Today, I’m joined by comedian, podcast host, and YouTuber Adam Conover.
Adam is a familiar face to anyone who’s spent time on the internet. He got his start, like so many successful comedy writers, at CollegeHumor back in the day. That was before transitioning into cable TV with Adam Ruins Everything, then onto Netflix, and all the way back to YouTube again, where he posts videos and hosts a podcast called Factually!
That is exactly the kind of career path that fascinates me, and it also happens to touch on basically every major Decoder theme there is. You’ll hear upfront that Adam does not in fact like the word “creator” — he’s got a unique perspective on it that speaks to how he sees tech platforms and their leverage.
Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here.
We get deep into what Adam thinks really happened to the TV business — that Hollywood ceded whole categories of TV programming to YouTube in the chase to become Netflix and HBO.
Adam also pushes back on the idea that any of this was democratizing — YouTube, he argues, is in fact a worse gatekeeper than the networks, because you can’t actually argue or negotiate with a recommendation algorithm.
I think you’re really going to enjoy this conversation, I know I did. Remember to please subscribe to our YouTube channel for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.
Okay: comedian Adam Conover on YouTube, gatekeepers, and the business of making things online. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Adam Conover, you’re a comedian, you’re a podcaster, you’re a YouTuber, you’re a board member on the Writers Guild of America West. I’m sure you have additional titles. Welcome to Decoder.
I’m also a standup comic. That’s often how I describe myself, my identity as a comedian. But yeah, thank you so much for having me. I’m a fan of the show.
I have so many questions for you about this moment in media and entertainment. You have a view into all of it. Live comedy is a thing that is successful in America in 2026. Sitcoms don’t exist, which is a video I just watched that you made. There’s some disconnect with how we make this stuff, how we distribute the stuff, and how we pay for the stuff. Like I said, you have a view into Hollywood, you have a view into television, a view into YouTube.
Let’s just start at the very beginning. I listed off a bunch of things and you said you identify as a standup comic. How many roles do you have? How many things do you do?
I’m a standup comic. I’m a comedy writer. I’m a television host. I’m a member leader in the Writers Guild of America. I also now basically run a small business as a YouTube podcaster. I recently hired my first full-time employee to help me do all the things I do, but beyond that, I have a bunch of freelancers. I’m one of many people trying to make my way in this new, massively disrupted media landscape, where the companies that used to make media seem intent on destroying themselves and their businesses, giving up large swaths of the industry to tech giants, which are trying to crush us under their heel. So, it’s an interesting time to be a comedian, to say the least.
I’m interested in all that. That dynamic between the tech giants, the people who make content for those platforms, and Hollywood — let’s just call it the Death Star of Hollywood — seems as fraught as ever. I want to start with a really basic question. You describe yourself as a YouTuber and a podcaster. Do you think you’re a creator or an influencer?
God! I mean, I don’t like those words. I think a lot of people don’t, but I do use them because that’s the terminology we’ve started to use. I feel the word “creator” was created by the social media companies as a way to trick people into entering an extremely inequitable economic bargain. Basically they promise, “Hey, Mr. Beast makes a billion dollars. You could be Mr. Beast. Why don’t you work for us basically for free for the rest of your life in the hopes that one day, we’ll break off a little chunk of ad revenue for you?” That is what they mean by creator.
We used to be writers, performers, talent, Hollywood labor, or media labor. Creator is like when Avon or Mary Kay calls you an entrepreneur. [Laughs] “Oh, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re starting your own business.” Am I? Or is that an illusion that you want me to buy into because it obscures what you have done to the industry I work in?
We’re just going to get into it. This is why I wanted you here. So my thesis on Decoder and now increasingly on anyone else’s podcast who will have me, is that the entire entertainment complex — all of Hollywood and now the music industry to some extent — could not acknowledge that their real competition is the army of teenagers who work for free on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. These platforms really do not pay any money. Instagram will literally pay you no money. TikTok will maybe pay a tiny fraction of a penny for every view that you get. YouTube used to be the gold standard, but it just changed its rules. It is now harder than ever to get started in the YouTube Partner Program and get paid actual money from YouTube. But people cannot stop expressing themselves. They cannot stop themselves from wanting to be Mr. Beast.
So, there they are, infinite free content for the tech giants. Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, and everyone else have to pay Hollywood celebrities to desperately try and get people to come to the movies. And the economic disparity of that simply cannot be acknowledged. Because if you do that and you’re [Disney CEO] Josh D’Amaro or [Warner Bros. Discovery CEO] David Zaslav, you should just put all your money in the S&P 500 and shut it down.
I agree with most of that. I think the competition is a bit more fine-grained than that. Obviously, the movies compete with TikTok to the extent that there’s a limited number of minutes in the day, but movies are also competing with literally every other human activity. The movies are competing with you playing soccer in the park with your friends, right?
There will always be a market for the high end of entertainment because new media forms never completely replace old ones. They compete with them and take some of their share. People still read novels, people still go to plays, and people still listen to the radio. Old forms of media don’t go away altogether. There’s always still a market for them. The market just gets smaller and a bit more specific.
So, I’m not sure about the idea that David Zaslav is competing with TikTok. However, he is very specifically competing with YouTube, because YouTube has specifically gone into the television space and it was doing it for about 10 years before the TV industry noticed at all. People have started to notice over the past year. I have started every single conversation I’ve had in Hollywood over the last two years with, “Did you know that YouTube is the largest streaming service on television sets?” Forget laptops, forget phones.
I know you know this, Nilay, but I blow people’s minds with this in Hollywood. What those companies haven’t realized was in their rush to chase Netflix, Netflix came in and disrupted them directly. They said, “We all have to create our own mini HBOs that everyone is going to pay $15 a month for.” Obviously, that’s ludicrous. That was never going to be a workable business model, but that’s what they thought for about five years. In their rush to do that, they destroyed linear television. They destroyed the cable business. You can argue that people prefer to watch when they want, whatever. But what they never figured out how to work on streaming was about 60 percent of television: news, talk shows, comedy talk shows, lifestyle programming, The Drew Barrymore Show, travel shows, the weather. They let all of those things go to YouTube specifically.
Now when people are like, “I just want to watch somebody talk about home improvement for a little bit. I want to hear somebody talk about the Knicks. I want to hear a funny person talk about the news,” they go to YouTube first, and it’s all free. YouTube’s entire business model is, “We don’t pay for content. We break off a chunk. If we make a lot of money, you get 50 percent.” That’s better than most of the other revenue share models for ads.
But that is the thing I think they still haven’t grappled with. Here’s a good example of this. A couple years ago, I was pitching a game show. I had a huge piece of IP attached. It was, I thought, a good pitch. I went to a streaming service to pitch it, and they said, “Here’s our problem with game shows. We can get people to watch one episode. We can’t get people to watch a whole season in a weekend.” I was like, “Wait, your whole business model doesn’t work if people don’t watch a whole season on the weekend? That’s not how people watch game shows.”
So, if you are conceding all of game shows, along with all these other formats, you’re conceding a huge swath of what used to be your business. Now, you are only focused on the very high end. You don’t have all of that cheaper programming anymore. I’m in the Writers Guild as what we call a “comedy variety writer.” I do nonfiction comedy like The Daily Show. The networks literally don’t make that kind of thing anymore. My old show, Adam Ruins Everything, ran for 65 episodes. It was a hit for the network and second-biggest show on TruTV. I could not sell a show anything close to that now because networks are like, “Well, we haven’t figured out how to get people to watch if it’s not like a high-end prestige drama starring Adam Scott.” Well, YouTube has, so people like me have been driven to YouTube with disastrous effects on the media landscape, both on the amount of money that we make but also on the kind of media that gets made.
I make a good living. I make as good a living as I did as a TV host. I’m very lucky to do so. But now I have a couple freelancers instead of a room full of writers, cinematographers, actors, all of these funny people who made a really good comedy product. Now when you want to get the comedy news, you don’t get to watch The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. Those shows are going away. You get to watch [Andrew] Schulz riff on the news with his three dumbass friends in front of a curtain for $0. Those shows have $0 budgets. The middle has evaporated.
My whole thing in media right now is trying to figure out how to rebuild a bit of the middle. How do I get a little bit of a budget so I can do something a little bit better than a podcast and a little bit closer to a television show? I think there’s still a market for it. It’s just that nobody is serving it currently.
That’s really what I want to dig into because I’m very curious how that budget comes back. If I just take what you’re describing — like when you were on truTV or if you made a show for another cable network back in the day like MTV — they had pretty good business models. Everyone in the country would pay their cable bill and MTV would get a piece of that money no matter what. That was really lucrative. Not only could they afford writers’ rooms, cinematographers, people who hire the cameras, all those people could be unionized, demand better wages every year, and all the other stuff that unionized employees can do. They could also afford accountants, healthcare professionals, benefit service people, and highly paid CEOs.
A cable channel’s overhead was massive, and maybe it was always all wrong. Maybe that overhead should have always flowed back to the content in some other way, but the business model was lucrative because the distribution was lucrative. We had convinced everyone in America to pay for television.
And they sold ads against the shows. My show was in the black. It costs this much to make the show, we sell this many ads, here are the rates we get for the ads, and here’s the money we get from the cable company. The show was in the black. That’s why we ran for five years. Most other shows on television are currently in the black.
We have two problems. One, the streamers don’t know how to make a show in the black anymore. They’re like, “We have this many subscribers.” How many people signed up for Apple TV Plus to watch Widows Bay? They do this weird math. That’s the first thing.
The second thing — and this is a little bit my own theory — is that they gave up decades of business development in the advertising business. Why was CBS able to get a certain rate for The Late Show with Steven Colbert? Because CBS has been negotiating with Johnson & Johnson for 100 years saying, “Here’s how much a spot on CBS is worth.” You cannot rebuild that in an instant. Netflix tricked the entire industry into thinking there wasn’t going to be any advertising ever again, they all destroyed those businesses, and now they’re trying to rebuild them on Peacock. It’s like they gave up a business model that actually made them money.
On the other hand, you’ve got YouTube, which is, of course, a massive advertising business, but it’s completely scrambled. The advertisers that I’m able to get on my show are all direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands. It’s MeUndies or whatever. It’s meal kits, subscription services, stuff like that. A lot of them are great, but where’s Coke and Chevy, you know what I mean? Car commercials used to pay for the media you watched. It was Don Draper shit. They didn’t realize that they were throwing the baby out with the bath water and that all of us have to somehow figure out how to rebuild. I do have a theory for how that might happen on the YouTube end that I’m, unfortunately, currently trying to pursue as a business person because that’s what I have to be now. I just wanted the David Zaslavs of the world to just give me a couple hundred grand a year and a union contract to make funny stuff. I don’t need to make millions, right? But now I have to be an entrepreneur, and so does everybody else. Fuck, that’s what I’ll do if I have to, but I was very happy being a laborer in the media industry, and I don’t have that option anymore.
I think for a lot of people, their dream in life was to be a laborer in the media and entertainment industries. People who are good at cameras wanted to operate cameras, costume designers wanted to design costumes. They want to specialize in the field that they’re interested in. Now you end up being a multi-hyphenate entrepreneur. How has that shift been for you? Did you wake up one day and say, “Screw it, I’m a business person now?”
It’s devastating. I do remember when I shifted my business from trying to sell TV shows first and having a podcast to keep my audience hooked second to, “Oh, the podcast is the business now.” It was disorienting and disheartening. At the same time, I felt lucky to do it. Nobody tells me what to make except for the YouTube algorithm, which honestly does tell me what to make in pernicious ways that I grapple with every day. But I don’t have to convince somebody in a suit somewhere to let me do something. I’m lucky because I already had a show with my face on it and my name in the title that enabled me to bring some audience along and build something.
There are so many incredible writers, performers, technicians, and artists of all levels who just don’t have work now. My whole cohort that moved to LA in our 30s to make television moved here because there was an industry here. It was a business. That’s why people have moved to LA for 100 years. That’s why, I don’t know, people like J.D. Salinger and F. Scott Fitzgerald would come to Hollywood to write a couple scripts because this is where a writer could get paid. Now, that doesn’t appear to exist in the same way. You know, my friends — people who are incredibly funny comedians and writers and actors — are all going to grad school. It’s very sad what’s happened.
That’s literally part of why my whole goal for the next couple years is to get enough funding and build a business model where I can employ a couple of comedy writers because that’s what I used to do. I used to have funny people around me. We would come up with funny stuff together. We’d digest the news and give it back to you. I just want to create that system again, or a little bit of it so a couple people can make livings. I want to figure out how to get my YouTube channel under a couple different union contracts. There’s a ways to go until we get there, but we’re in the rubble trying to rebuild anything close to the infrastructure we had before. As you said, cable channels were expensive. There was a lot of waste. There was also infrastructure that does not exist, and infrastructure, once demolished, takes a long time to rebuild.
We had the authors of a great book called It’s Not TV, which is a history of HBO, on the show a couple years ago.
That’s a fantastic book. I love it.
That book rules.
It’ll make you cry with what we’ve lost.
There were entire executives at HBO and their job was to just identify and produce good creative.
Literally their job was to know crazy people who made great art and keep them calm and productive. That was their whole job. I could not identify those people anywhere anymore.
I know a lot of those people. I know good executives at all the companies. They either live in fear of a current streamer and are hoping they don’t get fired, or they’re going into other businesses. Good creative executives were a real thing that are hard to find, and we treasured them as writers. Those people are going the way of the dinosaur too, unfortunately.
You have brought me to the Decoder questions because you’re talking about a structure you want to build to achieve very specific goals. How is the business of Adam Conover structured today? You have one employee, but how is it organized?
Great question. It’s everything everywhere all at once. I’m doing a million things. I have a live touring business. I tour as a standup comic. Luckily, that is a very durable business because no matter what happens in the tech industry, people are always going to want to sit in the dark with a drink in their hand around other people. Maybe they’ll want to do it a bit less because they’ll be on TikTok, but they’re going to want to do it. There are buildings set up to give them food and drinks that’ll pay to bring me out, so that’s good.
I also do a weekly podcast, which is funded through those DTC ads with my podcast network, Headgum, which is a wonderful partner. It does really great work. Then, I currently do what I call biweekly monologues, which are scripted. I work with a couple freelance writers and researchers. We write them together, and then I deliver them straight to camera. Those have a little more thought and work put into them. We’re currently able to sell those at a higher ad premium because when they pop, they get a couple hundred thousand views on YouTube. They get millions of views at times on YouTube. The problem is that if they underperform, you almost immediately have to have hard conversations with your advertisers, and it’s very hard to get anything pre-funded. So, you’re constantly trying to keep your head above water with that piece of it.
Simultaneously with those two things, I’m trying to figure out the next piece. I just produced a standup comedy special for myself that’s entirely self-funded. I recorded it at the Den Theater in Chicago. It cost me five figures to shoot because I wanted to do it properly and make it look good. That will be coming out on my YouTube channel in October, hopefully with a sponsor so I don’t lose a bunch of money on it. If I do, hey, at least it was an hour of my creative work. I spent two years working on this material. It’s very important to me. People will see it, and it’ll hopefully fuel my touring business.
The days of a large company buying your standup special… This is a really great example of YouTube creating a race to the bottom because Netflix, in its destruction of cable like Comedy Central and largely the destruction of HBO, set itself up as we’re the home of standup comedy. It does have a ton of standup comedy on the platform, but YouTube has even more. And when people just want to watch a standup comedy special, they’ll more likely go to YouTube first. As a result, more and more comedians are saying, “Well, I’ll just record it and put it on YouTube because maybe I’ll get lucky with the algorithm. There’s been a couple examples of that and I’ll hit the jackpot.” Honestly, the streamers don’t pay enough unless you’re very high end, like if you’re someone incredible like Ali Wong, one of my favorite comics in the country. I’m sure she has a great deal. But if you’re entry level, you’re looking at it going, “Well, I might as well just do it on YouTube because I might lose some money either way. Why not just control it and put it on my own channel?” As a result, YouTube has totally undercut this sector of the market. That’s what I’ve experienced. I’m sure other people in music or other forms of media have experienced the same.
The last piece is that I am constantly trying to find my way in the new media ecosystem. People are starting to have this intuition that the future of YouTube is television. The ad dollars are eventually going to come and we’ll be able to figure out the business model. It’s starting to look like you’re going to be able to get investment to create something that looks a little bit similar to an old cable pitch process. I made a deck that I’m going to be taking around trying to say, “Hey, will someone —
Did you do it by hand or did you just let Claude do it for you? I’ve seen a lot of Claude decks lately, man. I’m just asking.
Look, I do not work with AI for the creative stuff. I did the first draft by hand, and I have a graphic designer who has made my decks for years.
Wow. You are committed to human labor, my friend.
My god. Look, the whole point of life is to be around other people!
But is the point of life to make decks? Come on.
The deck is part of the creative process, man. Literally, I figure out what the show is by writing the pitch document. If you think about if you’re going to be able to sell this to a person to get them to put money into it, then you can sell it to an audience. That was part of how the TV pitch process worked. So, I’m starting to try and figure out what that is in order to build what I hope will be the future of what we used to call late-night or topical nonfiction comedy on television. It’s sort of merging the monologues and the interviews I currently do into something that feels more like a TV show. That’s my project for the next couple of years. Hopefully, I can employ a couple people and give them health insurance, but that’s a big leap to take.
It’s not necessarily a slow gradation where you can just build it piece by piece. At some point, you’re like, “I kind of just need a couple hundred grand to do this or I can just keep making the thing alone in my apartment.” That is not what I got in the business to do. I mean, it’s great, but I would like to do more.
I’m going to ask you the other Decoder questions, and then I want to push on some of this just a little bit.
Please.
How do you make decisions? What’s your framework for making decisions? You obviously have a wide range to make.
Wow.
Don’t worry. Some of the biggest CEOs in the world have been like deer in the headlights at this question, which I think is fascinating.
You cut to a deep therapy question for me.
That’s all the show is. It’s important people doing therapy with me.
Decision-making is really difficult. I am trying to embrace more of the build in public ethos of the internet and saying, “I’ll put it out there and we’ll see how it does, and we’ll learn from that.” I think my best decision-making works that way. That is how you build a standup set. You go do jokes in front of an audience, half of them don’t work, and you stop doing them after the third try when they don’t work. Then, you come up with something new, and the ones that lived are the ones in the special. I’ve been trying to apply that more to my scripted and my podcast interviews.
But sometimes you got to take a flying leap and say, “Let’s try to do this.” I mean, the hardest decisions to make are the ones about the business itself. So, I have a limited amount of time in the day. Do I try to create a new piece of YouTube content for my AVOD (ad-supported video on-demand) audience? Or do I try to create something special for my Patreon audience? A big chunk of my income is people who pay to subscribe. Do I make a custom podcast that only a few thousand people are going to hear rather than the 100,000 that might hear it on YouTube? Those people are paying for it, and if I put good content there, maybe it’ll grow. You end up making those sort of decisions in a vacuum, and all you can really do is follow your intuition and adjust when it doesn’t go well.
The last thing I’ll say is that my oldest decision-making rubric has always been to try and imagine myself as the audience. When I was first making a cable show, I was very lucky that I grew up watching basic cable and I got to make a basic cable show. I imagined, “I’m 15 years old. I’m sitting on the floor watching the television set. What would get me excited?” I try to do that same thing with YouTube and the podcast. If you’re thinking about the audience’s experience as someone who’s creating things for an audience, you’ll hopefully never be steered wrong.
I’m very curious about that dynamic in your decision-making because I personally always think we should start with the audience. Unfortunately, I keep getting older and the young audience came up in a totally different media environment. I started as a blogger, and famous newspaper columnists would not give me the time of day at events. Now the TikTokers look at me like I’m Gandalf at events. They call me the mainstream media, which is deeply hilarious, right?
My calibration towards the audience has largely been, “Oh, they don’t know.” They don’t know that there was another way. This is the only way they’ve known. If I don’t participate in these specific ways, I’m actually so different that I’m incompatible. I’m trying to plug the old USB cable into the new USB port. It just doesn’t work.
The thing that really gets me about that is the pressure on all the platforms and all the creatives in the world to go directly to the audience for free is at an all-time high. Then, the expectation is that you will monetize that with a brand sponsorship. You went viral twice on TikTok, and you’re going to read the ads for green powder from some supplement company that makes you more virile or whatever it is they’re promising today.
There’s something about that that feels very dangerous to the creative process for me. You’re scratching at it with, “What creative thing am I going to do today?” Maybe the rubric is that Patreon people are paying you this much money, but the audience might grow on YouTube in this way. Maybe I just want to make the most viral thing the algorithm is telling me to make. I have truly struggled to manage that dynamic. What is the most economically lucrative thing to do? What is the thing that will get me the most attention? What is the thing that lets me stay pure of heart?
What is the thing you actually want to do?
There’s that. That’s important.
What is the thing that lets you do what got you into the business in the first place? What made you want to go to college for the thing or made you get that first job?
Which is saying the iPod is better than the Zune. If I could just make that video every single day for the rest of my life, that would be great.
I just wanted to goof off with funny people and come up with something new to say with them. It’s really, really hard.
A couple answers there. First of all, in terms of what the audience expects now, it’s true. I talk to people in their 20s, and the way you or I would talk about MTV or Comedy Central is how they talk about early YouTube. That is the culture they grew up with. You can’t ignore that. Sometimes, I’m like, is my desire to do something that feels more like a television show me being an old man about it? Should I just do the new thing?
I look at people I really admire on YouTube, like ContraPoints and Hbomberguy. They are two YouTube video essayists I adore. They use this very specific, internet-native model where each of them makes one three-hour-long YouTube video once a year that is so amazing that they have a massive Patreon audience and take no brand deals. Do I need to do that? Well, they built that organically. They started that when I was working in television. That’s not who I am. So, that’s hard for me to do. You don’t want to be the Steve Buscemi meme, right? Show up and try to do the thing.
If you started making a ContraPoints video, I think that’d be pretty good. I would pay extra for that one.
She writes, films, edits, and set decorates every single piece of that herself. That’s not the way I’ve ever worked, and sometimes I go, “Do I need to do that? Well, it’s special when she does it. It’s going to work when I do it?” At the same time, I do have this belief that… I always wanted to make a late-night show. That is still a goal of mine. There are other things I want to do too. I’d love to do a travel documentary. I’d also love to do a late-night show. Everyone says late night is dying, except that millions of people still fucking watch it on YouTube. [Stephen] Colbert was getting millions of views on every single thing he posted. The Daily Show still does. But no one has built the digital-native business model.
And YouTube videos are getting longer. I still have an intuition that, at the end of the day, people still want to sit on the couch with a drink in their hands, their partner’s feet on their lap, and the dog next to them and watch something that’s 45 minutes long. Watch a funny person give them some relief about the news of the day and have it be funnier than just a bunch of fucking riffs. Bringing those two sensibilities together is what I’m trying to crack. Figuring out how to do the same thing on YouTube that has a flavor of the old style. I think the success of standup comedy on YouTube and vertical video is a good example of this. It’s such an old art form, and yet it really performs well. People do still want it.
How do you do what is economically successful? That is the really difficult part because Hollywood at its best was about having a good idea. There’s someone working for the company who sees that it’s good. They buy it because they know it’s good, and it’s so good other people will watch it. Then, they give you money to make it good.
On some level, they can say, “We don’t want to pay for this.” And you could say, “Yeah, it’s going to be really good though.” If you convince them, you can get the money and you can make the thing. This is literally how I made the last show. My old show on truTV cost like $700,000 an episode to make — $1 million by the end — and that’s because it was good! They made enough money off of it that they kept it going.
But when you are literally just chasing the algorithm for every single click, that is a lot harder. It disincentivizes experimentation and it disincentivizes putting the work in to make the thing good. For instance, the stuff that I get the best numbers with on YouTube is when I talk about AI and am critical of the tech giants. My top YouTube video ever from my recent run is like, Elon Musk Is An Idiot. That’s the name of the video.
That’s going to be the title of this video. Can you do a tight five on it right now?
Absolutely! Wait, no, it would take an hour.
But I also have other things I want to talk about. I just made a video that went into the history of leaf blowers. Why did I literally walk by a gas-powered leaf blower on the block today even though they’re banned in California? There’s a fascinating history behind it. Leaf blowers are horrible for the environment. It’s a really interesting story. I was like, “Oh, I heard about this. I want to make a video about it.” I spent three weeks making the video. It got 50,000 views. I don’t know, maybe I could have had a better thumbnail, but it wasn’t what the algorithm wanted from me today. So I’m going, “Do I only talk about AI now?” I would like to talk about other things. People click “subscribe” on my channel. I can try to grow my audience, but they’re not going to see my video unless the algo shows it to them.
I want to ask about this because this dynamic is very real, especially if you think about data driving every young creator. They’re just trying to get started, so the data is going to drive them. It’s going to have an outsized influence no matter what. You have some history, you have some beliefs about what people might want based on what people wanted in the past. You’re going to make a late-night show, you’re going to take that risk. A young creator just looks at the view counts and says, “Well, this got many views, I should get more views.”
We’ve had basically every platform CEO on the show. We’ve had Neal [Mohan] from YouTube. We’ve had Adam [Mosseri] from Instagram. The argument they would make in response to this whole conversation — and I’m going to try to do it justice even though I mostly agree with you, but I’ll try to do it justice — is, “What you’re describing in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s was a series of gatekeepers that were inaccessible to most of the people in the world.”
I’m a kid who grew up in Wisconsin. If I wanted to make a late-night cable TV show, that path was almost totally foreclosed to me unless I moved to New York or Los Angeles, got a job as a waiter, and then hustled my way up through comedy clubs to meet one person who might decide that I was talented. That meant gatekeepers existed and people were left out. The economics of that might have been great and might have created a large middle class because there was enough overhead in that system to pay for a large middle class of creatives, but it mostly locked everybody out.
The social platforms create instant marketing opportunities for everyone from their bedroom. So, if you’re a young comic in the middle of the country and you have no ability to get into the Comedy Cellar in New York because you can’t work for free in that specific way, you can just film yourself talking on TikTok until you get a little bit of an audience. Then you can maybe drive an audience to come to a club near you, or whatever it is that you’re going to do. That pathway to get the exposure, which is necessary at the beginning, exists in a totally democratizing way. The economics of it might be bad, but many, many more people have the opportunity.
I think about that. I think about my own career. I started as a blogger working for AOL for $12 a post. The newspaper columnists who are now very sweet to me — they’ve been very sweet to me over the years — I got to compete with them in a way that I would have never gotten to previously. I can’t quite reconcile how badly I feel about the economics of the industry today and the amount of opportunity that it has created for so many other people.
So, I have a clear answer to this, which is that to the people from YouTube, I would say, “You’re the gatekeepers now.”
The algorithm is the gatekeeper.
Of course it is! Try to start something from scratch. Try. Try to build from getting 200 views on videos that the algorithm gives you, and tell me that’s not a gatekeeper. Yes, we had NBC, CBS, and ABC in the bad old days, and that’s all you got. Those were big gatekeepers, you had to please them. Now, we have YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. That’s all you get. In fact, YouTube doesn’t really compete with Instagram and TikTok directly because it has a completely different business model. They do the horizontal thing. It’s on streamers in the way those aren’t. Really, it’s literally just YouTube if you want to do broad swaths of content. That’s a fucking gatekeeper. You think Mr. Beast is good at what he does? He pleases the gatekeeper. Look at any interview with him. It’s about him figuring out, “Okay this video got this many views, this other one got this many views.”
Now, the argument that you’re making — that the gatekeepers were gone and the internet was democratizing — was good when it was people in charge of it. Do you remember back when we used to email memes to each other because you saw the video of the Numa Numa kid and you thought, “Oh, that kid’s funny. I’m going to send it to my friend”? Large swaths of people were in charge of the distribution. It is not anymore. They are taking some very loose signals from our swiping and turning it into algorithmic control of what we see. They have more power than anyone who worked for CBS or ABC ever did. It’s actually worse because people aren’t in charge of it. If you went and talked to any of them and said, “Hey, you’re in charge of this?” They would say, “No, we’re not, it’s just an algorithm.”
That’s actually worse because at least in the old days, there was someone I could go impress. There was a person I could go talk to. If you go talk to a streamer like Netflix now and try to convince them that this show is a good idea, it would say, “The algorithm said it’s not.” That’s basically what it boils down to. They don’t have the leeway to make decisions, with rare exceptions. Frankly, the good shows are when the exception gets made. But it’s ludicrous. The media ecosystem now is more concentrated and more closed off than it ever was before. The only difference is that now anybody can upload anything for free, and YouTube will host it for you. That’s good from a user perspective. If you just want to upload a video of your baby and send it to your sister, that used to be a lot harder. YouTube solved that problem for a lot of people. But in terms of a broadcast medium, it’s grotesquely exploitative.
Imagine if you were driving for Uber and you didn’t get paid. Instead, you got to try driving for Uber for years, and it said, “Oh, if the algorithm says you’re really good at Uber, maybe we’ll start to give you a little bit of money.” And what if everybody in the country was doing this simultaneously? That is what the media ecosystem is, and it’s bad. It’s bad.
This is the other thing I wanted to ask you about. You mentioned you want to have a unionized talk show on YouTube. You’re going to hire some people. That’s a cost. We run a union shop here. There’s costs associated with all of that. Those are good costs. I think media companies should pay those costs. You need the economics to work, and you mentioned you needed a digital-native business model for that.
I look at how that works today, and that mostly looks like big, lucrative brand deals. You need a Coca-Cola, a Chevy, a Ford, or whoever to show up and pay you a bunch of money to be integrated into your show. You, Adam Conover, eventually have to drive to every guest’s house in your Ford Fiesta or whatever and open it. In the back, it’s full of supplements or whatever that money’s going to look like. Because the advertising has to be integrated into the content, and then that has to reach scale. That is where that money comes from. Are you comfortable with those level of integrations? It’s very different in me for news, but on the YouTube entertainment side, that pendulum has swung and it has been swinging for a long time.
I don’t love it. You’re constantly being asked to make compromises and deals that you’d rather not make. In so many ways, we’re going back to the old days of media. Again, YouTube is ABC, NBC, and CBS rolled into one. What were the earliest days of that broadcasting like? It was the Marlboro comedy hour, right? All the comedians would say, “I love smoking Marlboro cigarettes” in between every single joke. That was how television as an industry began. We eventually separated those out. The commercials were run in between the shows, and it was never like it is at The New York Times where ad sales never talks to the creative. I made a basic cable show for years where half of our episodes were taking apart advertisers and talking about the diamond engagement rings, razors, and how capitalism tries to scam you, and in between was ads.
We never got pushback. One time they were like, “Hey, please don’t do something about the NCAA because we broadcast that every March.” It would be stuff like that. They had the separation. Why? Because the audience likes it better that way. It just took them a couple decades to figure that out. Right now, we are in the period of a couple decades where we have to figure that out again. I see YouTube literally trying to rebuild that model very slowly.
This is a bit of my own theory, but I think YouTube is trying not to be the channel. It wants to be the cable company. It wants the channel, the Adam Conover channel, to be the cable channel. So, it wants me to make the brand deal and do all the business development. It’s just the pipe that takes a bunch off the top. Great business model if it can make it happen, but it knows it wants to level up the production value.
So, what is YouTube doing? It’s not giving anybody money, but it is starting to promote shows more. It’s doing its own up-fronts. It’s trying to connect people with advertisers. I see it trying to spark the pilot light of this a bit but without actually putting money or infrastructure or investment into it. It’s just like, “Can we just boost you guys up a little bit?” At the same time Netflix’s model is the opposite. It’ll sink the money into the production and try to make the thing at the high end. That’s a really interesting competition. Unfortunately, it’s a competition between two giants.
I think we could get there by the time I’m like 60. Hopefully, at that point, I’m hosting a show with ad breaks in between and it’s not too bad of an integration. But we’re in the world that we’re in.
The reality is that I would love to do a totally pure show where I’m just subscriber funded. I would love to be ContraPoints or Hbomberguy, but that model pushes you towards doing it all by yourself. My costs are zero, and so what do I have? Time. I put in infinite amounts of time, and if I can put in infinite amounts of my own time, then I can get rewarded with subscriber money. The subscribers will pay me because they know that it’s just me doing this.
But I don’t want to work that way. I want to work with writers. I want to work with other comedians. I want camera people. I want a team, you know? And to do that, I need to get advertisers. Currently, that means dealing with a lot of bullshit that you would rather not have to and having to make compromises that you would rather not. It sucks, and I don’t have a way around it.
I certainly know a lot of creators who describe the lifestyle as very lonely and have taken to calling other creators their colleagues in order to create that sense of camaraderie, even though they are largely competing for the same minutes and the same platform in terms of attention.
I want to ask you about the advertiser thing. I basically have to ask you about crypto advertising now. You got in a lot of trouble because you read Sam Altman’s crypto ad, I think Worldcoin. This is the hardest thing. For all I know, the ads on our show are going to be a bunch of AI companies and crypto companies. We do have the wall. We make journalism here. I get to say that I have no idea what happens there. Take it or leave it. The integrations are where people get in trouble. You read the ad copy, you took the money. The audience was very unhappy with you.
I actually didn’t take the money. I turned down the money. I took the ad down. I was not paid for all the trouble I got in.
Walk me through all of that. Walk me through saying, “Yes.” Walk me through then saying, “Actually, this is bad. I’m taking it down. I don’t want your money.”
When you’re in this business, you have to look for [return on investment]. You have to look for if someone wants to pay you an outsized amount of money to not do that much work. That’s the way you make the entire business function because, for instance, the YouTube monologues I do are incredibly effortful. But I’m still trying to make a living, so if someone’s like… One example of this from live performance is that I’ll get hired to host a gala event. That pays more than a normal standup gig, but it’s actually less work. You sort of need some of that to pad out.
So, Sam Altman’s [World] comes along — which you guys have covered quite well on your site — and says, “We want you to come to this event. Just make a video at the event, publish it, and we’ll give you a bunch of money for it.” Well, this product honestly looks like fucking garbage. It looks like one of the worst products I’d ever seen. I was like, “They want to pay me a bunch of money? My audience is going to hate this.” Yeah, sure. Whatever. This way I can literally use that to fund some of the stuff that I want to do.
So I go and do it, and it comes out. People are very unhappy with it. The premise of the product is deeply unsettling, grotesque, and surveillance oriented, right? However, when I was there watching the keynote, I was like, “This is the most comical vaporware I have ever seen. This is never going to come out. No one is ever going to do this. This is so ill-conceived. It’s the biggest turd I’ve ever seen in tech.” That was my evaluation. How could I expect my audience to see it that way? They only saw the horrible version of it.
So, what I eventually did was take the video down. I turned the money down. I was not paid for it. I instead made a YouTube video where I talked for around 25 minutes about how grotesque, stupid, and bad the product was. I think I was able to do a pretty funny and incisive piece of commentary about it because I was at the keynote. The only reason I went to the keynote. Part of the reason I went was that I thought that this thing was going to be weird and it was. I wanted to go see. There was a bit of lookie-looing around. I ended up making a video that I was very proud of as a result of this fiasco. I did not monetize that video, so I didn’t earn any income off of it.
I think a lot of creators go through this moment where you’re constantly being led along and tempted. Sometimes, you step over the line and you don’t even realize you’ve done it until after you’ve done it. Well, I thought I was behaving with integrity in the moment, but looking back, why would anybody think that I was? Does that mean I really did? I mean, that’s the situation we’re in.
I’m happy to say that I fucked up by doing so. I also believe that you make mistakes, you acknowledge it, and you do something corrective, which is what I did my best to do. Luckily, the lion’s share of my audience was like, “Oh, this video was really great. Thank you for the thorough explanation and for eviscerating the product.”
That thing is hilarious, by the way. I would encourage people to watch your video and all the other videos. Any coverage of the Orb that isn’t literal sponcon is like, “What are we doing here?”
Let me ask you about this. You obviously learned a huge important lesson. If you had worked in a media company or entertainment company of any kind, that would become institutional knowledge. “We screwed up. We’re never going to do this again.” Now, a bunch of people have had this experience, and when new people come in and try to do this thing again, we’re just going to say no. But you have to do that alone. Every creator has to do that alone.
Yeah.
My joke on the show for ages is that every YouTuber gets their wings when they make the video about how mad they are at YouTube.
I’m about to make that video actually. I’ve got it locked and loaded.
Finally, you’re going to grow up, Adam.
This actually might be it. This is the beginning of it.
Well, the reason I ask that is because in the old way, there were unions. You are part of a union. The union and the big Hollywood studios would negotiate. These are repeat players, so even if they were antagonistic, the negotiations were towards a common purpose because you were going to do it again in three years. That created a kind of institutional knowledge, or a set of shared goals at the very least. If the tactics and specific negotiations got heated, at least the goals were the same.
No one can do that with YouTube. Ben Smith from Semafor was just on the show and he said that people are building real businesses and real careers on top of YouTube. But YouTube has — probably to its own benefit and to the detriment of the media industry — built a system where it’s for individuals and no one has any leverage except for YouTube.
You and I cannot get together and go demand terms from YouTube. If we got a thousand YouTubers together to demand terms from YouTube, it would still laugh. It wouldn’t even take the call. It would say, “There’s another thousand teenagers who will work for free. Good luck.” How do you change that? You have a very unique perspective as someone who has organized against Hollywood. Can you change that for the platforms?
If I’m putting my labor organizer hat on, I don’t think the organizing target is YouTube itself. I think it’s the channel. So, I wouldn’t try to organize YouTube. I’d try to organize Mr. Beast’s staff, who — you’ve probably done some reporting on it yourself — are horribly abused and underpaid. That is the reality of the economy.
It’s actually not the case that all the biggest YouTubers are individuals. The biggest YouTubers are companies. Go look at Adam Savage. That guy is basically doing a cable show every single day. Go look at Hank Green. I love Hank Green. I look at him and I go, “How many people are helping him to make these videos?” You know what I mean?
If you want to do something that’s big, constant, and brings in the money, it is a large scale enterprise. It’s in YouTube’s interest to encourage those big channels to get bigger. Monopolies or consolidation are sort of the law of economics unless you’ve got a strong antitrust to prevent them. I see YouTube getting even bigger, the bigger channels getting even bigger, and them getting big enough to organize. Like you said yourself, you’re The Verge, you are a YouTube channel, and you have a unionized staff. And we’re starting to see that happen in the YouTube space. We’re starting to see the staffs of specific channels unionizing.
So, if the top 100 channels do grow big enough, could they go to YouTube and say, “Hey, we demand a better split?” Yeah, they could. Is that going to benefit all the people who work for the channels? Probably not, but it becomes more of a B2B negotiation. You know what it becomes more like? When the cable channels were arguing against Spectrum, Charter, and all of those. They would have those carriage battles and those kinds of wars. It becomes that kind of dispute.
So, YouTube is making itself a cable monopoly on top of the internet. I think that’s what the dynamic is. However, the original point of the creator economy was to separate labor from each other and, in fact, make the labor so invisible that even if you’re not doing it professionally, you’re kind of ambiently doing it all the time. When you open YouTube or Instagram, how often are you watching someone do it professionally versus how often are you watching someone do it for fun? Having one video go viral; or making one video a week to promote their dentistry business; or making one video a week because they hope to go pro but they actually never will and Instagram hasn’t told them. That’s the huge dark matter of social media. None of those people will be paid. Those people are truly un-unionizable. Sorry, but what it’ll eventually take is the government making some regulations around this.
Where we’re starting to see that is with how different states are treating gig workers like rideshare drivers. You’re starting to see that action happening. There have been battles in California and in other states as well. They’re slow. We’re certainly not close to being all the way there. Again, this looks to me like we’re doing the history of the labor movement again. The capitalists have consolidated. They figured out a new industrial revolution that has impoverished everybody and had us working for penny wages. It’s going to take a lot of people organizing, a lot of labor power, and the government figuring out that there’s a problem to do something about it. It’s going to take decades.
Hopefully it won’t take violence in the streets, which is what it took during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the labor movement worked its way towards labor peace. So often when I think about these things, everyone wants to say, “Oh, it’s new. It’s new. It’s new.” Actually, we’ve gone back to the beginning in so many areas.
One of our great reporters, Mia Sato, has a line and a thesis she’s reporting out that influencers are the new gig workers. There’s just a lot of echoes in there.
Oh yeah.
I want to end by asking about Hollywood. You’ve come out very strongly against the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. There’s an argument in everything you’re describing that we should just let Hollywood kill itself. We should just let David Ellison spend all of his dad’s money buying a studio, running CBS News into the ground. These things are doomed. There’s a version of this where the big fights to stop them from killing themselves so that the writing staff of whatever show on whatever network can persist for a little longer just slows down the apocalypse. You can’t fix it. Do you think it’s fixable, or are you just trying to slow down the apocalypse?
First of all, I think all effort that you put into fighting this shit is good effort. Even if the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger happens and it costs them a lot more time and money, well, that’ll make the next monopolist think a little longer about the next monopoly. We are starting to see an epochal shift in antitrust. Even people like [former Federal Trade Commission chair] Lina Khan and [former FTC commissioner] Alvaro Bedoya are doing amazing work out of office. You can imagine if Democrats take power again. Even the Republicans are starting to do antitrust a little bit. So, we are making progress there.
The most pernicious lie the tech industry tells is about its own inevitability. “Oh, oopsie! Hey, we just invented something so good that everything you used to like has to die. Oh, sorry, you got to get with the program.” No, these people killed our businesses purposefully with mal intent. The first time this ever happened to me was during the Facebook pivot-to-video era. I used to work at CollegeHumor. We had a great business making videos on the internet. Facebook lied about the traffic that their videos were getting. We pivoted a huge amount of the business to Facebook, and it cratered a huge amount of CollegeHumor’s business. CollegeHumor later became Dropout TV, which is a wonderful media success story that I’m really proud of. But it’s that kind of thing. When you look at this shit, half of it is just Mark Zuckerberg lying to people over and over again. So, we don’t need to accept it as some law of the universe.
The last part of it is that I don’t just make this argument because I miss having union health insurance and hanging out with funny people writing stuff. Of course I miss those things. Of course I’m sad about the death of the creative class in Hollywood. I got into this because I like movies. I like television. People still do like movies. Talk to people. They’re not like, “No, I never want to see a movie again.” They’re like, “What happened to the good movies?” Go watch Terminator 2 with anybody, and they’ll go, “I wish I could see a movie like this now. Why won’t they make me this movie anymore?”
By the way, the box office is having a really good year because they made a couple good fucking movies this year. Big movies and small movies. You’ve got Obsession and Backrooms. You’ve got The Odyssey. Even the Marvel bullshit has had a pretty good year. So, we still love this art form. The movies are one of America’s greatest cultural legacies. It’s like the movies, jazz, and soul food are America’s three biggest contributions to world culture.
We can’t let it die. The fact that this entire art form is very effortful and takes a lot of money doesn’t mean that we should accept a world in which it doesn’t exist because a couple of billionaires wanted to lie and steal from each other. We don’t need to accept that world. We can, in fact, have a world that has room for YouTube and television and the movies and, by the way, plays and novels and all the other art forms that people love. We just have to not let these idiots and assholes destroy their own and each other’s businesses.
I can’t think of a better place to end it. Adam, you’re going to have to come back soon. This was incredible. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.
Nilay, thank you so much for having me. I had a blast.
Questions or comments? Hit us up at [email protected]. We really do read every email!
