Adam Conover's old cable show cost about $700,000 an episode to make, and roughly $1 million by the end of its run. The comedy shows that replaced it, he says, have budgets of $0.
The standard account of what happened to television is a technology shift nobody could have stopped. Conover's account is that the companies wrecked their own businesses on purpose, and that the platform which picked up the audience is a tighter gatekeeper than the networks ever were.
"The most pernicious lie the tech industry tells is about its own inevitability."
He hosted Adam Ruins Everything on truTV for 65 episodes, sits on the board of the Writers Guild of America West, and now runs his own YouTube and podcast business with exactly one full-time employee.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 65 minutes of audio, 32 minutes of reading.
Here are the 15 arguments that matter.
👤 Guest: Adam Conover, comedian and standup comic, host of the Factually! podcast and previously of Adam Ruins Everything, and a board member of the Writers Guild of America West
🎙️ Host: Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge
📰 Published: 14 September 2026 on The Verge
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Episode page | ⏱️ 1 hr 5 min | ✅ Time saved: 33 min
Key Takeaways
The word "creator" was invented to make an unequal bargain sound like an opportunity
His comparison is Avon or Mary Kay telling a salesperson they are an entrepreneur
Streaming took the prestige end of television and handed roughly 60% of the schedule to YouTube
News, talk shows, lifestyle programming and the weather all went, and nobody fought for them
A recommendation algorithm is a worse gatekeeper than a network executive, because there is nobody to persuade
"There was a person I could go talk to"
The economics of a mid-budget comedy show have gone from $700,000 an episode to nothing
Conover turned down the money for a crypto ad he had already made, and published a critical video instead
The way to organize YouTube labor is not to organize YouTube — it is to organize the big channels
The largest YouTubers are companies with staff, not individuals
Most of the people doing free content work will never be unionizable, so the fix has to be regulation
The box office is having a good year, which Conover treats as evidence the audience never left
1. "Creator" Is a Trick Word
Patel opened by listing Conover's titles — comedian, podcaster, YouTuber, Writers Guild board member — and Conover added one back: standup comic is the identity, the rest are jobs.
He enumerated the roles himself: standup comic, comedy writer, television host, member leader in the Writers Guild of America, and, now, the operator of a small business. He recently hired his first full-time employee and works with a bunch of freelancers beyond that.
His framing of the industry he is working in: "I'm one of many people trying to make my way in this new, massively disrupted media landscape, where the companies that used to make media seem intent on destroying themselves and their businesses, giving up large swaths of the industry to tech giants, which are trying to crush us under their heel."
Asked whether he is a creator or an influencer, he rejected both words while admitting he uses them. The term, in his account, was invented by the social media companies to talk people into what he called "an extremely inequitable economic bargain."
The bargain, in his telling, is sold on one example: "Hey, Mr. Beast makes a billion dollars. You could be Mr. Beast. Why don't you work for us basically for free for the rest of your life in the hopes that one day, we'll break off a little chunk of ad revenue for you?"
The vocabulary it replaced was more honest about the relationship. "We used to be writers, performers, talent, Hollywood labor, or media labor."
His analogy is direct-sales recruitment: "Creator is like when Avon or Mary Kay calls you an entrepreneur." He followed it with the question he says the word is designed to stop you asking — "Am I? Or is that an illusion that you want me to buy into because it obscures what you have done to the industry I work in?"
2. Patel's Free-Labor Thesis
Patel laid out his own standing argument, which he said he now makes on anyone else's podcast that will have him, and Conover pushed back on part of it.
The thesis: the entire entertainment complex cannot acknowledge that its real competition is an army of teenagers who work for free on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.
The host's own rundown of what those platforms pay: Instagram "will literally pay you no money," TikTok pays "a tiny fraction of a penny" per view, and YouTube, once the gold standard, has just made it harder than ever to get into its Partner Program. The rules change is The Verge's own reporting, not the guest's claim.
Patel's conclusion was blunt about what the incumbents should do if they took the comparison seriously: "Because if you do that and you're [Disney CEO] Josh D'Amaro or [Warner Bros. Discovery CEO] David Zaslav, you should just put all your money in the S&P 500 and shut it down."
Conover agreed with most of it and narrowed it. Movies do compete with TikTok for minutes in the day, he said, but they are also competing with every other human activity: "The movies are competing with you playing soccer in the park with your friends, right?"
His structural point is that displacement is never total. "There will always be a market for the high end of entertainment because new media forms never completely replace old ones." People still read novels, still go to plays, still listen to the radio — "The market just gets smaller and a bit more specific."
3. YouTube Took 60% of TV
Where Conover does think the competition is direct is between the studios and YouTube, and he dates the blind spot to roughly a decade.
YouTube moved into the television space, he said, and was there "before the TV industry noticed at all" — for about 10 years, with real attention only arriving in the past year.
He has been using one fact as a conversation opener in Hollywood for two years: "Did you know that YouTube is the largest streaming service on television sets?" Forget laptops, forget phones. His own summary of the reaction: "I blow people's minds with this in Hollywood."
The cause, in his account, was the rush to copy Netflix. The studios decided "We all have to create our own mini HBOs that everyone is going to pay $15 a month for," which he called ludicrous and unworkable — "that's what they thought for about five years." In the process they destroyed linear television and the cable business.
What they never worked out how to do on streaming is the majority of the schedule: "But what they never figured out how to work on streaming was about 60 percent of television: news, talk shows, comedy talk shows, lifestyle programming, The Drew Barrymore Show, travel shows, the weather." All of it went to YouTube.
The viewer behavior follows the supply. Somebody who wants to hear a person talk about home improvement, or the Knicks, or the news, goes to YouTube first, and it is free.
Conover's summary of the platform's side of the deal is that YouTube pays nothing for content, breaks off a chunk of what it earns and hands over 50 percent once the money is large enough. He allowed that the split itself is not the worst on offer: "That's better than most of the other revenue share models for ads."
The evidence he gives that the industry still has not absorbed it is a pitch meeting. He took a game show with a large piece of IP attached to a streaming service and was told: "Here's our problem with game shows. We can get people to watch one episode. We can't get people to watch a whole season in a weekend."
His reaction at the time: "Wait, your whole business model doesn't work if people don't watch a whole season on the weekend? That's not how people watch game shows."
Conceding game shows and the other formats, he said, means conceding a huge swath of what used to be the business and keeping only the very high end.
4. The Middle Has Evaporated
The personal version of the argument is what happened to the kind of show Conover used to make.
He is in the Writers Guild as what the union calls a comedy variety writer — nonfiction comedy in the manner of The Daily Show. "The networks literally don't make that kind of thing anymore."
His own track record is the measure: "My old show, Adam Ruins Everything, ran for 65 episodes. It was a hit for the network and second-biggest show on truTV." He says he could not sell anything close to it today, because networks have not figured out how to get people to watch anything that is not "a high-end prestige drama starring Adam Scott."
He was careful not to plead poverty. "I make a good living. I make as good a living as I did as a TV host. I'm very lucky to do so."
What changed is the payroll behind the work: "But now I have a couple freelancers instead of a room full of writers, cinematographers, actors, all of these funny people who made a really good comedy product."
The replacement product, in his description, is one comedian and some friends in front of a curtain. "Those shows have $0 budgets. The middle has evaporated."
His stated project is to put some of it back. "My whole thing in media right now is trying to figure out how to rebuild a bit of the middle. How do I get a little bit of a budget so I can do something a little bit better than a podcast and a little bit closer to a television show?"
5. What Cable Money Paid For
Patel spent several minutes explaining the old cable economics to the audience rather than asking about them, and the explainer is where the numbers behind the nostalgia sit.
The mechanism: everyone in the country paid a cable bill, and a channel like MTV got a piece of that money whether or not anyone watched. That, the host said, was really lucrative.
What the money bought, in Patel's list: writers' rooms, cinematographers, camera crews — all of whom could be unionized and bargain for better wages every year — plus accountants, healthcare professionals, benefits staff and highly paid chief executives.
He did not present it as a golden age. "A cable channel's overhead was massive, and maybe it was always all wrong. Maybe that overhead should have always flowed back to the content in some other way, but the business model was lucrative because the distribution was lucrative. We had convinced everyone in America to pay for television."
Conover added the second revenue line and the accounting that came with it: "And they sold ads against the shows. My show was in the black." The arithmetic was legible — production cost, ads sold, ad rates, carriage money — "The show was in the black. That's why we ran for five years."
6. The Ad Business Given Up
Conover's diagnosis of the streaming era has two parts, and the second one he flagged as his own theory rather than received wisdom.
The first is that the streamers cannot tell whether a show works. "One, the streamers don't know how to make a show in the black anymore." They count subscribers instead, and his example of the unanswerable question is how many people signed up for Apple TV Plus to watch Widows Bay. "They do this weird math."
The second is that the industry demolished decades of advertising relationships. CBS could charge what it did for The Late Show with Steven Colbert, he said, "Because CBS has been negotiating with Johnson & Johnson for 100 years" over what a spot on CBS is worth. "You cannot rebuild that in an instant."
He put the blame for that on one company's messaging. "Netflix tricked the entire industry into thinking there wasn't going to be any advertising ever again, they all destroyed those businesses, and now they're trying to rebuild them on Peacock."
On the other side, YouTube is a large advertising business but a scrambled one from a seller's point of view. "The advertisers that I'm able to get on my show are all direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands." Meal kits, subscription services, MeUndies — "A lot of them are great, but where's Coke and Chevy, you know what I mean? Car commercials used to pay for the media you watched."
7. Forced to Be a Businessman
The consequence Conover keeps returning to is not artistic but occupational: he did not want to run a company.
"I just wanted the David Zaslavs of the world to just give me a couple hundred grand a year and a union contract to make funny stuff. I don't need to make millions, right? But now I have to be an entrepreneur, and so does everybody else." His conclusion: "I was very happy being a laborer in the media industry, and I don't have that option anymore."
Patel put the same point in general terms: "I think for a lot of people, their dream in life was to be a laborer in the media and entertainment industries." Camera operators wanted to operate cameras and costume designers wanted to design costumes; now, he said, everyone ends up a multi-hyphenate entrepreneur.
Conover called the shift devastating, and dated it to the moment the podcast stopped being a marketing channel for television pitches and became the business itself. "It was disorienting and disheartening."
The compensation is autonomy, with one caveat he named himself: "Nobody tells me what to make except for the YouTube algorithm, which honestly does tell me what to make in pernicious ways that I grapple with every day." He also acknowledged his own head start — he already had a show with his face on it and his name in the title.
The people without that head start are the ones he keeps naming. "There are so many incredible writers, performers, technicians, and artists of all levels who just don't have work now." His cohort moved to Los Angeles because there was an industry there, the way writers had for a century; "You know, my friends — people who are incredibly funny comedians and writers and actors — are all going to grad school."
His two-year goal is to fund a payroll: enough money to employ a couple of comedy writers and to get his YouTube channel under union contracts. He was realistic about the distance. "We're in the rubble trying to rebuild anything close to the infrastructure we had before... infrastructure, once demolished, takes a long time to rebuild."
Patel brought up It's Not TV, the history of HBO whose authors had been on the show, and the two of them mourned a job title. Patel: "There were entire executives at HBO and their job was to just identify and produce good creative." Conover's report from the current market is that the good ones are leaving: "They either live in fear of a current streamer and are hoping they don't get fired, or they're going into other businesses."
8. Inside Conover's Business
Patel turned to the standing Decoder question about structure, and Conover itemized a business with four moving parts.
His own description of the shape of it: "Great question. It's everything everywhere all at once."
Live touring is the durable leg, because venues will always pay to bring him in. "People are always going to want to sit in the dark with a drink in their hand around other people."
A weekly podcast, funded by direct-to-consumer ads through his podcast network Headgum, which he called a wonderful partner.
Biweekly scripted monologues, written with freelance writers and researchers and delivered to camera. These sell at a higher ad premium: "We're currently able to sell those at a higher ad premium because when they pop, they get a couple hundred thousand views on YouTube."
The fragility is in the downside: "The problem is that if they underperform, you almost immediately have to have hard conversations with your advertisers, and it's very hard to get anything pre-funded."
A self-funded standup special, recorded at the Den Theater in Chicago. "It cost me five figures to shoot because I wanted to do it properly and make it look good." It is due on his YouTube channel in October, and he is hoping for a sponsor so he does not lose money on two years of material.
On why comedians now self-release, he described a race to the bottom: Netflix positioned itself as the home of standup after the decline of Comedy Central and HBO, but YouTube has more of it and gets the first click. For anyone below the very top, the calculation ends the same way: "Why not just control it and put it on my own channel?"
The fourth part is the pitch he is taking around — a deck for something that looks like an old cable commission. Patel asked how it was made: "Did you do it by hand or did you just let Claude do it for you? I've seen a lot of Claude decks lately, man."
Conover's answer: "Look, I do not work with AI for the creative stuff." He wrote the first draft by hand and uses a graphic designer who has made his decks for years.
He defended the deck as part of the work, not paperwork around it. "Literally, I figure out what the show is by writing the pitch document."
The step he cannot take incrementally is the funding one. "It's not necessarily a slow gradation where you can just build it piece by piece." Either a couple of hundred thousand dollars arrives or he keeps making the thing alone in his apartment — "That is not what I got in the business to do."
9. How He Makes Decisions
Asked for his decision-making framework — a question Patel noted has left some of the biggest chief executives in the world looking like deer in the headlights — Conover said it was a therapy question and then answered it in three parts.
The first is publishing to find out. "I am trying to embrace more of the build in public ethos of the internet" — put it out, see how it does, learn from that.
The model for it is a standup set: "You go do jokes in front of an audience, half of them don't work, and you stop doing them after the third try when they don't work. Then, you come up with something new, and the ones that lived are the ones in the special."
The second is that the hardest calls are about the business, not the material, and they are made without data. His worked example is the allocation of a day: make something for the ad-supported YouTube audience, or something for the Patreon subscribers who pay him directly?
"Do I make a custom podcast that only a few thousand people are going to hear rather than the 100,000 that might hear it on YouTube?" His answer is that you make those decisions in a vacuum, follow your intuition and adjust when it goes badly.
The third is the oldest. "My oldest decision-making rubric has always been to try and imagine myself as the audience." Making a basic cable show, he pictured himself at 15 on the floor in front of the television and asked what would excite him.
Patel put his own version of the problem back, and it is the most personal passage in the episode. He started as a blogger when newspaper columnists would not give him the time of day; now, he said, "Now the TikTokers look at me like I'm Gandalf at events. They call me the mainstream media, which is deeply hilarious, right?"
His calibration toward a younger audience is that they do not know there was another way — "I'm trying to plug the old USB cable into the new USB port. It just doesn't work."
The pressure he named is the direct-to-audience-for-free model plus a brand deal on the end of it, which he said "feels very dangerous to the creative process." His own unresolved list: "What is the most economically lucrative thing to do? What is the thing that will get me the most attention? What is the thing that lets me stay pure of heart?"
Conover's interjection was a fourth question: "What is the thing you actually want to do?" — and then, "What is the thing that lets you do what got you into the business in the first place?" Patel's answer was that his own version is "saying the iPod is better than the Zune."
10. Chasing the Algorithm
Conover's ambition is a digital-native late-night show, and the obstacle he described is that the platform rewards a narrower version of him than he wants to be.
He is aware the ambition might be nostalgia. Talking to people in their 20s, he said, the way he and Patel talk about MTV or Comedy Central is how they talk about early YouTube. "Sometimes, I'm like, is my desire to do something that feels more like a television show me being an old man about it?"
The internet-native alternative he admires is a one-person model he does not think he can copy: the video essayists ContraPoints and Hbomberguy, who each make roughly one three-hour video a year, carry a large Patreon audience and take no brand deals. Of ContraPoints he said: "She writes, films, edits, and set decorates every single piece of that herself. That's not the way I've ever worked."
The case for late night is that the audience is still there and only the business model is missing. "Everyone says late night is dying, except that millions of people still fucking watch it on YouTube." He cited Colbert getting millions of views on everything he posted and The Daily Show still doing it, then added: "But no one has built the digital-native business model."
His intuition about what people want has not changed with the platform: something 45 minutes long, watched on a couch, "funnier than just a bunch of fucking riffs." The performance of standup comedy on YouTube and in vertical video is his evidence that an old form can still work.
Then the money. "My old show on truTV cost like $700,000 an episode to make — $1 million by the end — and that's because it was good!" The old commissioning loop, in his description, was that someone at the company recognized a good idea, believed other people would watch it, and paid for it to be made well.
What replaced it penalizes range. "But when you are literally just chasing the algorithm for every single click, that is a lot harder. It disincentivizes experimentation and it disincentivizes putting the work in to make the thing good."
The worked example is his own analytics. His best numbers come from criticizing AI and the tech giants — "My top YouTube video ever from my recent run is like, Elon Musk Is An Idiot. That's the name of the video."
Against that, a video on the history of leaf blowers, prompted by walking past a gas-powered one in California where they are banned: "I spent three weeks making the video. It got 50,000 views."
His conclusion is a question about his own range — whether he is now allowed only one subject. "I would like to talk about other things." Subscribing, he noted, does not guarantee delivery: "I can try to grow my audience, but they're not going to see my video unless the algo shows it to them."
11. YouTube Is the Gatekeeper
Patel made the platforms' argument at length and on purpose, saying he would try to do it justice even though he mostly agrees with Conover. It is the longest stretch of host argument in the episode.
The steelman: what existed in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s was a series of gatekeepers inaccessible to most people. Patel's own case is that a kid in Wisconsin who wanted to make a late-night show had almost no path unless he moved to New York or Los Angeles and worked his way up.
"The economics of that might have been great and might have created a large middle class because there was enough overhead in that system to pay for a large middle class of creatives, but it mostly locked everybody out."
What the social platforms added, he said, is an instant marketing opportunity from a bedroom — a young comic in the middle of the country can film themselves until an audience exists. "The economics of it might be bad, but many, many more people have the opportunity."
Patel's own stake, stated plainly: he started as a blogger writing for AOL at $12 a post and got to compete with columnists who would otherwise have outranked him forever. "I can't quite reconcile how badly I feel about the economics of the industry today and the amount of opportunity that it has created for so many other people."
Conover's answer was one sentence, addressed to the platform: "You're the gatekeepers now." Patel's gloss: "The algorithm is the gatekeeper."
His test for the claim is to try starting from nothing. "Try to build from getting 200 views on videos that the algorithm gives you, and tell me that's not a gatekeeper." The old set was NBC, CBS and ABC; the new one is YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, and for long-form video he argues it is effectively just YouTube.
He does not accept that the distribution was ever democratized for long. It was, when people were passing links around themselves — the Numa Numa era — but not now. "They are taking some very loose signals from our swiping and turning it into algorithmic control of what we see. They have more power than anyone who worked for CBS or ABC ever did."
The aggravating factor is deniability. Ask the platforms whether they are in charge of what people see, he said, and the answer is that they are not — it is just an algorithm.
The loss he feels most is a person to persuade. "That's actually worse because at least in the old days, there was someone I could go impress. There was a person I could go talk to." Pitch a streamer now, he said, and the answer is that the algorithm said no.
His verdict on the whole arrangement: "The media ecosystem now is more concentrated and more closed off than it ever was before." He granted the one real gain — anybody can upload anything for free and YouTube will host it, which solved a genuine problem for people sending videos to their families — but as a broadcast medium he called it "grotesquely exploitative."
His analogy for the deal: "Imagine if you were driving for Uber and you didn't get paid. Instead, you got to try driving for Uber for years" — and were told that if the algorithm decided you were good at it, the company might start giving you a little money. His addition is that everybody in the country is doing this at once.
12. The Brand-Deal Bargain
Patel asked whether a unionized YouTube talk show can be paid for the only way YouTube currently pays for things — large integrated brand deals — and whether Conover is comfortable with that.
Patel described the mechanism without flattering it: you need a Coca-Cola or a Ford to pay to be integrated, which eventually means the host driving to every guest's house in the sponsor's car. He noted that the same pendulum has swung on the entertainment side for a long time, and that news has a different standard.
Conover's answer is that he does not love it and does it anyway. "You're constantly being asked to make compromises and deals that you'd rather not make."
His historical parallel is the start of broadcasting, not the end of it: "Again, YouTube is ABC, NBC, and CBS rolled into one. What were the earliest days of that broadcasting like? It was the Marlboro comedy hour, right?" Comedians said they loved smoking Marlboros between jokes; the separation of ads from programming took decades to arrive, and he thinks the separation is being rebuilt now on the same slow timetable.
He has lived on the good side of that separation. On truTV he made episodes taking apart advertisers — diamond engagement rings, razors, how capitalism scams you — with ads running in between, and got essentially no pushback beyond one request not to cover the NCAA during March.
His theory of what YouTube is actually building is a distribution monopoly rather than a network: "This is a bit of my own theory, but I think YouTube is trying not to be the channel. It wants to be the cable company." It wants the Adam Conover channel to be the cable channel, doing its own business development, while YouTube takes a cut of the pipe.
The evidence he offers is promotion without investment. "It's not giving anybody money, but it is starting to promote shows more. It's doing its own up-fronts. It's trying to connect people with advertisers."
Netflix, he said, is running the opposite experiment — sinking money into production at the high end — and the competition between the two is interesting mainly because both are giants.
What he would prefer is the subscriber-funded model, and the reason he cannot use it is that it only works for one person. "That model pushes you towards doing it all by yourself. My costs are zero, and so what do I have? Time." He wants writers, comedians and camera people, and "to do that, I need to get advertisers."
Patel added that the creators he knows describe the life as lonely enough that they have taken to calling other creators their colleagues, despite competing for the same attention.
13. The Ad He Turned Down
Patel raised the Worldcoin advertisement Conover read for Sam Altman's World, which drew a large backlash, and Conover corrected the premise before answering.
"I actually didn't take the money. I turned down the money. I took the ad down. I was not paid for all the trouble I got in."
The commercial logic that got him there is the same one every independent producer runs. "You have to look for if someone wants to pay you an outsized amount of money to not do that much work." His non-controversial example of the same trade is hosting a gala, which pays more than a standup gig for less work and pads out the rest.
He said he thought the product was worthless before he made the video, not after: "Well, this product honestly looks like fucking garbage." He took the offer anyway, expecting his audience to dislike it.
Seeing the keynote changed what he thought he could do with it. "This is the most comical vaporware I have ever seen. This is never going to come out." The gap he identified is that his audience only saw the horrible version, not the ridiculous one.
What he did instead was publish a roughly 25-minute video attacking the product, and decline to monetize it. "I did not monetize that video, so I didn't earn any income off of it."
His account of how this happens is about the absence of a line. "I think a lot of creators go through this moment where you're constantly being led along and tempted. Sometimes, you step over the line and you don't even realize you've done it until after you've done it."
He did not hedge the admission: "I'm happy to say that I fucked up by doing so. I also believe that you make mistakes, you acknowledge it, and you do something corrective, which is what I did my best to do." Most of his audience, he said, came back positive on the replacement video.
Patel drew the structural moral: inside a media company that lesson becomes institutional knowledge and nobody repeats it. "But you have to do that alone. Every creator has to do that alone."
His own long-running joke on the subject: "My joke on the show for ages is that every YouTuber gets their wings when they make the video about how mad they are at YouTube." Conover said he has one locked and loaded.
14. Organize the Channel
Patel's framing was that a union works because the two sides are repeat players with shared goals, and that nobody has that relationship with YouTube.
The host's version of the leverage problem: "If we got a thousand YouTubers together to demand terms from YouTube, it would still laugh. It wouldn't even take the call." There is always, he said, another thousand teenagers who will work for free. He also cited Semafor's Ben Smith, who had been on the show, on YouTube having built a system for individuals in which no one but YouTube has leverage.
Conover's organizing answer changes the target. "If I'm putting my labor organizer hat on, I don't think the organizing target is YouTube itself. I think it's the channel." He would organize MrBeast's staff rather than the platform.
The premise that makes it possible is that the top of YouTube is not made of individuals: "It's actually not the case that all the biggest YouTubers are individuals. The biggest YouTubers are companies." Adam Savage, he said, is basically making a cable show every single day; Hank Green's output implies a staff. The Verge itself is a YouTube channel with a unionized staff.
Consolidation, in his view, makes this more likely rather than less. He expects YouTube and the biggest channels both to get bigger, and bigger channels to get large enough to organize. If the top 100 channels grew enough to demand a better revenue split, "Yeah, they could."
The precedent he reaches for is carriage, not labor: it becomes "more of a B2B negotiation," like the cable channels fighting Spectrum and Charter. He was candid that this might not help the people working for those channels.
His name for the endpoint: "So, YouTube is making itself a cable monopoly on top of the internet."
The part that cannot be organized is everyone else — the ambient, semi-professional posting that fills the feed. One viral video, one video a week to promote a dentistry practice, one video a week from someone who hopes to go pro and will not. "That's the huge dark matter of social media. None of those people will be paid. Those people are truly un-unionizable."
So the remedy he lands on is public, not private: "Sorry, but what it'll eventually take is the government making some regulations around this." He pointed to states treating gig workers such as rideshare drivers as the live front, with battles in California and elsewhere, and said the process is slow.
His historical read is that none of this is new. "This looks to me like we're doing the history of the labor movement again. The capitalists have consolidated. They figured out a new industrial revolution that has impoverished everybody and had us working for penny wages." He expects it to take decades, and hopes it will not take what the late 19th century took.
Patel noted that one of The Verge's reporters, Mia Sato, is reporting out a thesis that influencers are the new gig workers.
15. Why Hollywood Is Worth It
Patel closed with the hardest version of the question: Conover has campaigned against the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger, but if Hollywood is doomed anyway, is he just slowing down the apocalypse?
Conover's first answer is that friction has value on its own: "Even if the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger happens and it costs them a lot more time and money, well, that'll make the next monopolist think a little longer about the next monopoly."
He sees an actual shift in antitrust, naming former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan and former commissioner Alvaro Bedoya as doing what he called amazing work out of office, and noting that even Republicans are doing some antitrust.
The core of his objection is to the story the industry tells about itself: "The most pernicious lie the tech industry tells is about its own inevitability." His paraphrase of it — "Oh, oopsie! Hey, we just invented something so good that everything you used to like has to die" — is followed by the flat contradiction: "No, these people killed our businesses purposefully with mal intent."
His first-hand case is the pivot to video. He was at CollegeHumor when Facebook, in his account, lied about the traffic its videos were getting; the company moved a large part of its business across and "it cratered a huge amount of CollegeHumor's business." CollegeHumor later became Dropout TV, which he called a success story he is proud of.
He was explicit that the argument is not self-interest. He misses union health insurance and a room of funny people, and he is sad about the creative class, but the reason he is making the case is the audience. "People still do like movies. Talk to people." The complaint he hears is not that nobody wants films, but that nobody can find a good one.
His evidence that the demand is intact is this year's receipts: "By the way, the box office is having a really good year because they made a couple good fucking movies this year." Big and small, with Obsession, Backrooms and The Odyssey named, and even the Marvel slate having a decent run.
The closing claim is about what is at stake: "The movies are one of America's greatest cultural legacies. It's like the movies, jazz, and soul food are America's three biggest contributions to world culture."
His last word rejects the tradeoff entirely. "We can, in fact, have a world that has room for YouTube and television and the movies and, by the way, plays and novels and all the other art forms that people love. We just have to not let these idiots and assholes destroy their own and each other's businesses."
Bonus Insights
Conover's opening self-description frames everything else: asked how many roles he has, he named five and then placed himself among "many people trying to make my way" in a landscape where the incumbents are destroying themselves.
Patel's running joke about the show's format — asked why every guest freezes on the decision-making question, he said "That's all the show is. It's important people doing therapy with me."
Conover on why he will not hand the pitch deck to a model: he treats writing the document as the act of designing the show, so outsourcing it would be outsourcing the idea. Patel's response to the refusal was "Wow. You are committed to human labor, my friend," and Conover's was that the whole point of life is to be around other people.
The two of them agreed on the one thing the platform era did solve. Uploading a video of your baby to send to your sister used to be hard; "YouTube solved that problem for a lot of people."
Conover's reason for going to the World keynote in the first place was curiosity rather than the fee. "Part of the reason I went was that I thought that this thing was going to be weird and it was. I wanted to go see." He said he ended up proud of the video that came out of the fiasco.
Patel's aside on the Orb coverage was that any write-up of it which is not literally sponsored content leaves a reader wondering what everyone involved thinks they are doing.
On the possibility that he is simply out of step, Conover named the trap himself: "You don't want to be the Steve Buscemi meme, right? Show up and try to do the thing."
Conover's bottom line is that the media business was not taken by a better technology but given away by its own operators, and that the platform which collected the audience is a gatekeeper with more power than any network ever had and nobody inside it who will admit to holding it — which is why he thinks the fix runs through labor organizing at the channel level and through government regulation, not through waiting for the algorithm to get fairer.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
YouTube (The subject of the episode: the largest streaming service on television sets, which Conover says took roughly 60% of the old TV schedule and is now becoming "a cable monopoly on top of the internet")
Netflix (The company he blames for convincing the industry both that everyone needed a mini-HBO and that advertising was over)
truTV (Home of Adam Ruins Everything for 65 episodes, at about $700,000 an episode rising to $1 million)
Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney and Paramount (The incumbents in Patel's framing, and the merger Conover has campaigned against)
CBS (His example of advertising relationships built over a century, and of the rate The Late Show could command because of them)
Instagram and TikTok (The platforms Patel says pay nothing and almost nothing; Conover argues YouTube does not really compete with them because of the format difference)
Headgum (His podcast network, which sells the direct-to-consumer ads that fund the weekly show)
Patreon (The subscriber income he weighs against YouTube reach when deciding what to make on a given day)
World (Sam Altman's identity project, whose ad Conover read, pulled and refused payment for)
CollegeHumor and Dropout (Where he worked during the Facebook pivot-to-video collapse, and the subscription business it became)
MrBeast (The recruiting promise the word "creator" is built on, and the staff Conover says he would organize rather than trying to organize YouTube)
ContraPoints and Hbomberguy (The one-person, no-brand-deal model he admires and says he cannot copy)
Adam Savage's Tested and Hank Green (His evidence that the biggest YouTube channels are companies with staff, not individuals)
Uber (His analogy for the platform bargain — years of unpaid driving in the hope the algorithm eventually pays)
Apple TV+ and Peacock (The subscriber math he calls weird, and the place the industry is trying to rebuild the ad business it demolished)
MeUndies (His shorthand for the direct-to-consumer advertisers who replaced Coke and Chevy on his show)
Writers Guild of America West (The union he sits on the board of, and the contracts he wants to bring his YouTube channel under)
The Den Theatre (Where he self-funded a standup special at a five-figure cost)
Semafor (Ben Smith's outlet; Patel cited his argument that YouTube built a system in which only YouTube has leverage)
Books & Resources Mentioned
It's Not TV (The history of HBO whose authors appeared on Decoder; Conover called it fantastic and said "It'll make you cry with what we've lost")
Elon Musk Is An Idiot (His highest-performing recent video, and his example of the one subject the algorithm reliably rewards)
His 25-minute video on the World Orb (The unmonetized replacement for the sponsored video he pulled)
Sitcoms don't exist (The Conover video Patel cites at the top of the episode)
The Verge on the new YouTube Partner Program rules (The show's own reporting behind Patel's claim that it is harder than ever to start earning on YouTube)
The Verge on Conover and the World ad (The episode's source for the controversy he is asked about)
The Verge on the World identity-verifying Orb (The coverage Conover credits during that exchange)
AP on conditions for MrBeast's staff (The reporting behind his claim that the people making the biggest channels are underpaid)
Neal Mohan on Decoder and Adam Mosseri on Decoder (The platform chief executives whose argument Patel reconstructs)
Ben Smith on Decoder (Cited for the point that real careers are being built on a platform where creators have no leverage)
Hank Green on Decoder and Hank Green and Sam Reich on Dropout (Earlier episodes behind the staffed-channel and CollegeHumor-to-Dropout points)
The Numa Numa video (His marker for the era when people, not algorithms, decided what spread)
If this was worth your time, send it to someone closer to the industry than you are.
Get the latest market chatter as it happens: