'Final Straw': Why YouTube Stars Broke Up with H'wood (But Kept Their Lawyers and Agents)
Says WME's Ben Davis: 'It's all about direct-to-consumer businesses'
Rhett and Link wanted to be on TV. After making YouTube videos since 2006 and creating one of the most enduring and popular digital shows in history — Good Mythical Morning, a gonzo spin on the kind of silly segments one might see on a daytime talk show, such as “We Tried EVERY Blue Food” or “Trying to Cut Things Perfectly in Half” — Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal believed Hollywood was the next logical move.
“We thought [YouTube] was still a stepping stone,” explains McLaughlin, the bearded half of the duo. “What we were doing on YouTube really started to get traction. We still had this idea in the back of our minds that we needed to ascend to that level” — mainstream Hollywood — “which felt like it was the next level.”
The two best friends who met in first grade nearly 40 years ago wrote countless pilots and screenplays. They wrote a novel with the idea that they could adapt their own IP. Even though it was a best-seller, no dice. The duo had done an IFC series called Rhett & Link: Commercial Kings in 2011, but it was canceled after a season. All the while, their reach and revenue kept growing, rising from $4.5 million in 2015 to $30 million in 2022.
That year, they finally got another shot, this time with Food Network, Inside Eats with Rhett and Link.
Inside Eats did not go as they hoped. “Those four episodes took a very long time to make — and, all along the way, we were reminded what it's like to make something for someone else's audience,” McLaughlin says. “The pressures that we were getting to take the edge off the show, to take the comedy out of the show, to make it more about the food and less about the story that we wanted to tell.”
That, he says, “was the final straw.”
In February, Rhett and Link made a video cheekily titled “We’re Done” to announce to their fans their retirement from . . . trying to appease Hollywood.
“They have a giant operation with over 100 people, and they produce tons of content,” says Adam Kaller, a partner at the law firm Hansen Jacobson and the duo’s attorney since the early days of their career. “They have podcasts, YouTube shows, a subscription offering, consumer products, merchandising, publishing and more. They're a full-scale media company in their own right.”
Kaller is among the dealmakers who saw from the start that rather than trying to shoehorn YouTubers into legacy entertainment, they’d be better off — professionally and financially — embracing YouTube as its own destination instead of a pit stop en route to basic cable (or worse).
For audiences — and no, not just 13-year-olds — YouTube is Hollywood. People are watching more than a billion hours of professionally-produced content on their TVs each day. It consistently ranks No. 1 on the Nielsen Gauge charts with almost 10 percent of the audience (Netflix is second, with less than nine percent).
As YouTube VP Tara Walpert Levy tells me, the company has invested more than $70 billion in its YouTube creator partners over just the past three years.
According to the talent and reps I interviewed, YouTube is not only reliably lucrative for their clients but it also allows talent to keep ownership of their intellectual property and retain full creative control — neither of which is standard in Hollywood. (It’s also worth noting that YouTube is non-union, although this is not a focus of this piece.)
“You can make a lot of money on YouTube and have all your freedom,” says Kaller. “I don't think MrBeast, or any [top-tier creator making millions on the platform], is looking to cross over as a goal — and, if they do, it's more of a one-off, not a career change.”
For all of the entertainment industry’s obsession with Netflix (and Apple and Amazon), those tech rivals largely exist within the system. YouTube doesn’t — but it’s grown well past the point where its impact can just be shrugged off. Maybe the only people in town that have profited so far are the early adopters, the lawyers and agents who were smart enough to see creators’ potential and guide clients to stick with the platform. Just how big can this opportunity get?
In this issue, you’ll learn:
Where reps can and can’t cash in on commissions
Another hot YouTube show that turned down traditional TV
Why there’s “no ceiling” on revenue opportunities for YouTubers
How YouTube’s breakout personality-led programming could shape the evolution of streaming
The traditional Hollywood stars turning to YouTube
How even entertainment giants like Disney are tiptoeing into YouTube
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