'Chicken Shop Date': $6,000-an-Ep. & Turning the Tables on TV
Amelia Dimoldenberg on how her hit YouTube show draws Paul Mescal to Cher to her door, and why she's now the one rejecting traditional buyers
Manori Ravindran covers int’l TV from London. She recently wrote about the model TV producers are loving to get shows made, the “buy, sell or die” M&A climate for producers and producers’ pivot to YouTube for money.
For years, traditional broadcasters refused to buy Amelia Dimoldenberg’s idea for a TV show. They didn’t get the vision — a flirty “date”-style interview in a chicken shop (hole-in-the-wall fried chicken restaurants popular with young people in particular) — and they didn’t get her. A decade later, the 30-year-old British YouTuber is the kind of youth-skewing talent anyone would kill to have on their network.
But now it may be too late as no one could ever offer her the independence Dimoldenberg enjoys. She’s flown the terrestrial coop. “The future is YouTube and with streaming,” she tells me. “There are so many other avenues where you could be making entertainment and connecting with audiences.”
If you’re on social media — or use the internet at all — chances are you’ve seen clips of her show Chicken Shop Date, where the Londoner has awkward chats with celebrities (recent guests include Paul Mescal, Cher and Sabrina Carpenter) in the capital’s myriad chicken shops. The 40-minute dates are forensically edited into pithy eight-minute videos.
Dimoldenberg, who first conceived of the idea as a magazine column when she was a fashion journalism student, is celebrating her 10th anniversary doing the show. Most long-running formats feel tired after a few years, with guests wise to the beats and punchlines. But Chicken Shop Date never fails to show well-known figures in an entirely new light. In October, her infectious chemistry with Andrew Garfield lit up the internet and has amassed 9.5 million views — the show’s biggest hit to date. She’s posted more than 300 videos on her YouTube channel, accruing 2.78 million subscribers and more than 638 million views.
This success has TV producers wanting in. YouTube shows like Chicken Shop Date are growing in their appeal to legacy media eager to tap in. (Media regulator Ofcom reported in July that TV sets accounted for 34 percent of YouTube’s viewing inside U.K. homes in 2023, up from 29 percent a year prior. In the U.S., Nielsen Gauge has consistently shown YouTube to be the most-popular streamer for living-room viewing, exceeding 10 percent market share.)
But beyond Dimoldenberg’s work as a red-carpet interviewer — she served as the 2024 Oscars’ official “social-media correspondent” and has engaged in antics with Dwayne Johnson, Billie Eilish and Ryan Gosling (her ‘How to Lure a Ken’ tutorial at the Barbie premiere is a classic) — traditional entertainment can’t give her what she now demands: Speed, control and most importantly, ownership. For producers looking to make original content for YouTube, she has some bracing words as well: The math still doesn’t add up given old-school production costs.
As more in the production sector begin to think seriously about digital and how to start making money there, I sat down with Dimoldenberg in early December (sadly, not in a chicken shop) to discuss all this and more.
From our interview, you’ll learn:
How much she spends to produce an eight-minute episode and how much staff she uses to produce each show
What producers can learn from YouTube creators about viewing habits
What she learned from working with a traditional broadcaster — and why she won’t do it again
Why IP ownership is paramount for YouTubers
Why Dimoldenberg keeps Chicken Shop Date brand-free
Whether a TV producer can earn a living from YouTube alone
Why more entertainment formats need to start online
The age and geographic demos Chicken Shop Date is popular with
The scripted projects she’s currently developing — but why she may do them herself rather than sell them
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One of my fave shows