Part 25. YouTube and Short-Form Video — The Day Individuals Became Broadcasters

Core question: How long is my target audience willing to watch, and what habits already occupy that span of time?

The Earlier Habit-Space: What It Meant to Sit in Front of a Television

Throughout the twentieth century, watching video meant sitting in front of a television. Broadcasters chose the channels. Schedules dictated airtimes. Viewers sat down at the appointed hour, watched what was given to them, and endured the commercials inserted in between.

This structure divided the payment habit into two forms.

License-fee model: KBS's television license fee was ₩2,500, unchanged from its introduction in 1981 through 2024. It was a charge for the service's very existence, payable whether one watched or not.

Advertising-acceptance model: Broadcasters received money from advertisers, while viewers watched content for free. Instead of money, viewers paid with their attention.

Radio used the same structure. Listeners received music and information for free in exchange for hearing advertisements. Before podcasts appeared, radio-listening habits were fully embedded in this advertising-funded payment structure.

In 2005, cracks began to appear.

The Birth of YouTube: From “Me at the zoo” to Creators with 200 Million Subscribers

On April 23, 2005, Jawed Karim uploaded a nineteen-second clip filmed at the San Diego Zoo. Titled “Me at the zoo,” it was a brief monologue about elephants' trunks. It became the first video ever uploaded to YouTube.

YouTube (2005) was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. Its slogan was “Broadcast Yourself.” In October 2006, Google acquired it for $1.65 billion, Google's largest acquisition at the time.

Early YouTube had no advertising. People simply uploaded videos for others to watch. After Google's acquisition, however, integration with AdSense created a system that placed ads on videos and shared revenue with creators according to views.

The YouTube Partner Program arrived in 2007. Channels that met subscriber and view thresholds could share advertising revenue: 55 percent to the creator and 45 percent to YouTube. That single formula opened the age of personal broadcasting.

This episode proved a basic rule: when a platform begins sharing money, the number of producers explodes. Suppliers flock to wherever money can be made. By 2023, more than fifty million people were estimated to participate in the global creator economy, with millions of channels earning through the YouTube Partner Program alone. Every minute, another five hundred hours of video were uploaded.

YouTube generated approximately $31.3 billion in advertising revenue in 2023, about 10 percent of Google parent Alphabet's total revenue.

The Creator Economy: Individuals Become Media

The most consequential change in the video market once monopolized by television networks was that individuals could become broadcasters in their own right.

PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg, Sweden) began as a gaming YouTuber and became the world's most-subscribed channel in 2013. His annual income was estimated at roughly $13 million in 2019. His 110 million subscribers rival the population of a midsize country.

MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson, United States) had approximately 240 million subscribers in 2024, the largest following among individual YouTubers. His large-scale project videos range from completing a hospital for children with cancer to placing one hundred people on a deserted island. Beyond advertising, he operates brands such as MrBeast Burger and Feastables chocolate. His estimated annual income exceeds $50 million.

In Korea, first-generation gaming YouTubers such as Bokyem, Ddotty, and Daedoseogwan built major channels in the early 2010s. Tzuyang became the country's largest mukbang channel, with 9.8 million subscribers in 2024.

What these creators share is that they made content conventional broadcasters would not have selected. Mukbang, gameplay, daily vlogs, and ASMR would not have passed a network's programming standards. YouTube's algorithm instead asked how many people watched and for how long. Once gatekeepers disappeared, the market became the gatekeeper.

The Layered Structure of Monetization

YouTube creators' revenue structure accumulated multiple layers over time.

Layer 1: Advertising revenue (AdSense). CPM—the price per one thousand impressions—varies widely by category. Finance, education, and business content can command a CPM of $10–30, while gaming and entertainment may earn $1–5. Revenue depends not on subscriber count but on views and watch time.

Layer 2: Channel memberships. Subscribers pay $4.99–49.99 per month for special emoji, private videos, and members-only posts: a digital fan club. YouTube takes 30 percent.

Layer 3: Super Chat (2017). During livestreams, viewers pay to highlight their messages, with payments in Korea ranging from ₩200 to ₩500,000. YouTube takes 30 percent. According to Playboard's tallies, Japan is the world's largest Super Chat market, and Korea also ranks near the top; large Super Chat payments are routine in gaming, music, and fan-service streams. Streams by the virtual-idol group ISEGYE IDOL have at times recorded tens of millions of won in a single broadcast. The virtual YouTuber (VTuber) ecosystem helps explain why Japan and Korea became leading markets. VTubers perform as 2D or 3D avatar characters and have built a strong culture of direct fan interaction through Super Chat, which then spread to ordinary gaming and music channels. Because Super Chat is consumed not merely as a donation but as a participatory experience that makes one's message stand out onscreen, psychological resistance to a one-off payment is low.

Layer 4: YouTube Shopping. Products connect directly to videos. Viewers can immediately buy the clothes a creator wears or the equipment they use through links beneath the video.

Layer 5: Sponsorships (brand deals). These are direct contracts outside YouTube's own platform: a company pays a creator to feature its product. A single brand deal with a channel of more than one million subscribers can be worth tens or hundreds of millions of won.

Of these layers, brand deals provide creators with the most stable revenue, while advertising income is the most volatile. Every change in YouTube's advertising policy can abruptly transform creators' earnings. Many lost revenue after the 2017 policy change targeting “advertiser-unfriendly content.” The industry called the event the Adpocalypse.

Immediately afterward, YouTube introduced the Yellow Dollar Icon system. Videos classified as unsuitable for advertisers displayed a yellow dollar icon beside the title and had their ad revenue severely restricted. Criteria included adult, violent, or political content, controversial social issues, and profanity. YouTube never disclosed an exact number of affected creators. Since more than one million creators belonged to the Partner Program at the time, however, the industry estimated that hundreds of thousands of channels experienced declining revenue. In response, creators aggressively developed income sources outside YouTube, including Patreon and memberships.

The Rise and Fall of MCNs

An MCN (Multi-Channel Network) manages YouTube creators and handles advertising sales on their behalf. MCNs grew rapidly in the early 2010s.

Maker Studios (2009) was once YouTube's dominant MCN. Disney acquired it for $675 million in 2014, when its channels had a combined 380 million subscribers. Disney expected the purchase to provide access to a digital generation, but the MCN proved far less valuable than anticipated. Creators retained their own brands rather than belonging to the MCN. In 2017, Disney folded Maker Studios into the Disney Digital Network, effectively dismantling it, cut staff heavily, and reduced its creator network to fewer than one thousand. Its flagship creator, PewDiePie, also parted ways with Disney that year after a content controversy prompted the company to terminate his contract. MCNs' 30–40 percent revenue share also encouraged departures. Once creators had secured their own fandoms, they had less and less reason to surrender a large portion of their personal brand-deal revenue to an MCN.

Fullscreen was acquired by Otter Media, the joint venture formed by AT&T and The Chernin Group in 2014, for an undisclosed sum. It was later separated as an independent media company.

In Korea, DIA TV, operated by CJ ENM, represented more than 1,400 creators whose YouTube channels had over 300 million combined subscribers. Sandbox Network (2015) began with gaming creators such as Ddotty and Jamttul, then expanded to celebrity YouTubers; it represented 460 creators in 2023.

Between 2016 and 2018, however, cracks emerged in the MCN revenue model for three reasons: YouTube ad rates fell sharply; creators began negotiating brand deals without MCNs; and individual creator brands grew stronger than MCN brands, making departures increasingly common.

The MCN's fundamental weakness was that it had no way to retain star creators. Unlike a record label holding an artist's sound-recording rights, an MCN controlled no comparable asset. A creator could terminate the contract at any time.

The TikTok Shock: The Day Algorithms Replaced Followers

In September 2016, China's ByteDance launched Douyin (抖音). The global version, TikTok, followed in 2017. ByteDance acquired the social-music app musical.ly in November 2017 and merged the platforms in August 2018.

TikTok's decisive difference from YouTube lies in its recommendation algorithm.

YouTube centers on a subscription-based feed. A user usually needs to subscribe before seeing more videos from a channel. New creators without subscribers struggle to receive any exposure at all, making the first ten thousand subscribers the hardest to acquire.

TikTok's For You Page (FYP) works differently. A single video can receive millions of views even when its creator has no followers. The algorithm shows it to people judged likely to watch to the end; completion, replay, and sharing rates determine further exposure. Performance of the content itself, not the follower count, is the standard.

The result is a path from obscurity to fame in twenty-four hours. TikTok had 150 million users in the United States in 2023 and more than one billion monthly active users worldwide. It ranked first in US App Store downloads in both 2021 and 2022.

One case came to symbolize the democratization of the FYP algorithm. In September 2020, an unknown Idaho man, Nathan Apodaca (@420doggface208), uploaded a seventeen-second video of himself skateboarding, drinking cranberry juice, and lip-syncing to Fleetwood Mac's “Dreams.” Within days, it surpassed fourteen million views. An account with almost no followers had reached tens of millions through the FYP algorithm. When Ocean Spray saw sales of its cranberry juice rise, it thanked Nathan with a truck filled with the drink and made an advertisement with him. The story became one of the industry's most frequently cited illustrations of how FYP makes virality possible without an existing following.

TikTok's other major change was to bring short-form content into the mainstream: videos from fifteen seconds to three minutes. Short videos spread faster and reach more people than long ones. YouTube responded with YouTube Shorts in 2021, while Instagram launched Reels in 2020.

By 2023, YouTube Shorts had grown to more than seventy billion monthly views. Advertising revenue sharing began in February 2023, but earnings of approximately $0.03–0.05 per one thousand views remained far below those of conventional long-form video. The structural difference in ad placement creates a persistent CPM gap. TikTok launched a $200 million US Creator Fund in 2020, yet tens of millions of creators divided the pool, leaving extremely small individual payouts. Even creators with millions of followers sometimes reported earnings of only tens of dollars per month. The example showed that the creator-monetization problem of short-form platforms, already visible after Vine, remained unresolved.

This episode proves that attention does not simply grow shorter over time; it grows shorter when platforms reward shorter content. Creators optimize their behavior to maximize views. If an algorithm rewards thirty-second videos, the supply of thirty-second videos rises.

YouTube Premium: The Paradox of Paying to Remove Ads

YouTube Red launched in October 2015. For $9.99 per month, users could watch without ads and receive original programming from YouTube Originals.

YouTube produced twenty-nine original dramas and entertainment programs, but none generated enough attention to compete with Netflix or Disney+. In 2018, YouTube made its original content free and effectively abandoned that strategy. It rebranded the service as YouTube Premium and bundled in music streaming through YouTube Music.

The apparent paradox is that YouTube's advertising model depends on viewers who watch ads, while subscribers pay a monthly fee to remove them. As more people remove ads, the foundation of advertising revenue seems to weaken.

In fact, this is not a paradox but a dual-revenue structure. Advertisers pay for free viewers, and paying subscribers directly fund an ad-free experience. The coexistence of both layers maximizes total revenue. It follows the same logic as Hulu's hybrid model and Spotify's parallel free and paid tiers.

YouTube Premium had an estimated eighty million subscribers in 2023. That was only about 3 percent of YouTube's roughly 2.7 billion global users, yet its contribution to revenue was far greater than the share suggests.

Special Field 1: ASMR and Sleepcasts — A New Payment-Space in the Hours of Sleep

ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) content grew explosively on YouTube in the late 2010s.

It began with claims that particular auditory stimuli—whispering, pages turning, typing, or rain—could produce a tingling sensation in the brain. By 2022, ASMR-related YouTube videos received more than twenty billion views annually. One of the largest channels, Gentle Whispering ASMR, had 1.9 million subscribers and more than five hundred million total views.

ASMR created a new habit-space because it targeted the time before sleep. Earlier video was entertainment for waking hours. ASMR became a modern lullaby consumed while falling asleep, landing first in a span of time that had held little other content.

Advertisers value ASMR because it tends to have a high completion rate. Viewers are more likely to let a video play to the end, which directly increases advertising opportunities. Beauty, lifestyle, and sleep-product brands favor ASMR channels, and CPMs consequently tend to be relatively high. In Korea, Jane ASMR grew into one of the country's largest ASMR channels, with seventeen million subscribers in 2024. By combining Korean and English, it secured a global audience and demonstrated that an individual creator could compete worldwide within a specialized category.

A sleepcast is audio content designed to help listeners sleep. Meditation and sleep apps such as Calm and Headspace position it as a core asset. Calm charges $14.99 per month and had accumulated more than one hundred million downloads by 2022.

Lofi Girl (2017) is a YouTube channel that streams lo-fi hip-hop suitable for studying or preparing to sleep, live and uninterrupted, twenty-four hours a day. It had thirteen million subscribers in 2022 and earns from ads, channel memberships, and merchandise. Its business model monetizes the habit-space of “music left playing before sleep.”

Special Field 2: Educational Content — Transplanting the Habit of Paying Academy Tuition

The combination of YouTube and education represents one of the strongest transfers of an existing payment habit.

The habit of paying private-academy tuition is particularly strong in Korea. Parents readily spend on their children's academies, and the habit often continues into adulthood as investment in self-development. Online education landed in this space.

Udemy (2010) is a global online-learning platform. By 2023, it offered 210,000 courses to fifty-three million students and had listed on Nasdaq in 2021. Courses usually cost between ₩10,000 and ₩200,000, though constant discounts often lower the price below ₩10,000. Its marketplace lets individuals upload courses and share the revenue.

Class101 (2018) is a Korean online platform for hobbies and self-development, including drawing, music, crafts, cooking, and personal finance. In 2022, it served one million students with more than four thousand courses, typically priced at ₩100,000–300,000 each. It transferred Korea's habit of paying for hobby and self-development academies into digital space.

Then there are YouTube education channels, an arena unto themselves. Korean personal-finance channels such as The Man Who Reads Real Estate and Shin Saimdang first built trust with free content, then led viewers to paid lectures or memberships. This free-to-paid funnel uses YouTube as a marketing channel.

Essential Failure 1: YouTube Red Originals

YouTube Red (2015) failed in its attempt to imitate Netflix.

YouTube produced original dramas starring famous YouTubers, including Scare PewDiePie and a show with YouTuber Lilly Singh, making roughly twenty-nine programs in all. But a YouTuber having millions of subscribers did not mean that a drama starring that creator would generate Netflix-scale attention.

The decisive problem was YouTube viewers' payment habit. People came to YouTube expecting free content. On a platform already filled with an immense supply available at no charge, the argument that “this content alone requires payment” was unconvincing. Too few people subscribed for the paid originals.

In 2018, YouTube made the original programs free and simplified the paid subscription's value to ad removal and YouTube Music. It abandoned content exclusivity.

Essential Failure 2: The Disappearance of Vine — Failing to Retain Creators

Vine (2012) pioneered short-form video with six-second looping clips. Twitter acquired it in 2012 for $30 million, and the service quickly gained popularity after launching in January 2013.

Stars emerged on Vine. King Bach, Lele Pons, and others gathered millions of followers. In 2016, however, Twitter announced the service's shutdown, and Vine closed completely in January 2017.

Several causes overlapped. Financial trouble at Twitter pushed Vine down the strategic-priority list. Instagram and Snapchat copied similar features. Vine never developed an advertising product suited to six-second clips. Beneath all three lay the largest problem: it could not retain creators.

As Vine grew, its star creators demanded more revenue. But the platform had no creator revenue-sharing system, and placing ads on six-second videos was difficult. King Bach and other major creators eventually moved to YouTube and Instagram. Once the stars left, the platform lost its value.

This episode proved that a platform must give creators a way to make a living. Creators have no reason to remain where they cannot earn. When suppliers leave, content disappears; when content disappears, audiences follow. The lesson also drove TikTok to introduce a Creator Fund after 2020 and strengthen livestream monetization.

In the very year Vine shut down, TikTok landed in precisely the same short-form space and grew into a platform of one billion people. The difference was their approach to monetization. TikTok did not begin with a complete creator-revenue structure either, but it kept adding creator funds, live gifts, and commerce connections, moving beyond the point where Vine had stopped.

Hint Points

What can we learn from the payment-habit patterns created by YouTube and short-form video?

First, a platform dies if revenue does not reach the people who make its content. Vine failed for the same reason the YouTube Partner Program succeeded. A structure that retains suppliers is the platform's foundation.

Second, viewing duration determines the revenue structure. Advertising works differently in a thirty-second video and a thirty-minute video. Ads are difficult to insert into short-form content, one reason TikTok has struggled with monetization. It is also why YouTube offers higher CPMs for videos longer than ten minutes.

Third, charging within a space built on a “free habit” requires a different kind of value. YouTube Premium sells the convenience of no ads. YouTube Red failed when it tried to sell exclusive originals. A paid layer placed on a free platform should add something to existing free content rather than hide it.

How long is my target audience willing to watch—fifteen seconds, ten minutes, or an hour? Which platform, business model, and payment habit already occupy that time? An entry strategy becomes visible only after answering these questions.

Vine invented six seconds but failed to invent a way to make money from them. TikTok inherited those six seconds and ultimately developed ways for both creators and the platform to profit. The format can be identical, yet a different business model produces a different outcome.

Kim Dongeun · WhtDrgon@MEJE.kr · 2026