timeline does kind of match up of. Because for this whole episode has been about dance needing to carve out a U.S. version of TikTok. Now they are in fact carving out a U.S. version of TikTok. Is that so that it becomes easier to sell it or are they thinking, well, if we do this, maybe this kind of appeases things because this whole thing, ban or die thing seems to just have become a really big joke. And so maybe this will be enough and then we can all move on with our lives.
- [12:46]
Kamika McCoy
Good.
- [12:46]
Tim Peterson
Because, God, I just want to move on from this. We've been talking about this for so long.
- [12:50]
Kamika McCoy
I'm ready to sunset this. Thank you so much. But I would imagine there's going to be a couple of concerns that come out of this, not just for creators. Right. But for users too. Is like, what happens to the account that you've already built and the platform that you've already built? This was kind of like the big question behind like the Fediverse. And we talked about this sometime last year, right. Is this question of like the audience that I've built here on TikTok, what then happens to those people and that data? Do I have to start my audience from scratch? You know, and then the months in between when both apps are working, how do you navigate that space? And then what then happens to the OG app of TikTok? So a lot of questions that have yet to that are going to have to pan out, you know, if and when this happens.
- [13:29]
Tim Peterson
Yeah, I imagine it would just be more that this app just becomes kind of a filter and a bubble. So like be your existing account just ported over to this new app, you would get the same followers. The algorithm will probably be different determining like which content you get. And then obviously it would be carving out this audience into a completely separate pool when it comes to advertisers. So advertisers would just be reaching people in the US using this US only TikTok app. So I imagine it's still going to be connected to like the broader content platform. Just the way that that content gets to users in this app is going to be a little different than the advertising is going to be a little different. That said, when I was talking to some agency execs, ad buyers back in January during CES about like, what then we thought was going to be the TikTok shutdown deadline, they were saying TikTok was telling them, okay, if you've committed to spend on TikTok in the coming months and if we do get shut down in the US we'll just like move your ads to international audiences. And the ad buyers that I talked to are just like, no, that's not what we want. Also, like, we're not going to pay the same for those audiences, but also we want to reach people in the US So I don't imagine there would be such a hit from an advertising side of things. I don't know that it would be all that helpful to like, full on carve out the US Audience if you want to be a bit more global with a campaign. But I don't, I don't know. This doesn't feel like it's going to be such a hassle.
- [15:17]
Kamika McCoy
No. And then I think creators, as we talked to, I think it was a couple weeks ago, earlier this year, we talked to even like Alyssa McKay, who's a big content creator. And one of the themes there was just like, yeah, I've already diversified. We've moved beyond. I cannot be continued to be bogged down with the TikTok ban. At this point, I'm just going to diversify and put my eggs in several baskets as opposed to the TikTok basket. So they've made their minds up there at least.
- [15:41]
Tim Peterson
Yeah, yeah. I think, like, what will be the real, what will actually matter is if this US app has a meaningfully different algorithm and people are using. I mean, feel like there was conversation about this after the January 19th deadline of people feeling like the algorithm had changed or like their TikTok feed wasn't their old TikTok feed. So if that becomes the case this time around, then maybe people could stop using TikTok.
- [16:12]
Kamika McCoy
That's over to YouTube. Did you like that transition? Which takes us to our conversation with our guest this week, Tim, Remind us of this conversation with Michelle Caray.
- [16:24]
Tim Peterson
Yeah. So we spoke with Michelle Carre, who's like one of the higher profile YouTube creators out there these days. She's even, you know, one of three YouTube channels that's up for a potential Emmy nomination this year in the Primetime Emmy awards. We'll find out if she in fact got nominated next week. But she made it onto the ballot, which was like a pretty meaningful milestone. I wanted to have her on in no small part to you. And I have talked before about your thoughts on YouTube and kind of like, what is or isn't a YouTube video these days. And I feel like Michelle's one of the best examples of, like, how different and high quality YouTube videos are compared to what the average person may think of, like, someone just talking to their webcam or like filming their cat, things like that. So I thought it was really. It was for one thing, a fun conversation, which was nice in light of all the news that we just talked about. But it was also like, eye opening even for me, who's been covering creators for more than a decade at this point, just to hear her process of something. Like, she just filmed a video in which she recreated the plane stunt from Mission Impossible, which is like a huge thing. And so it was just really interesting to hear her process of how she comes up with ideas, develops them, gets a crew together, goes out and films them, everything.
- [18:00]
Kamika McCoy
I will say that I have been converted. I am now a believer. I'm still searching through my own YouTube algorithm to curate my perfect presence here. But my eyes have been opened and I hope that our listeners will too. So with no further ado, here's the conversation with Michelle.
- [18:26]
Tim Peterson
Michelle, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.
- [18:29]
Michelle Kare
Hello, everyone. I'm so happy to be here.
- [18:32]
Tim Peterson
We're happy to have you because I feel like a lot of people cough. Kimiko still think of YouTube videos as webcam videos, cat videos. Kimiko, am I misrepresenting you grossly?
- [18:45]
Kamika McCoy
You are not wrong. And I'm excited to talk to Michelle today to hopefully steer me in the right direction. I think the YouTube content is just not for me because it is cat videos, mukbangs and cars and things like this.
- [18:57]
Michelle Kare
Well, Kimiko, we have determined what my challenge of this podcast will be today. Hopefully by the end, I can open you up to a whole new world of what YouTube and television content looks like today.
- [19:11]
Tim Peterson
Yeah, this could be challenge accepted. Digiday podcast.
- [19:15]
Michelle Kare
Oh, yeah. The challenge has begun.
- [19:17]
Tim Peterson
Yeah. To that point, Michelle, I feel like your videos, your show, challenge accepted is one of the examples that gets most cited when it comes to. Okay, YouTube videos aren't what people like Kimiko. I'm sorry to keep shading you, but what people like Kimiko think of when it comes to YouTube, they're very much on par with any unscripted show on TV or on streaming. And I feel like probably a really good example hasn't come out yet, but a few weeks ago, you recreated the plane stunt from Mission Impossible.
- [19:53]
Michelle Kare
That is correct. Yes, sir. We just wrapped. It's really exciting to get to talk about it with you, actually, because coming fresh off of that production where we recreated Tom Cruise's stunt from Impossible, Rogue Nation, which is, for those who are listening and might not know what that is, it is the stunt where he's hanging off the side of a military aircraft as it's taking off.
- [20:17]
Tim Peterson
Kamika. Is that what you expect from YouTube videos?
- [20:19]
Kamika McCoy
Absolutely. I don't expect that from anybody, let alone a YouTube video. I don't know. Maybe the challenge came and went because I'm convinced.
- [20:31]
Tim Peterson
So, Michelle, for that, how long was the production there? How many people did you have on set? How. How was it hanging from a plane?
- [20:42]
Michelle Kare
Oh, my gosh. Wow. You know, this project really represented one of those special. I'm gonna be honest with you guys, like, a special career high when I started. Challenge accepted. You can look at the development of the show over the past several seasons. And, you know, in the beginning, I'm learning to do things like how to solve a Rubik's cube in under 60 seconds or even training, like a Victoria's Secret model for six weeks. And to fast forward to years later where we're collaborating with the Secret Service, where, you know, doing Houdini's deadliest stunt and now this stunt from Rogue Nation. Each of those moments is really, really special, specifically because a lot of the crew that I started working with when I, you know, first started my channel are. It's the same DP who was rigging cameras to that plane. And when you just think of the breadth and depth of the show itself and that, you know, each episode is tackling a different profession, lifestyle, or stunt in this case. It's really amazing to get to kind of reset the bar for ourselves every time. I mean, I'll be honest with you guys. This was the biggest production we've ever taken on, to my knowledge. The only other people who have done this specific stunt are paramount. Like, are you kidding me? And so to follow in their footsteps and also, you know, not just perfectly recreate it, but make it our own and make it interesting to our audience and tell a different story was a Special, special challenge. We had a crew of over 40 people. We had an aerial team, we had a helicopter with a Cineflex flying around the plane. A group of stunt professionals who have worked on everything from Marvel to Avatar, where they're overseeing all the logistics. And it's a really special culmination of years of hard work from our entire team.
- [22:49]
Kamika McCoy
Not to say that training like a Victoria's Secret model is small potatoes, right? But very different from hanging off the side of a plane. So I want to. I want you to zoom out and like, how does this kind of come together? What's the storyboarding? How you determine, like, the budget? Like, walk us through that.
- [23:04]
Michelle Kare
So the process of taking an episode of challenge accepted from ideation to upload is a wild one in many ways. We are like, we're wrangling our white whale every time, especially nowadays. In the beginning of the show, I was, you know, making tons of content, uploading weekly or every other week. And we got to this point where our audience really latched onto longer in depth storytelling. You know, the episodes where I would train like an Olympic figure skater for 60 days for one single video, that is what people latched onto and also what started performing better. And it's a really special feeling to have that intersection of a Venn diagram of what your audience wants to watch and what you are passionate about creating. Meet in the middle. I think that's pretty exciting and from my understanding, rare for a lot of creators. So once that happened, we really, really leaned into it and stopped making anything else. It was all these larger, bigger projects and really investing in that. And it was a bit of a gamble, but it's. It's worked out, which I'm really happy about. But when I zoom out and think about everything and our process, honestly, I think the best way to explain it is to give you an example. So let me take our Houdini project, for example. The title of that episode is I Tried Houdini's Deadliest Trick. And in this episode, I learn how to perform the water torture cell endurance trick that Houdini invented. But the behind the scenes of that project were months of calling magicians several dead ends, trying to find the right engineers who were willing to fabricate a water torture cell. Crafting an outreach email that doesn't sound crazy when it says, hey, I'm reaching out to inquire about fabricating a water torture cell. You know, meeting, meeting with those teams and talking about how can we build a glass tank that will carry the pressure of all of this water with a person inside and be safe. What are the stages of this obstacle with the handcuffs, the padlocks, the chains, Learning how to pick those things. Working with a free diving instructor, a world class freediving instructor, to learn how to hold my breath for over three minutes. And then ultimately all of the production to bring together, you know, a large audience of people to watch this happen in a soundstage. And then months of editing to follow that. So that whole process, you know, it's about 10 months. And when you think about something like the plane stunt, that's gonna be about nine months as well, by the time that gets out the door simultaneously. So it's a really interesting thing because I don't necessarily believe, honestly, being honest with you guys, I don't necessarily believe that spending more time or energy or money always leads to more views, necessarily, or more return. However, on our channel, at least that's what our community is excited about and is interested in. And so we make sure that every time we hit upload, it's gotta be an event. I think that time is our most valuable resource. And in fact, I think that there's this misconception that younger generations have a short attention span or something. And I don't think that's the whole truth. What I think it is is that everybody today knows that if they're watching something and they don't like it or they don't get value from it, they can swipe and find something that will. So why would I ever expect anybody to continue watching something of mine if it's not adding value to them? That means it's more competitive and more important for me to be an even better storyteller, such that every single moment of every video educates, entertains, or inspires. Those are the three pillars we go after for every episode, every scene. And we don't do it perfectly every time. But the pursuit of that, I think is what we're always looking to improve on every episode.
- [27:49]
Tim Peterson
This is a bit of an aside. I was at vidcon recently, which for anyone listening isn't familiar. It's basically like Comic Con for the creator economy. But I was, I like to talk to a lot of the, like teens and 20 somethings are there because when else can I talk to the audience on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, et cetera? There was one who said they had like recently watched a 40 minute long video on TikTok. So to your point, like, these kids have attention spans, it's just a matter of they're very discerning with what they watch. When it comes to coming up with ideas for videos, especially because the ideas are getting bigger and bigger, where it seems like anything could be on the table. For all I know, you're already planning a video of how I Went to the Moon. But how do you figure out, okay, what idea is not only doable, but also makes sense to do? Basically, you're throwing stuff at the board. How are you picking what to commit.
- [28:49]
Michelle Kare
To the green lighting process? Our green lighting process is pretty involved. We have a huge spreadsheet of ideas, and these ideas come from lots of different places. We're often inspired by our favorite shows, media, things that have impacted us growing up, professions or concepts that genuinely spark our curiosity. Sometimes fan suggestions. But once we have a potential idea, you know, like ruminating with us, it's a heavy research process. So once we have a couple ideas, we pass them off to Carissa, who does this big research document on the topic. And she will go into the history, the pop culture, potential personnel that we could reach out to to collaborate with them. And from that we continue to develop the idea. So it might be, you know, last year we did an episode where we simulated what it would be like to go to be the president if nuclear missiles were inbound. And so we created this simulation with actors and role players playing the various heads of state. And we brought in a professional from Harvard who, you know, studies all of these types of conflicts in history to help us write the simulation. All of those actors had a binder that was basically an if, then tree. If Michelle says this, turn to page, whatever, and continue the scene this way. But that's something we developed ourselves. It's not like a written scenario, but it came about initially. How could we do a project about what it's like to be the president? Could we get in the White House? Could we shadow someone at the White House for a day? No, probably not. Well, what about. What's the hardest day of a president's job? Arguably, it's that situation. Okay, well, how could we.
- [31:06]
Tim Peterson
Or aliens.
- [31:07]
Michelle Kare
Yeah, or aliens. Oh, that's a good idea. Okay, we've gotta do aliens. Alien sticks. I like this idea. And we thought about, well, how could we get in the real situation room? Is there another situation room? Are there places you can go to simulate this for school kids? Could we learn from that? And ultimately, what we kind of navigated towards was developing our own thing, which is sometimes the answer honestly. Another example is for our courtroom episode. We took an old mock trial case that was used at nationals for mock Trial and we revamped it to make it our own. But we're never really going off of an existing playbook for any episode, which is not a clean answer, but it's a combination of intuition, gut instinct, and us as a team genuinely wanting to watch the thing that we're developing simultaneously and in parallel to all of that, most of our ideas, I often, you know, get feedback from other top YouTube creators to get their opinions on because we also want to ensure that what we're making makes sense to an external audience and is something we believe will be seen and perform well.
- [32:25]
Kamika McCoy
That's a lot that goes into the front end of this, right? Oh, yeah, just the research, the staff, the production. I'm sure there's a lot of having to like, hold harmless documents being contracts being signed. But I'd be curious, like, how do you determine the ROI on this? Right? Like, how, like, is it the views? Like, how do we ship this to. Or pitch, excuse me, to advertisers, that type of deal.
- [32:51]
Michelle Kare
So as far as our business model, we, you know, like many other top YouTube creators, we receive funds from the AdSense program, which is, you know, based on viewership and other factors. We also work with bespoke partners for projects and branded sponsors. And then we also will do commercial work too, for other parties. So we run our company like a normal production company in a way. The only difference is that the only barrier to distribution is an upload button. And so when I think about ROI on a project, we put it in various buckets. Obviously there's the P and L bottom line, how much did we spend and how much did we make back after a few weeks of it being online between all of those various potential revenue sources. But also another important thing that we look at is the consumer ROI or the audience reaction. There are situations where a video we have spent a lot of time, energy and funds on can have a thin margin, but be a massive, massive engagement for our audience and really bring the community together or make a certain community feel seen and heard. There are a lot of projects we do that where I embed in communities that have not necessarily been properly portrayed by traditional media or have been portrayed at all by media. And so we look at the qualitative and quantitative ROI on both because for me, the longer term biggest value is that audience growth and that audience commitment to returning on every upload.
- [34:45]
Tim Peterson
Michelle, for someone who thinks the average budget of a YouTube video is whatever the current iPhone costs and like a, I don't know, subscription to cap cut or something Generally, what's the budget for your videos?
- [35:02]
Michelle Kare
So I can't go into specifics of our budgets, but I can tell you it is many, many, many, many, many, many iPhones. And there have been other content creators who have, you know, shared their estimates. Like, you can look at a Mr. Beast project and know that that is millions of dollars. And so I'll. I'll just say this. Renting a C130 aircraft is not cheap, and having a crew of 42 people on set for three days is also not cheap. But I think we're entering this very special time where I'm hoping I get to see the convergence of the. The traditional and digital industries, because that line is blurring so much these days. It's unignorable, and it gets me excited because I'm a person who grew up watching my favorite shows on television with my family, and that device is very exciting to me. And in fact, the television device is the number one device that our audience watches our episodes on. So it's really wonderful and gratifying to know that the way my family came together in the living room watching our favorite shows is now how many families are experiencing challenge accepted. And in fact, when we go out in public or fly somewhere or see people in airports, oftentimes it is a whole family approaching us. It's not just the kids saying, hey, mom, she's a YouTuber. I know her. It's a whole family coming up to us and saying, we watch Challenge accepted on Friday nights together. And in fact, when we've held fan events like our theatrical premiere of 90 Day Black Belt last year, there were many full families who attended. And it wasn't, you know, like a bifurcation of the kids dragging the parents along. And that's the kind of impact I would like to have with our work is something that's intergenerational and brings lots of different demographics together.
- [37:07]
Kamika McCoy
You mentioned a really interesting POV about, like, this intersection of creators and also the traditional, like television and whatnot. So my question is kind of like, what is the end goal here? Do we want challenge accepted to be on a streaming platform or, you know, where do we go from here besides hanging off the sides of airplanes, which I don't know where you go from there, but where do we go from here?
- [37:30]
Michelle Kare
Well, I'll say this. I'm always open to collaboration, new ideas. Sky's the limit. Let's go. You know, whether it's with a streamer or else or anywhere, I want our work to be seen by the most amount of people possible in the most artistically true possible, meaning as little red tape as we can find. So I remain super open and excited for whatever the future holds. And I'm genuinely so excited about this shift we're feeling and seeing. And even as evidence by this year, we were so, so over the moon excited to make it past the special review process for the Emmys ballot. We're on the ballot. That's crazy. Like, I got texts from people saying, hey, I voted for you. That's amazing. And whether or not we win or whether or not we even get nominated is not up to me. And though I will shamelessly say, please vote for us, I know the voting window is closed, but it's just like in my bones. Please vote for us.
- [38:37]
Tim Peterson
Well, if you get nominated, then you get the voting process for that.
- [38:40]
Michelle Kare
If we're nominated, please vote. Please vote for us. But to me, that pursuit is interesting and exciting. Not because it's fun to get an award, which it is, but because there's a reason why the traditional Hollywood system cares about awards like that. It is a sign of a maturing industry. It's an opportunity to attract talent who want to work on the show, as well as the audience who will continue to support the show and the advertisers who are interested in spending their ad dollars on high quality projects that will be seen by millions of people. So that's why those shifts are exciting to me. And at the same time, I'm going to keep doing my thing and creating in the space where I feel uninhibited as a creator.
- [39:38]
Tim Peterson
And then to that point, we've been seeing streaming services and TV networks get much more interested in creators. Obviously there's the Mr. Beast show on Amazon Prime Video. Netflix licensed episodes of Miss Rachel from YouTube to put on its streaming service. Even recently, there's been Wall street analysts making a case for Netflix to open itself up even more to YouTube creators, with challenge accepted. You have IP. You have this whole back library of episodes. Do you get much inbound inquiries from streaming services or networks looking to license the back catalog?
- [40:17]
Michelle Kare
Yeah, we're really excited. We're going to be licensing our catalog. This has been announced on Samsung tv, which is really cool. And I just remain super honored and excited about syndication as a whole. Historically, it's been a really special avenue for legacy television shows, and to be kind of in those adjacent and similar conversations is a dream come true because we have worked so hard for this ip. I mean, we have worked our asses off. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on here, but by God, we have. We have. And again, it's a vote of confidence. And it's special because we are operating in a world where not everybody knows the quality of what's happening in our space. And I genuinely believe that there is just a crop of content creators who are making content that is so good it cannot be ignored any further.
- [41:20]
Tim Peterson
I think that's a great note to end on. Hopefully the people listening to this interview that opened their eyes to it. Kimiko, I don't want to speak for you, but I think it opened up your eyes a bit.
- [41:29]
Michelle Kare
Yes, let's get the final review. What do we think? Is YouTube still cat videos?
- [41:34]
Kamika McCoy
YouTube is not cat videos. I have learned so much and I so appreciate you joining us. Obviously, I will be on the lookout for the Mission Impossible recreation, but consider me sold. Consider me a believer in YouTube.
- [41:48]
Michelle Kare
Mission accomplished.
- [41:55]
Tim Peterson
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Digiday Podcast. If you enjoyed it, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening. Get more from Digiday with our daily newsletter sent out each weekday morning. Visit digiday.comnewsletters to sign up.