A few months before YouTube’s 20th anniversary, there is no longer any question of being confined to videos on smartphones: we must now consider the platform “like the first television channel in France”, affirms its general director Justine Ryst in an interview with AFP .
For the manager, at the head of the French branch since 2019, YouTube is now “a key player in the audiovisual landscape”.
A few weeks after the colossal success of the film “Kaizen” by Youtuber Inoxtag about his ascent of Everest, the platform wants to establish its place on all screens.
The 2h26 documentary, which brought together 340,000 spectators in theaters and generated 37 million views, was also broadcast on TF1: the multimedia triumph born on YouTube alone sums up the ambitions of the platform.
According to Médiamétrie results, communicated by YouTube, the site and the application have in fact passed French television channels in number of users among 15-49 year olds and displayed 42.6 million users over 15 years in May.
During the same period, the French spent 41 minutes per day watching YouTube videos.
And the distribution media are evolving.
“Television is today the second screen for YouTube consumption in France, after the mobile phone,” insists Justine Ryst. “It’s a real trend that is taking hold and goes hand in hand with the observation of the success of long, even very long, formats.”
– Multi-format –
The movement is global: with more than a billion hours of viewing per day worldwide on televisions, the Google subsidiary recently announced from the United States the implementation of a so-called cinematographic version of the videos of creators, which better takes advantage of the capabilities of a large screen.
The growth of the video juggernaut comes precisely from the multiplication of formats it has developed, according to its general director in France.
“Our uniqueness is multi-format,” explains Justine Ryst. “We can offer, in parallel with long videos, short formats, in parallel with horizontal, vertical formats, etc.”.
A way to “offer the greatest possible creative palette”, but also to stay in the race in the face of the proliferation of players who each try to keep users in front of their screen for as long as possible.
Like Instagram, which created “reels”, YouTube did not hesitate to take inspiration from the short-format viral videos of the social network TikTok by creating “shorts”. And the recipe seems to be working: launched three years ago, they now have 70 billion daily views worldwide.
– Create gateways –
But compared to traditional media, Justine Ryst emphasizes connections more than competition.
“Classic audiovisual players are taking over YouTube,” she welcomes, mentioning in particular the case of Arte, which has increased the number of channels on the platform and launched formats exclusively broadcast on the web, such as its show of popular science “The Vortex”.
With several YouTube channels each to their credit, TF1 and France Télévisions also have hundreds of millions of views.
And watching the iconic faces of television and YouTube move from one screen to another, the porosity between the two worlds has rarely been as visible as in recent weeks.
“Our specificity is the meeting of all these generations of creation,” praises the general director.
After the arrival of Hugo Travers, better known by the name of his account HugoDécrypte, on France 2 in 2023, two presenters recently launched their YouTube channel.
Star journalists Elise Lucet and Claire Chazal thus made their debut, the first accompanied by Squeezie, the other advised by Gaspard G. That is, two stars born on the internet to facilitate the transition to “a very different exercise in freedom of tone”, advances Justine Ryst.
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