The Media Column: The youth appeal of digital platforms means they are giving TV a run for its advertising

Though television is far from dead

The team that turned Sorted Food into Europe’s biggest online cookery channel

They are a clean-cut quartet of young Brits who found themselves mobbed by teenage fans on their debut tour of the United States. Yet James Spafford and his schoolfriends are not the next One Direction but a collective of amateur chefs who have built a lucrative global brand through YouTube exposure.

From a shaky clip demonstrating their amateurish attempts to cook a home-made pizza, posted in 2010, Spafford, Ben Ebbrell, Barry Taylor and Mike Huttlestone from Hertfordshire have turned Sorted Food into Europe’s biggest online cookery channel.

It now has more than one million subscribers, with six million videos viewed each month and branding deals with Tesco and HSBC. Its founders’ mission was to build a community inspired by making cooking fun but they didn’t need to take the traditional celebrity-chef route of securing a deal with a conventional television network.

And because of that, the foursome is well positioned to take advantage of a brazen move by YouTube to turn the migration of viewers and advertisers from traditional TV channels into an exodus.

“The audience is in control now; they are the commissioners and the kingmakers,” said David Black, UK branding director at YouTube’s owner, Google. “At YouTube, it’s prime time all the time.”

He is urging advertisers to move 24 per cent of their budgets from television, where viewership among the UK’s 16- to 34-year-olds has fallen 15 per cent, to the video platform which has an audience that has grown by 50 per cent year-on-year.

Sorted Food’s presenters were shocked this spring to find themselves recognised on the streets during their first recipe-sharing tour of the US. Now they could benefit from YouTube’s controversial decision to launch its first subscription service, offering original, exclusive material, including features from high-profile vloggers.

Initially only available in the US, YouTube Red will cost $9.99 (£6.50) a month and show no advertising. PewDiePie, the Swedish performer who has 40 million subscribers and earned £8m last year, Rooster Teeth and Lilly Singh are among the vlogging stars so far involved.

Sorted Food were YouTube’s star performers when the company presented at Digital Upfronts, a week of events across London that gives BuzzFeed, Facebook, Twitter and new-technology insurgents an opportunity to set out the next phase in their colonisation of media space. If the BBC thought it could re-engage a mobile-focused young audience by shifting BBC3 online, it now faces competition from upstart competitors promising shareable “content” of an equally high quality.

At the AOL Upfront, its flagship property, The Huffington Post, announced #PowerShift, a 10-part documentary series hosted by Game of Thrones actress Sophie Turner. It will examine the power of social media and the ways in which young people are embracing it to create change around the world.

The hashtag #Jezwecan, used by Jeremy Corbyn supporters once every 25 seconds on Twitter during the Labour leadership election, will be one of the topics covered.

The series, commissioned from the UK, will be shown on all 15 global editions of the blogging platform and syndicated through AOL’s On entertainment network. “Over the next year, we’ll be producing loads more short-form content,” said Stephen Hull, Huffington Post UK’s editor-in-chief.

AOL, which claims more than 100 million platform viewers each month and more than 13 million in the UK, is investing heavily in original unscripted programming, such as the reality series Citizen Mars. Sponsored by Honda, it follows five would-be astronauts competing for a one-way trip to the red planet.

The mobile audience cares little if the programming it consumes is devised by advertisers, as long as it is engaging. BuzzFeed is now angling for a big chunk of the £650m market in branded content.

The one-time listicles site announced a partnership with Costa Coffee at its Upfront event and unveiled a video showing Britons discussing the things that made them smile, which has been released on BuzzFeed, Facebook and YouTube.

Caroline Harris, Costa’s UK marketing director, said that she hoped the video would get one million views and “speak to customers in a relevant way. We also want to seed [a message about] our British heritage.”

BuzzFeed’s California studio will produce more than 340 videos in 11 different languages, gathering three billion views across 30 distribution platforms – all designed to lure advertising budgets away from television.

Facebook, which pulls in four billion video views per day, offered an olive branch to “old media” at the social network’s presentation. “This isn’t about TV versus Facebook versus digital video. It’s not an either/or,” said Matthew Corbin, the company’s global head of product marketing. But he added: “There may be a day when most of the video you see may be on Facebook’s Newsfeed.”

A surprising advocate for the theory that television is far from dead proved to be Shane Smith, the founder of Vice, the edgy online news channel famed for sending reporters to trouble zones where conventional providers fear to tread.

Smith said that Vice – which is valued at £3.3bn, boasts 96 million unique visitors across its digital properties and includes Fox among its shareholders – plans an aggressive move into television and hopes to launch a dozen channels in Europe.

With 70 programmes in production (including a daily newscast for HBO), Vice is talking to potential partners including Sky, ITV and Channel 4 about launching a programming block within their schedules. But Smith is also willing to use Vice’s resources to buy its own network; the company is already launching a channel in Canada.

His desire to secure a foothold in television suggests the digital evangelists may have oversold their revolution. UK digital advertising grew 13.3 per cent, to £3.9bn, in the first half of 2015 but advertisers will still pay more to reach the mass television audiences that gather around a major entertainment, drama or sporting event than they will to link their wares to YouTube videos. One entertainment figure who has successfully straddled both worlds is James Corden, who uses YouTube clips to build a buzz around his US Late, Late Show.

Beamed into the YouTube event, Corden told the audience: “YouTube has changed everything. When you’re trying to engage with the digital space, you’d be naive not to think that’s how a generation of young people consume the show. There is a certain snobbery to YouTube stars. But just because you didn’t grow up with something doesn’t mean that it’s not a legitimate thing.”

Choose authenticity, says industry to young

When Napster first introduced the concept of widespread file-sharing, the music industry responded with heavy-handed legal threats. Now the creative industries and ISPs are uniting for the first time to create a high-profile consumer education campaign aimed at persuading young people not to use pirate film and music sites.

X Factor viewers on Saturday night will have seen the first fruits of the new approach, an animated film, depicting twin characters Dodgy and Genuine, and the strapline “Get it right from a genuine site”.

Dodgy’s world of illegal file-sharing leads to contracting cinemas, reduced to a single screen. Genuine’s path of legal entertainment creates a thriving music scene and online bookstores.

Older viewers might sneer but Marianne Grant, senior vice president of the Motion Picture Association, tells me: “Instead of the finger-wagging approach, we’re focusing on a younger age group and giving them an animation they might choose to watch and share. It says: when people make the right choice, they have a better experience and creativity thrives.”

The campaign is backed by BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk and Virgin Media as well as £3.5m of government funding. But Grant says Google could do its bit, too, by refusing to list illegal sites in its search results.

James Murdoch stokes Sky guessing game

The Murdoch clan remains bitter over the forced abandonment, amid the phone-hacking furore, of its 2011 attempt to take full control of Sky UK.

James Murdoch, now 21st Century Fox boss, prompted speculation that the ambition remains when he said the group’s 39 per cent ownership of Sky UK was “not an end state that is natural for us”.

Sky UK’s successful absorption of Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia has turned it into a European broadcaster of scale. A Fox takeover bid would open a whole new regulatory can of worms.

The newly elevated Fox CEO could be testing the water to see how toxic the Murdoch brand remains in the UK.

Rebekah Brooks is now safely reinstalled as boss of Rupert’s newspapers and able to use her charms on a new generation of legislators. Under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s hostility is a given, but the party looks further away from power than ever.

A more likely scenario is that Fox will seek to offload its £7.3bn Sky stake at the behest of investors nervous about pay-TV’s prospects.

Twitter: @adamsherwin10