In October 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. On January 1, 2007, brothers Hank and John Green began making videos of each other and sharing them publicly on YouTube. That same year, YouTube launched its affiliate program, which shares ad revenue between YouTube and the people who make videos. The split was 55/45 in favor of the creators.
The affiliate program essentially launched the creator economy as we know it today, and YouTube is the gold standard for creators. It’s something we’ve heard in every creator-focused Decoder episode we’ve ever done: if you can make it big on YouTube, you can make it a career.
This is not the case on other platforms. There is no revenue share on Instagram. There is no revenue share on Twitter. In fact, there is no revenue from Twitter. And importantly, there is no revenue share in TikTok. Instead, there’s something called a creator fund, which shares a fixed pool of money, about a billion dollars, distributed among all creators on the platform. This means that as more creators join TikTok, the money is split more ways and each individual creator can make less.
In this episode I talk to Hank Green. Now, as you’d expect from one of YouTube’s original and most successful users and creators, Hank has very strong opinions about the platforms and how they pay creators. In addition to being an individual creator, he is also the CEO of Complexly, a 50-person company that creates educational content about science, history, and art across about 20 YouTube channels and podcasts. And if it weren’t for YouTube ad money, none of these shows would exist.
So, in February, Hank made a video about how TikTok’s “creator fund” is a really bad deal for creators and said that YouTube’s model is still better. As it happens, this was right around the time I was talking to YouTube Chief Product Officer Neil Mohan. After that episode with Neil came out, one of Hank’s friends tweeted it to him and said he should go on Decoder and talk about it. So Hank invited himself on the show – of course we said yes; this is hank green!
This episode goes pretty deep into our feelings about participation in the internet culture economy and the relationship between huge platform companies and the communities that build on them. But it’s good, and it’s not really something any of us talk about enough.
Okay, Hank Green. Creator and CEO of Complexly. Here we are.
Hank Green is the CEO of Complexly and a very popular internet creator. Welcome to Decoder.
Thanks. I listen all the time and learn a lot from the conversations you have, so thanks for having them.
Get ready for the org chart questions, man. They are coming.
I’ve thought of it as, “I don’t feel satisfied with my own answer.”
You’re also our first guest to effectively invite yourself onto the show in a tweet. I appreciate that.
In the whole story?
Yes
A friend of mine asked, “Hank, why haven’t you been on Decoder?” I said “Please” and it worked.
“Don’t mind if I do!” We interviewed Neil Mohan, who is YouTube’s Chief Product Officer. He talks about his creator fund for YouTube Shorts. TikTok also has a Creator Fund. You are very suspicious of artists’ means.
I hate them.
Here it is. It’s the whole show, y’all. It’s been two minutes and now we’re going to run about five ads.
Not only do I hate them, but they are very bad and everyone should hate them with me. Okay, great. That’s how Twitter works, right?
yes Promo code is Decoder. See you next week. So you are a businessman. You’ve built a long-standing, stable business on the shifting sands of the internet for creators for over 15 years. I want to talk about it.
Start with Complex. What is? What are your goals with the company?
Complexly is an educational media company that focuses on creating things through the Internet that are free and accessible to everyone and as good as what you can see on TV or sold to schools by larger educational media companies. It’s hard. There are certainly things that these big companies do that we don’t. It felt like the only way to compete in this world was to just make it and put it out there. If students and teachers like it, they will use it. If they don’t, then they won’t.
It’s a complicated business to put together, and it’s very diverse—which is a nice way of saying we couldn’t make it work without trying like eight different things at the same time. There are a couple of really big YouTube channels and podcasts, which is most of what we do, and then some other social media stuff. It’s been 10 years now and we’re making it work. There are definitely days when I feel like someone should just come out and give me $10 million so I don’t have to worry all the time, but it’s not a business, I guess.
Bezos where are you man? [Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon.] There are billionaires out there somewhere. They have to watch the channels.
They should be listening to this podcast, right?
I mean, that’s the whole point. They listen, then want to participate to talk about their organizational charts. The entire podcast is bait.
You’ve actually turned a company around before. You started VidCon with your brother—which was the creators’ conference—then you turned it over to Viacom. What was that process like for you? Is this something you would do again?
I mean, oddly enough, it was the second company I sold. The first was Subbable, which we sold on Patreon. It was basically the exact same thing that Patreon did, except we didn’t have the technology. To sign up, you had to email someone to ask, “Can I be on your platform?” It was a wonderful, easy project to merge these two companies. I’m glad we did.
The Viacom thing was much bigger and more complicated and I had to really think about it. It’s always been something I remain ambivalent about, though less so now that we’ve seen two years of a pandemic. In that period, we would have gone bankrupt eight times if we hadn’t had a bigger company behind us.
One of the reasons we wanted to do it so badly was that we felt very vulnerable to the world. I wasn’t specifically thinking about a pandemic, but any volatility is scary when you’re basing your entire business on three days in the summer. At first I thought we would sell to a conference company. I thought, “Some company that organizes conferences will hold this conference.” I realized that if we did that, the company would try to make as much profit as possible. Whereas a media company would try to make it as cool as possible to look cool. We’re not a big part of Viacom’s budget at VidCon.
This is the event game for media companies. That’s why they do it.
It seemed like a much better outcome than someone trying to squeeze every penny out of it. You make a conference great by creating a great event that can also serve to make you look good and help build relationships so you can get your executives on stage. Your real goal should be to make a good conference, not a profitable one.
You just said, “I hope someone gives me $10 million.” After you’ve gone through the process of selling two companies, do you feel like “I’ve got to sell at some point and ride off into the sunset”?
No, I don’t like the sunset. The sunsets are terrible. Have you ever actually seen one? So ugly.
But yes, I am a worker and I like to do things. I often wish I had time to do other work. I think, “How do I build these businesses so that they have great leadership? Am I mentoring enough or systematizing my own brain enough?” It’s better than thinking, ‘Everything would be so much easier if I just did my job and didn’t have to help other people.’
I really like what both of my companies are doing right now and I feel really good about them. It’s hard, but I’m certainly not thinking about acquiring these companies. I think about, “How do I find great leadership to support me?”
Here comes the decoder questions. How many people are in these companies?
DFTBA — a company that helps creators make great products and sell those products to their communities — is about 50. There’s product development and customer support, but most of it is on the warehouse side. Complexly is also about 50 people, most of whom are focused on individual shows, although there are a few who jump between crews.
Let’s focus on Complex. We can do a whole episode on goods, logistics and shipping on request.
Why do I know so much about all this? That was not my intention.
I think I should disclose that our thrift store is DFTBA.
Vox works with us.
Yes, so buy an EMAILS t-shirt. It will help us both. The promo code is Decoder. It’s the best shirt we’ve all made together, to be honest with you. But let’s focus on Complex. You said that most people focus on individual shows. How is it structured in general?
Much of our editorial—the words that come out of people’s mouths—is based on contract. Especially with Crash Course we will teach a chemistry course. We don’t want to hire a chemistry writer only to fire him after completing a year-long course, so we have many expert contractors who do the fact-checking, the curriculum stuff, the course design, and the actual writing of the thing. We also have something of an editorial team that knows how to turn the words of smart people into intensive courses. It’s similar to how it works on SciShow or Eons, which is our prehistoric world podcast and YouTube show.
These shows live in their own worlds. They usually have an editorial guy who doesn’t necessarily write most of this stuff, but manages people on a contract basis. Then there is the production team responsible for turning it into…
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