Lessons Learned from YouTube's $300M Hole - Hank's Tumblr: For those of you who don’t know, John and I were recipients of part of YouTube’s “Original Channel” funding initiative. We used that money to start Crash Course and SciShow. We were extremely excited to get the chance to have some real capital to spend on content, and the result has been great…we are extremely grateful to be a part of this program.
It was a great thing for us…but it might have been a bit of a dopey idea.
There were a lot of recipients of this money, and many of them were major media companies trying their hand at online video that received some fat checks, up to $5M a piece, to launch TV-like channels. What we all found out is that, no matter how hard you push them and how much money you spend on them, YouTube doesn’t work like TV…and funding it that way is daft.