Content creators are bringing Silicon Valley-style disruption to the capital of the traditional media
Inside a white house on a leafy residential street in Burbank, YouTuber Michelle Khare is watching a rough edit of the latest episode of her show Challenge Accepted, which has more than 5mn subscribers.
In her most daring challenge yet, she recreates a famous Mission: Impossible scene where Tom Cruise hangs from a military plane with no parachute, goggles or helmet. Khare watches herself holding on as the C-130 aircraft takes off from the runway.
“This is where I’m thinking to myself, ‘Oh yeah, there is no parachute’,” she says as her six-member production team discusses technical details about sound and colour. “It’s so strange to relive this.”
Khare, who launched the show in 2018, is one of a first wave of YouTube creators to set up studios in Burbank, home of the historic Warner Bros and Disney lots and long known as the “media capital of the world”.
Michelle Khare at her Challenge Accepted office in Burbank, California © Kyle Grillot/FT
Neal Mohan, YouTube chief executive, is blunt about what the influx of content creators spells for the traditional entertainment companies that have clustered here for the past century.
“Something is happening in Hollywood: Silicon Valley-style disruption,” Mohan said last year at the opening of an 8,000-sq ft Burbank studio by another creator, Alan Chikin Chow.
YouTube, he continued, represents a shift away from content produced by big, traditional studios. “Creators really are the new Hollywood.”
That may be a stretch for now, but for creators the attraction to Burbank is obvious. YouTubers are able to tap into the local studio infrastructure, props, talent and technical knowhow in Hollywood — and improve the quality of their work in the process.
Dhar Mann, a top YouTube creator, works from a 125,000-square-foot campus in Burbank, which he plans to expand. Other creators nearby include Rhett & Link, whose foodie show has nearly 20mn subscribers, and Smosh, a sketch comedy channel.
“It’s such a great concentration of local creators and actors here, especially in a world where a lot of productions are leaving LA,” Khare says. “We’ve done wardrobe and prop rentals from Warner Brothers and Universal down the street.”
(L-R) Neal Mohan and Dhar Mann attend the YouTube Brandcast 2025 in New York City in May © Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
YouTube launched 20 years ago, but it has only recently started to stake a claim in Hollywood. Its top creators are spread out across the US and the globe — Mr Beast, estimated by Forbes to have earned $85mn last year, shoots from Greenville, North Carolina, while video podcaster Joe Rogan’s studio is in Austin, Texas.
But YouTube executives are not shy about pushing the narrative that they are shaking things up in Hollywood.
It is true that YouTube is becoming a bigger worry for the established Hollywood companies — and even for its fellow streaming disrupter, Netflix.
YouTube has eclipsed Netflix as the service that audiences spend the most time watching, accounting for 13.1 per cent of all TV viewing in August, compared to Netflix in second place with an 8.7 per cent share, according to Nielsen.
And it is financially robust: the Google-owned company generated $54bn in revenue last year, with operating income of about $8bn, according to estimates by MoffettNathanson.
It reached another significant milestone this year: US viewers now watch YouTube primarily on the TV set — not mobile phones and desktop computers, the norm for years. Roughly 1bn hours of YouTube videos are watched on TV screens every day.
As a result, the company is making changes to the service “to ensure that viewers are having an incredible viewing experience on YouTube in the living room”, says Mary Ellen Coe, YouTube’s chief business officer.
This includes creating “dynamic” thumbnails — the little windows that are key to generating clicks — and introducing episodic shows that help viewers watch a series in order. “These are all product innovations focused in the living room environment,” Coe says.
These efforts appear to be aimed at making the experience more Netflix-like. Netflix has repeatedly acknowledged that its main competition for streaming “engagement” is YouTube.
But Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-chief executive, says he considers much of YouTube’s creator-made video to be “snackable” content, compared with the professionally made shows and films available on his service. “There’s a difference between killing time and spending time,” Sarandos said at a conference in May. “We’re in the how-you-spend-time business.”
The two streaming giants compete for advertising — and are also pursuing the sports content that has been the last stronghold for traditional TV. Netflix has a deal with the NFL to stream games on Christmas Day, while YouTube streamed the first game of the 2025 NFL season in São Paulo, Brazil last month.
Some US TV networks have been pushing back against YouTube recently.
Last week, NBCUniversal warned customers of YouTube TV — a paid streaming subscription service offering live sports and other television programming — that they could lose access to network programmes including Sunday Night Football, Premier League matches and The Real Housewives because of an impasse over carriage fees.
YouTube’s chief business officer Mary Ellen Coe on stage during the YouTube Brandcast 2025 in New York in May © Noam Galai/Getty Images
NBCU accused YouTube TV of deploying a “big tech playbook,” citing Google’s “$3tn market cap” as its leverage against traditional media groups.
Other networks, including Fox and Spanish language company TelevisaUnivision, have also chafed against what they called unfair carriage demands. YouTube says its carriage renewal decisions are based solely on viewer consumption and pricing. NBCU and YouTube settled the dispute on Thursday after reaching a “multiyear, long-term” carriage agreement.
Yet even as YouTube chafes against the traditional media establishment, it is also trying to push its way into it. This year YouTube held a “for your consideration” event to build buzz ahead of the Primetime Emmy Awards. Khare qualified for a ballot for Emmy consideration, but did not receive a nomination. The exercise helped her show’s profile, however.
This summer Khare signed a sponsorship deal with Red Bull, which in addition to supporting her with advertising helped to secure the C-130 plane for the Mission: Impossible stunt.
The energy drink company also hosted a distinctly YouTube version of a Hollywood premiere for Khare’s I Tried Tom Cruise’s Deadliest Stunt episode in August. There was a reception at Red Bull’s Santa Monica headquarters, complete with a red carpet for photos, a movie poster featuring Khare in aviators and a screening in its in-house cinema.
YouTuber Michelle Khare’s ‘I Tried Tom Cruise’s Deadliest Stunt’ episode was given a Hollywood-style premiere © Red Bull/YouTube
Khare says she grew up wanting to work in Hollywood, but finds the “democratic” way of working on YouTube liberating. “If you want to make a show, you can,” she says. “The barrier to entry is the upload button.”
The life of a YouTube creator is one of constant creation, however. Once the premiere finished, she shifted focus to her next daunting challenge: running seven marathons on all seven continents in seven consecutive days, all while being filmed.
“I’m super excited for this — it has been a big white whale project,” she says. “It’s going to feel really great to cross the seventh finish line.”
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/b9240daa-e1b3-4946-8dcf-bfb1181a6c41
