My godson doesn’t know who Rocky and Bullwinkle or Madonna are. He is only aware of Xena: Warrior Princess because of a Fortnite skin. This is, in part, because he’s 11, but mostly, it’s because he wasn’t raised on a steady diet of TV and film. He was raised on YouTube. He finds entertainment in MrBeast and clips of people playing Microsoft Flight Simulator. As much as it pains me to say it, he is not alone. Two generations now have been raised on what the algorithm provides. Hollywood and the wider entertainment world has taken notice, and now it seems every big business move has an air of YouTube about it.
If you count YouTube as a streamer, it would be by far the most watched one. In 2025, it surpassed every other video streamer in views. It owns the living room in a way no single entity has since back when there were exactly three channels on the television—only it’s hard to really classify it as a streamer. The interface, even on a TV, still feels like YouTube’s front page. The suggested videos to watch still have a liberal amount of AI generated slop (same with the commercials). Apart from Cobra Kai—which was picked up and popularized by Netflix—its own scripted originals bombed nearly a decade ago, and the new scripted successes aren’t YouTube-native. YouTube isn’t even counted in Nielsen’s streaming ratings. My godson and his friends don’t care about any of that. YouTube is to them what the TV was to me. It’s comfort and diversion and education, and it’s the first place they go when they’re looking for something to watch.
Hollywood has noticed. “YouTube is a straightforward direct competitor,” Netflix’s Ted Sarandos told Politico back in March. At the time, Netflix was trying to acquire Warner Bros. and Sarandos needed to explain why one of the biggest media companies on the planet needed even more studios. He warned that everyone was underestimating Google’s video giant as nothing more than “a bunch of cat videos” before insisting that YouTube is “in the same exact game that we are.”
That’s why Netflix is penning contracts with Condé Nast, Hearst, and BuzzFeed. Those media publishers made a miniscule mint creating YouTube videos and built tiny franchises around lie detector machines and piles of adorable puppies. Their back catalog of videos are in a weird space between the gloss of Hollywood and YouTube’s bread and butter. Now Hearst, Condé Nast, and BuzzFeed get to double dip into all the videos they made. Netflix, which we’ve previously established has become a tech company with Hollywood ambitions, gets to add more “content” to its library. Will people watch that old interview of Dakota Johnson gushing over a mountain of limes in her kitchen? It doesn’t matter. Like YouTube, Netflix is focused more on the quantity of content than the quality.
It’s a silly tactic for Netflix because YouTube is the DoorDash of streamers. It’s a gig economy where you only work when you want to work, and if you’re lucky, you get enough views that YouTube then pays you for what you made. Netflix has traditionally operated in the more governed entertainment business, with its contracts and unions, and focus on making sure people get paid upfront for their efforts. Even when it does eschew unions, as in the case of its recent push into talk shows (for some reason they call them podcasts), it’s still making big-dollar deals for big names. Unless it fundamentally changes its business model, it’s going to always struggle to match YouTube’s volume of content.
But, given Netflix thinks like a tech company first and an entertainment company second, it isn’t a surprise it’s chasing YouTube with a “more content” strategy. Nor is it a surprise that Mark Zuckerberg is doing the same with Instagram—he and Meta have never seen a good idea they didn’t either buy or try to beat. As Threads is to X, Instagram is now to YouTube. That’s why Instagram Stories is looking into longform and widescreen videos. The company noticed creators were using Instagram to advertise longer videos on other platforms, and wants to make sure they stay on the Instagram app instead.
But Meta will face challenges just like Netflix has. Both are trying to twist their greatest successes into something else. They’re both doing it because they see another company with a bigger and more lucrative success. I don’t know how well that will work out for them, though. My godson considers Instagram an old people app, and Netflix’s insistence on being the background noise of our lives has made it easier to just ignore it all together. These companies are chasing YouTube, but there can only be one YouTube. For everybody else there’s another time-honored tradition they could chase: finding and making stuff people want to watch.
Alex Cranz writes about the intersection of technology and pop culture.
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