Going Long: How The Young Turks Play the Internet’s Long Game of Content
Steven Oh is playing a long game. As chief operating officer of The Young Turks (TYT), the former founder of a frozen yogurt chain is charged with the task of making sure the online home of the self-proclaimed “world’s largest online news show” continues generating revenue in a digital landscape that is constantly evolving.
“There are no answers, and that’s because this space is changing so quickly,” he says. “It’s rapidly changing and being redefined as we speak.”
What started as a Sirius Satellite Radio show co-hosted by Cenk Uygur, the face of TYT, and his friend Ben Mankiewicz in 2002, has since expanded into an online network with original content on multiple platforms that garners up to 30 million views each month, according to the company. That number jumps to 60 million when views are aggregated across all of the TYT’s menu of content, which includes various channels and shows like “The Point,” a topical show hosted by Ana Kasparian; “What the Flick?!,” about movies; and a two-hour daily live show hosted by Uygur.
There have been stints on linear television, too: Uygur nabbed a contract with MSNBC in 2010 through 2011, and a TV version of the show, “The Young Turks with Cenk Uygur,” aired on Current TV from 2011 through 2013, all while still maintaining their core programming — and audience — on the web. Impressive considering its humble beginnings as a DIY radio show that was, as Oh puts it, “half about serious politics, half J-Lo’s ass.”
But playing the long game of web content means adapting to the Darwinian “evolve or die” nature of the digital age, something TYT has done with reasonable success by evolving — or at least existing — on a multitude of platforms, new and old: There’s YouTube, the TYT website, Hulu and now Facebook (more on that later). Existing across all of these can be risky. Oh reasons that TYT’s latest Facebook deal won’t make money for at least a year. So, whether or not Oh and his team can continue hedging their bets — in a game that constantly changes and adds new players and platforms — impacts whether they can continue playing a long game.
Oh credits much of TYT’s popularity with the network’s early foray into publishing, and eventually monetizing, content on YouTube in the nascent days of the video platform. “We decided to make a ton of content every single day, and it was easy because for a radio show, it was three hours, and we would clip it out and put it on YouTube,” he says.
Churning and turning has been an integral part of TYT’s viability, thus far: churning out a steady stream of content and turning that into revenue dollars. In the YouTube ecosystem, Oh says, that means about $2 to $3 for every 1,000 views. He describes TYT’s revenue generation as 70 percent advertiser-based and 30 percent subscription-based. The model for the latter includes membership tiers ranging from $10/month, “The Member” level to $1,000/month, or “The Chairman” level. A Chairman subscriber not only gets full access to TYT content but also “a one-on-one call with Cenk once a month for 15 minutes to tell him what you think TYT should do on the show.” Oh says that there have not been any regular Chairman-level subscribers, but the dedication of its left-of-center audience continues to be TYT’s digital lifeblood.
It’s a connection partly made possible since web content production costs are, almost notoriously, lower than those of traditional TV broadcasts. According to a 2012 article in TechCrunch, the CPM (cost-per-minute) to produce network television can be anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000. Web content costs a fraction of that: $500 to $1,000. Oh doesn’t reveal how much it takes for TYT to air every day but says that the company employs a full-time staff of about 50. He says TYT “producers” — an umbrella term for the people behind TYT who do everything from pitching stories to running camera to editing video — earn a salary ranging from $30,000 to $120,000, although on the latter end, producers aren’t, ostensibly, meta-tagging YouTube uploads. Compare this to an entry-level production assistant job in TV that pays between $25,000 and $30,000, where touching a camera is pretty much unheard of; a job like that is best left to the trained specialists. For a person who has worked in production, such as myself, it’s a difference worth noting, though. In my experience, you get what you pay for. Cheap productions tend to look, well, cheap. This doesn’t seem to deter Oh, though.
“Production values don’t mean as much on the Internet,” Oh says. “You don’t need to have the fancy $20 million studio. You don’t need to have the graphics and all the whiz-bang. You just need to make a real, genuine, authentic connection.”
And strengthen that connection through content that can exist across multiple digital platforms, most recently on Facebook.“The Final Judgment,” a “series” — really a segment — tailored to capitalize on Facebook’s “sharing” ecosystem features Uygur breaking down a news item with his uncensored opinions and insight, not unlike the bloviator segments that punctuate the end blocks of cable news shows. The segment is not exclusive to Facebook — it exists elsewhere in on TYT’s various web nodes — but sharing across the social network has, in turn, driven traffic back to TYT’s YouTube hub, creating a clicking feedback loop that has boosted the network’s viewership in the past four months alone. But TYT isn’t concerned with monetizing on Facebook just yet.
“People get too caught up in monetization too early. We’ve always believed that once you have the audience, then you win,” Oh says. “You can monetize them in many ways: through ads, through membership, through merchandising, special events. But to get there, you can’t worry about monetizing. On YouTube, early on, we didn’t even roll ads. We sacrificed short-term gain for long-term gain.”
Still, the pressure on Oh to play the long game, to sustain that “long-term gain,” is twofold: to create content that remains relevant and evergreen in a landscape that thrives on the fleeting and viral and adapting said content quickly enough for new platforms that seem to emerge by the minute. Compounding the latter challenge is that new platforms themselves have different objectives and methods for spreadability (again, think Facebook’s sharing ecosystem versus YouTube’s search-based one). And to do all of this while maintaining a low overhead.
To that first challenge, TYT already re-purposes existing content that generates views, in addition to creating new stuff. According to Oh, 50 percent of views come from videos uploaded more than 90 days ago. The TYT catalog is brimming with re-usable clips that can be formatted into new(ish) content and, thus, continue generating revenue, much like the syndication model of linear television.
TYT is hardly linear, though, and, some would argue, not really news but rather news commentary, the “armchair quarterbacking” of news. TYT does not employ fact-checkers. Instead, it relies on its audience to “fact check” along with Uygur and other hosts in real-time through comments and social media. They rarely conduct news-gathering in the same manner as traditional outlets or even online outlets like Vice, although recent initiatives, specifically in the documentary space, echo Oh’s desire to do more on-the-ground reporting. It’s a testament to both the advantages and disadvantages of not being a part of media’s old guard.
To TYT’s second challenge in playing the long game is the seemingly unending social and digital platforms emerging by the week, if not the minute. Cases in point: The Internet said “hello” to Ello, an ad-free alternative to Facebook, last fall, only to say “goodbye” shortly thereafter. Meerkat, an app that allows users to live stream video, experienced the equivalent of a social media meta-explosion when it started showing up on thousands of Twitter timelines. This was last week, at the end of which Meerkat streams jumped 100 percent. The app debuted on Feb. 27.
“The way they [old media] do business, they have all kinds of other priorities. The reality is they’re wasting a ton of money. A ton of money,” Oh says. “They pay Robin Roberts $14 million a year to host “Good Morning America.” They pay Stephanopolous $25 million a year.”
Actually, George Stephanopolous, the former Clinton administration communications director, earns a salary that hovers around $8 million a year as a co-host on GMA. But I understand the point Oh’s trying to make. Even so, he says there is still a lot of money to be made in TV and does not dismiss a future TYT venture there. Ultimately, the goal is to establish a news brand that lives on after its founder in a trust, akin to the U.K.’s The Guardian.
There is a saying I have often heard while working in both television and emerging digital platforms: “Good, fast or cheap. Pick two.” As a staunch believer in the value of expensive production, of having those specialized hands-on-deck to make things look good, I have experienced, first-hand, the sometimes harsh reality of having to “pick two.” But maybe in Steven Oh’s world, it’s possible to have it all, at least for now.
