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A big-time YouTube publisher says YouTube needs to give premium content more attention

AwesomenessTV CEO Brian Robbins thinks YouTube could be something akin to Netflix’s homepage.

by Kurt Wagner
Advertising Week New York 2016 - Day 3
Advertising Week New York 2016 - Day 3
Laura Cavanaugh/Getty Images for Advertising Week New York

AwesomenessTV makes most of its money from YouTube.

But CEO Brian Robbins thinks YouTube could give premium content — the kind of stuff his company is making for YouTube every day — a little more love.

“Obviously, YouTube was built on [user generated] content,” Robbins explained Monday at the Code Media conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point, Calif. “But for guys like us, who are really programming it and trying to do more and more premium content, it feels like there needs to be a separate way to discover our content — because it’s really hard to discover content on YouTube.”

“I know it’s a big ship to turn around, but I don’t quite understand why they don’t give premium content a better home, a better place to be discovered. Look at it like a Netflix homepage,” he continued.

YouTube isn’t the only company to face this challenge. Facebook’s algorithm is intended to find the best stuff for its users (and prioritize certain types of videos), and it has also tested a video-only feed in the past as a way to help surface relevant and high-quality video. Getting the best stuff to the top is not always simple.

Robbins says that YouTube is his company’s most important platform despite the search issues. AwesomenessTV’s YouTube channel has 4.7 million subscribers and has gotten almost 1.7 billion total video views.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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