2024 Emmy Nominations Need to Bless the Creator Economy’s Best

With FYC campaigns for the Emmys in full swing, several of YouTube’s biggest shows have thrown their hat in the ring for a nomination. While this may not be the first time exclusively online shows have sought recognition from the Television Academy, both YouTube’s increased dominance in the entertainment world and the caliber of its top creators make the strongest case yet for including online videos alongside TV and streaming shows.

The shows in question include chicken-centric interview shows “Hot Ones” and “Chicken Shop Date,” veteran YouTube duo Rhett & Link’s variety show “Good Mythical Morning” and several programs from independent streaming service Dropout (formerly first-generation YouTube channel CollegeHumor). With millions of subscribers and even more views, these shows certainly garner enough fandom to put them on par with most conventional TV shows.

The creator economy was also endorsed by YouTube CEO Neal Mohan last week in a guest column for the Hollywood Reporter: “Creators are defining a new era of entertainment. And they deserve the same acclaim as other creative professionals,” he wrote, specifically citing “Hot Ones,” “Good Mythical Morning” and Michelle Khare’s “Challenge Accepted” as examples of the platform’s exemplary content.

While YouTube has yet to submit anything directly for Emmy consideration, its vocal support of the creators who have signals a shift in its place in the larger entertainment industry. For most of YouTube’s existence, the ultimate brass ring for YouTubers was to leave the site behind and cross over into the mainstream. Indeed, some creators managed to do just that, taking on other ventures, launching businesses, and even creating full-fledged movies or animated shows.

But for every one of those successes, there’s a laundry list of sitcoms, reality shows, talk shows and more that were helmed by some of YouTube’s biggest stars that didn’t make it past one or two seasons. Rhett & Link, who have made several attempts at both films and TV shows over their 18 years on YouTube, perhaps best explained why the jump is so hard for online creators in a video titled “We’re Done.”

YouTube as a company has also felt growing pains as it made a more concerted effort to shed its scrappy image from the “Broadcast Yourself” days in favor of a more professional brand. The company even made a play at producing original content alongside prominent creators with YouTube Originals, which launched as part of its ad-free subscription service YouTube Red (later rebranded YouTube Premium) in 2015.

Despite launching several successful properties, namely “Cobra Kai,” which is airing its final season on Netflix later this year, YouTube shut down the Originals branch in 2022.

When it comes to the Emmy Awards, only a handful of online shows have won, let alone been nominated for the coveted statue. “Pride and Prejudice” adaptation “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” was the first web series to win an Emmy in 2013, and “Hot Ones” received its first Daytime Emmy nomination in 2022. But these are still exceptions to the norm.

This latest Emmys push by online creators and Mohan’s endorsement seems like both the company and its creators are no longer worried about fitting their internet-bred content for television-shaped boxes. Instead, they are presenting the Television Academy with the work they’ve done as YouTubers on YouTube, not for a spinoff show on Netflix or cable.

The main reason for this change seems to be that, almost two decades since its founding, YouTube is bigger than ever. Along with 2.4 billion monthly active users as of January 2024, there are also over 100 million paying YouTube Premium and Music users, which contributed to the over $15 billion generated from subscriptions in 2023 for YouTube’s parent company Alphabet.

The company has also seemingly achieved its advertiser-friendly aspirations, generating an all-time high of $31.5 billion in ad revenue for 2023 according to a Business of Apps report. So far this year, YouTube reported $8.1 billion in revenue for Q1 2024, a 21% YoY increase from the previous Q1.

But the real kicker arrived last week in a new extension of Nielsen’s “The Gauge” report — the Media Distributor Gauge, which tracks TV usage by media company. Nielsen found that YouTube garnered 9.6% of total TV usage — as in what people watched on TV, not on a computer — in April. That figure was second only to Disney and ahead of the big three broadcasters (NBCUniversal, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery) and even Netflix.

That metric, along with the fact that YouTube has been the top individual streaming platform for a year and counting, shows the platform has more weight than ever to throw around — and seems keen to do just that for online creators.

But YouTube’s desire to see these creators win Emmys would be delusional if the content isn’t high-quality. Those who still remember YouTube as the site for home videos and cat memes might still think that’s the case.

While those low- to no-budget videos will always exist on YouTube, most top-tier YouTubers are hardly a single person with a camera anymore. Behind these creators are production studios, writing teams, art departments, lawyers and other staples of a conventional media company, all of whom work toward creating online content that would not look out of place on streaming or cable.

Take Rhett & Link, whose production company Mythical employs over 100 people across three YouTube channels, which total almost 30 million subscribers. At this point, they have no reason or need to adapt their content for TV audiences, which they affirmed in the “We’re Done” video.

Dropout, meanwhile, is one of the few YouTube channels to make the transition to becoming an independent subscription-streaming platform, largely thanks to its eclectic, high-caliber and rapidly growing library of original shows.

And of course, there’s Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, currently the world’s biggest YouTuber, whose production company churns out high-budget reality-competition style videos that regularly draw over 100 million views. In a break with precedent, his upcoming show with Amazon isn’t watering down his brand for mainstream audiences but instead upping the ante with the biggest cash prize in TV history.

All of this is to say that the Television Academy has increasingly little reason not to consider the videos that represent the best of what the web has to offer. And, as younger audiences are not only online more than ever but prefer user-generated content over both traditional TV and SVOD, it would be unwise for the TV Academy and the larger industry to ignore online creators’ contributions for much longer.