YouTube have admitted defeat in their efforts to take on streaming titans like Netflix, by pulling the plug on YouTube Originals after six years.
The platform’s chief business officer announced the decision to halt production on most new YouTube Originals efforts, explaining that they had “played an integral role in growing the YouTube creator economy”, but had hit a snag.
“With rapid growth comes new opportunities and now our investments can make a greater impact on even more creators when applied towards other initiatives,” he announced through Twitter.
YouTube Originals was always set for higher-budget productions, and you needed a YouTube Premium subscription to view many of them.
The diverted funds will now be going towards initiatives such as the Black Voices Fund, the Creator Shorts Fund, YouTube Kids, and Live Shopping programming.
It was also announced that the woman behind YouTube Originals, Susanne Daniels, will be leaving the company.
To be fair, YouTube Originals never really set the world on fire, though there were definitely points of interest.
Mind Field used the higher budget capacity to showcase interesting science experiments, and A Heist With Markiplier from 2019 was a choose your own adventure-style film. But there hasn’t been much of interest of late.
The platform intends to honour commitments to contracted shows already in progress and will be contacting those involved imminently.
