America’s longest-running online political talk show announces first sponsorship deal.
Cenk Uygur is the bombastic host of America’s longest-running online political talk show, The Young Turks (TYT for short), and he wants to start a revolution in the US. “I don’t mean it like the Tea Party guys who talk about guns and violence, I mean a real political revolution,” the former lawyer from New Jersey explains, referring to protests in the US by the Tea Party movement, which supports constitutionally limited government and free markets.
TYT, which came to national prominence in 2005 with a 99-hour “Live, On Air Filibuster” during supreme court nomination hearings, is also part of a media revolution. Its filibustering was quickly followed by a decision to launch on YouTube. It now averages 13 million viewers a month.
Last week, TYT announced its first sponsorship deal with Netflix, the online film rental company. It has deals with other online businesses, such as godaddy.com, SquareSpace and GameFly, in the pipeline as well. Not shy of self-promotion, Uygur, a fixture on TV in the US, says: “We are a rare online show that is profitable and expanding. We’ve hired three people in the last five months. The growth and the sponsors were organic. We didn’t come in with a lot of money or a big sponsor. We created the show, found the audience, then got the sponsors.”
Uygur conceived TYT because he believes that online TV will eclipse network programming and that Americans are starved of public service journalism. “We’re looking for journalism in all the wrong places. What’s the last story anyone on television in America broke?”
TYT began life as a liberal talkshow on Sirius Satellite Radio in 2002. In 2006, Uygur decided to turn down a $250,000 radio-only deal and TYT became the first daily streaming online talk show. It went from zero to 30,000 viewers in a month; in February this year it reached more than 200m views on YouTube. “Before if you got on CNN or ABC in America that was huge and that was the best thing, if you were a cable station it was great – they always bragged about ‘Oh, we’re in 72m homes’. Now I think, so what? YouTube is in every home.”
TYT covers news and entertainment, and Uygur runs a tight ship, with just six full-time and three part-time staff and a monthly budget of $45,000. Income comes from subscriptions and YouTube revenue sharing, and between June 2008 and December 2009 it doubled to more than $60,000 a month, with margins increasing steadily since then. TYT has no advertising budget: its fans, the TYT Army, provide promotion by tweeting links or posting clips on social networking sites.
In fact, if you’re looking for a job, the TYT army is recruiting. “At this point,” Uygur says, “we only hire from our audience … We’re trying to give you news so you’re part of the process – the viewers are the Young Turks. If I get something wrong on air, I get 1,000 emails correcting me instantly and most of our story suggestions come from viewers.”
The show has been able to keep pace with the mighty networks it competes with by using its popularity to book a wide variety of guests, some of whom may not return: “I heard from [US Senate majority leader] Harry Reid’s office, after his interview, that we were effectively blacklisted for future interview requests. I didn’t really shed a tear. We’re gonna be all right.”
In terms of technology awards, TYT beat the competition, including the BBC and Rush Limbaugh, the leading talk radio host, to win Best Political Podcast 2009 at the Podcast Awards and Best Political News Site 2009 at the Mashable Awards. The show was also nominated for the Audience’s Choice Award 2010 at the Streamy Awards.
“We worked really hard at getting all the details right. Whether it’s the tagging of the video or the thumbnail … What ultimately mattered most was that we were delivering something the American media wasn’t. The American media is delivering nothing but fakeness,” Uygur argues.
So how will TYT evolve? Expansion, he says. He and the team have recently launched a sister network, What the Flick , on YouTube, which is hosted by the film critic Ben Mankiewicz. He plans to build more online networks: TYT sports, TYT Moms, TYT food – “Whatever matches our brand, and our brand is just: genuine, real and generally progressive.”
TYT apparently gets “a huge amount of feedback” from Britain. “We cover a lot of stories from the UK because your newspapers are more interesting – some of them are just having fun, but at least they’re covering interesting stories.”
When he was in London for the Changing Media Summit, Uygur was recognised a couple of times on the tube and in the street. Not bad for a American news anchor who has never had a show broadcast on TV.