Happy (early) birthday, YouTube. To celebrate the site’s 20th anniversary, we present: The InsideHook Guide to YouTube, a series of creator profiles, channel recommendations and deep dives about the viral, controversial, unstoppable video-sharing giant.
Before YouTube, there were a few straightforward ways to promote a new movie or TV show: some press junkets, a handful of magazine profiles and, of course, a late-night TV appearance where the star smiles, shares their most charming anecdote that can be told in under five minutes, and then throws to a clip.
Now, those late-night segments have plenty of competition. If an actor has a new project, you’ll likely see him sweating his way through a plate of wings on “Hot Ones,” answering the most frequently Googled questions about himself for the “Wired Autocomplete Interview,” gamely flirting with Amelia Dimoldenberg on “Chicken Shop Date,” walking GQ through his 10 most prized possessions, playing with puppies for BuzzFeed and maybe even strapping into a polygraph machine for Vanity Fair.
We all know that late-night TV is struggling at the moment, and the added pressure to compete with the slew of celebrity interviews on YouTube certainly isn’t helping. Ratings are down across the board and networks are cutting costs wherever possible. Late Night with Seth Meyers recently ditched its house band due to budget cuts, while The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon — the last network late-night show running five days a week — recently announced it’s joining its peers in airing reruns on Friday nights, trimming its production schedule down to four new episodes a week. But while the late-night format as a whole is seeing diminishing returns, it’s not because its hosts have been ignoring the ways YouTube has changed our viewing habits.
On the contrary, YouTube — or at least a willingness to cater to it — is at least partially responsible for Jimmy Fallon’s early success. After he took over NBC’s Late Night in 2009 following Conan O’Brien’s promotion to The Tonight Show, Fallon quickly differentiated himself by de-emphasizing the traditional interview segments and leaning more heavily on games, sketches and musical parodies with his guests.
“He did a lot of fresh stuff that hadn’t been really done before,” says Bill Carter, author of The Late Shift and The War for Late Night and editor-at-large of LateNighter. “He did segments that they then posted on YouTube and really got a tremendous number of views — famously, ‘Evolution of Mom Dancing’ with Michelle Obama. So he was on top of that, consciously doing something that would translate.”
“Every show now, even though they don’t plan a segment [to work specifically online] — and Jimmy will tell you overtly, ‘I don’t plan it thinking it’s going to be on YouTube. I plan to work that day in front of an audience’ — but they all have in the back of their minds when they run something that is going to be effective on YouTube, they will definitely put that up,” he says. “I think Jimmy was the first who had a producer who was dedicated to that, to the outreach to internet viewers.”
Of course, nowadays, Fallon is far from the only late-night host courting those online viewers and drawing influence from other YouTube series. Carter cites the example of “Seth Goes Day Drinking,” where Meyers plays a series of silly drinking games with a guest while getting increasingly hammered at a bar, and likens it to “Hot Ones.”
“It’s the same idea,” he says. “You have a celebrity, put them in a situation where they get uncomfortable, and ask questions. Although I think that the main purpose in the late-night show is the funny stuff, it’s not the revealing stuff. It’s not really so much an interview to get information or to be revelatory of the personality, but it’s basically the same sort of approach and idea. Jerry Seinfeld was doing that with Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. The actual perfect example of this is definitely a late-night example, which is ‘Carpool Karaoke.’”
One of the key aspects of the YouTube [interviews] is that there’s no audience. [On TV] the interviewee is aware of that and is not as relaxed and is less likely to be off the cuff.
Bill Carter, editor-at-large of LateNighter
But, as Carter points out, while it’s a formula that has enjoyed heightened success in the two decades since YouTube first debuted, the general concept — getting out of the studio and avoiding a more traditional interview format — pre-dates the internet by many years.
“If you go back, David Letterman was doing what he called ‘remotes’ in the late ’80s and early ’90s that he would sometimes bring celebrities with him to do,” he says. “They were out of the studio, not in front of an audience, and it was heavily edited segments with celebrities where they would have certain conversations. I wouldn’t call them interviews. They were meant to be funny…but that is really not that alien from ‘Chicken Shop Date.’”
In many ways, modern YouTubers like Dimoldenberg have advantages over late-night hosts like Fallon or Meyers because they have fewer barriers to entry (as Carter notes, they “don’t need to go through the regular steps of show business to get an idea and put it up”) and more creative control. There are no censors or network executives breathing down their necks, no strict time constraints, and this often leads to more engaging interviews.
“One of the key aspects of the YouTube [interviews] is that there’s no audience,” Carter explains. “[On TV] the interviewee is aware of that and is not as relaxed and is less likely to be off the cuff.”
How YouTube Took Over the World
It all started with a dick joke. Twenty years later, the colossal video-sharing site rivals TV networks, Hollywood and TikTok — with no signs of slowing.There’s also the simple logistical differences between the formats. Late-night shows, Carter points out, always do a pre-interview — where a segment producer sits down with the celebrity guest to go over what they’re planning on talking about — before taping. There’s little room for improvisation; most guests come prepared with a funny story ready to go.
“Letterman was famous for wanting the celebrity to bring something, to be there with ideas, with an anecdote, with something they could use,” he says. “That certainly undercuts the informality of the interview or even the information quotient, because they’re not looking for information much. They’re looking for entertainment.”
Of course, the problem is that these days, many people primarily look for entertainment on YouTube rather than broadcast television. Even if you prefer a celebrity interview in a traditional late-night format to a more free-flowing, casual one, there’s a good chance you’re still going to watch it online the next day instead of when it airs in real-time. A show like Fallon’s has essentially become a snake eating its tail.
“It has become a gigantic issue because the streaming services have taught a lot of viewers to not be tolerant at all of advertising,” Carter says. “Let’s say you’re a big Jimmy Fallon fan. You can watch him the night before, or you can say, ‘I’ll just go watch the highlights tomorrow.’”
That means ratings are down, and therefore so is advertising revenue. “It’s extremely difficult to monetize it,” he adds. “In the past, if you had Johnny Carson on five nights a week, and he was getting six, seven, eight million viewers a night, you could charge big revenue for that. That was a gigantic moneymaker. That’s why all these other networks were desperate at the time to get into it because the format is not that expensive. It’s not like producing an hour-long drama, so it had a lot of appeal, but advertising is what drove it.”
In an odd twist of fate, Carter believes that eventually late-night shows will have to air live in order to survive. “It adds an edge and it makes it feel a little more electric. It separates them from the heavily edited things that you’re going to see all over the internet,” he explains. “It’s a bit of a high-wire act then. If you bomb and nobody laughs, that’s not a good show, so it adds an element of challenge. I think there’s still an avenue for it, but I think it’s going to take a lot of creativity.”
He’s encouraged by what he’s seen recently, though. After the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in September, The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live (which, despite its name, is normally pre-taped) and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert all aired special live episodes.
“And they wrote some pretty darn good jokes in a very short amount of time,” Carter says. “So it’d be interesting to me to try, if I was a show that was sort of on the edge in this way, I think I’d say, let’s try it live and let’s see what happens, just to shake it up. Why not try it?”
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