The founder, CEO and lead anchor of the insurgent progressive news brand shares his pre-election outlook on what it's been like covering the 2024 presidential race and discusses the state of the TYT business from his days as a YouTube pioneer more than two decades ago.
Welcome to another episode of Strictly Business, the podcast in which we speak with some of the brightest minds working in the media business. Today, I'm Andrew Wallenstein with Variety. As we head into the home stretch before the November election. This is crunch time for the plethora of media companies who cover politics, count among them a twenty two year old operation based here in Los Angeles known as the Young Turks. To talk about the business of TYT, I am joined today by its founder, CEO and lead anchor, Jenk Yuger. We'll get into it with him right after the break. I am joined in studio today by Jenk Huger, who, if you don't know the name from his work at TYT, you might recall he had a brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination that ended earlier this year. Certainly ask him about that and the election, but today's focus is on his work in the news space. Thanks for coming in, Jenk.
Thank you, Andrew, appreciate it.
So, just for the uninitiated, before you even explain what TYT is all about, I actually want to talk about the scale of your business first. In this day and age, anyone can put a logo on a web page and say they're a news operation. That's obviously not you guys. So if you will paint a picture of the growth you guys have achieved all this time.
Yeah, So we are at about twenty seven million subscribers across all the platforms now, about eighteen million on YouTube, six million on the flagship show, The Young Turks. But it's now a network, so we have fast channels that are on almost all the fast channel platforms. We do everything from one minute TikTok videos to twenty four hour channels, about at least a dozen platforms so far. So you type iny or The Young Turks anywhere and you'll get us and tyts for the network. Young Turks is for the flagship show. And we've been around since the beginning of YouTube. We're actually the first YouTube partner ever, Yeah, which makes me the original YouTuber. So when I say that we have twenty nine billion lifetime views, that's both impressive, but at the same time, it's been a while, okay, so I'm fair about it. In fact, we're the longest running show in Internet history, so that's pretty neat, and I feel good about those, you know, hallmark achievements and the size that we've gotten to.
And I would imagine in this election season, the audience increases. People are paying attention like never before. You're seeing that.
Yeah, of course, election season views always go up, and you know, we've got hundreds of millions of views every month, and that feels great. But I'll tell you there is a wrinkle to that, and that makes the story interesting. We are doing something pretty different now than than almost anyone online, and it's so new school that it's almost old school, and it is costing us audience. Okay, so that's where it gets interesting. Tell us about it. Yeah. So, but we believe we're going to get a larger audience in that. And so we're telling the truth. And you might think, come on, jank, everybody tries to tell the truth, and you don't have a monopoly on it, et cetera. I understand all that, but do they So let me challenge that way of thinking. If you go on MSNBC or Morning Joe or The View and you say, for example, the photo op that that Trump did at McDonald's was actually a brilliant piece of marketing, they'll say, outrageous, you terrible, how dare you? He's the worst. Right, you have to be honest with your audience and you have to say what he's doing right and what he's doing wrong, what Kamala Harris is doing right, what Kamala Harris is doing wrong. But when you do that, the partisans get very very angry. You can alienate them.
They won't come back because you said something they don't like exactly.
So what's happening online now, unfortunately, is everyone is giving people what they want. And you say, wait, why is that unfortunate because what they want to hear is not necessarily what's true. So it's created a news industry that is filled to the rim with people. Whether it's mainstream media or social media and new digital media, they're all giving the audience what they want. Oh, Trump is the best, Trump is the worst, Kamma is the best, Kamala is the worst, and no one's actually getting the truth. And we're trying to give them the truth. And then that alienates people and it's a dangerous strategy we have of actually doing the news.
Well, but are you seeing signs of alienation? Do you see people reacting because you're not queuing to a party line partisan wise?
Oh? Definitely. And so it goes from ideology to partisanship. So on the ideology front, when crime rose, we accurately reported the crime rose. And that angered a lot of leftists in our audience, and they said, how dare you make the numbers basically fit your ideology instead of your ideology fitting the facts. And so now they wouldn't use it in those terms. They'd say, you're helping right wing framing by pointing out the facts. Well, I don't think you're helping your side by denying them, right, And so they got very mad at that. And then we said, look, I know the right wing is drumming up hatred against the trans community, and we fight against that, and we've been fighting against that when no one else was on our side. We were fighting for trans rights, gay rights, etc. And in fact, we held Biden and Obama accountable when they weren't for legalizing gay marriage. And back then people forget we were considered outrageous radicals for daring to criticize Obama and saying he's got the wrong position on gay marriage. They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You all want gay marriage, but don't criticize the sainted, benighted Barack Obama. See even as I say that, I guarantee you there's pete Democrats in your audience who are a little rankled by that framing, Like, whoa, what are you saying? Are you saying I'm biased? Are you saying that Obama's not benighted? And that sounds like a right winger? No, I just told you I hate Trump. I'm debating eight pro Trump guys at once, right, and I've done that all over media. But you lose credibility if you're not honest, right, And now, don't get me wrong, I'm not letting the right wing off the hook. Their right wing media is nuts and they say things that aren't anywhere near true. And Domanian has got what eight hundred and thirty five million dollars to prove it right? Right, So Fox is yes. So we're not saying Trump is great, and the lunacy that the right wing media has, we're knocking down every one of those mythologies, like Jesus Now they're at eating cats and dogs like that's just right. They hate the establishment. I don't like the establishment. We could talk about that. I think that's an interesting topic, right, But just because you don't like the establishment doesn't mean you should believe lunatic conspiracy theories.
Right, So it sounds like you're giving it to people on the right and the left. But I think we should make clear for those not familiar with TYT and correct me if I'm wrong. You guys are on the left, you guys are progressive. What is it like in this election cycle speaking to a progressive audience?
Honestly's a tough business, but you have to do it right. You have to give the analysis and then we give our perspective, and our perspective is that of progressive populace. So what does that mean? I think there are two political spectrums. One that is hidden and that especially to the establishment, that they're not even aware exists. The one that we're all familiar with is left right. And on that, let's just stick with the main show because all of our hosts have different points of view, and there are a lot to have different points of view. And TYT as a network has a mission statement which is boldly pursued the truth, challenge the establishment, and drive positive change. Okay, so as long as you're fitting that mission statement, you're allowed to have any opinion you like. You're an out to have any politics you want right. So for the main show, it's me and my co hosts Ana Kasparian, and our politics is center left. It's not extreme left. We take it on the extreme left all the time. It's definitely not right wing. And it's not what mainstream media would call moderate. But I think what mainstream media calls moderate is not actually moderate. I think it's a radical corporate agenda which brings us to the other part of the political spectrum, the hidden part, and that's establishment versus populist. And there we're very populist. We're on the one end of the spectrum on that one.
And when it comes to establishment, I'm hearing perhaps you're not just talking about government, you're talking about the media that follows the government as well.
Yeah, definitely yes. So for people who have watched television and makestream media their whole life, or read the New York Times, when I talk about the establishment, they say, what water? Okay, you know the old story about the fish. You ask him how's the water, and he says, what water? Right.
But in terms of your own company, which is for profit, you take advertising, how do you not as you grow fall into the same trap where you are beholden to corporate America. And I also it's hard for me to believe, given the scale that you've achieved, that political parties aren't whispering in your ear what their agenda is as well. So all this goes by way of saying, how do you really keep yourself apart from everyone else? And say, no, we're the antidote to the media problem.
Yeah, so this great question has interesting technical answers as well as ideological answers. So one is that we get a decent amount of our revenue from our members, and so that way we say you're our bosses instead of giant corporate advertisers or politicians, et cetera, and we serve you. And so when you tie your financial incentive to your audience, you're better off than if you tie your financial incentives to other factors that can then lead you in a direction that isn't true.
But just interrupt for a second. How big a chunk of the revenues that you get come from subscribers as opposed to advertise.
About a third? Okay, so that's a significant chunk. So if you lose a third of your revenue, you're in a lot of trouble. Ye, right, but if you gain more subscribers tyt dot com slash join. If you gain more subscribers, then that's the audience saying at a boy, okay, this is the news that makes sense. And by the way, if it doesn't make sense to you, that you don't join it.
Right.
So now, but we do get advertisers, and so what do we do. Number one, we do mainly programmatic, so we are not directly tied to the advertisers. It goes through a third party, so they don't care what we're saying, and we don't care what their corporate position is, and so it gives a good distance, so you're not overly influenced by that. The other thing that happens, there's a giant hidden advertising base again that we don't see much talk of in the mainstream media, which is the politicians themselves. So in the last cycle, they spent seventeen billion dollars, almost all of which went to ads in mainstream media. And so that's one of the reasons why they don't speak out too harshly against politicians because politicians are some of their top advertisers, they're top clients. We don't do that, so you will see political ads on TYT, but they went through a third party, and so there's no influence on us at all. In fact, a lot of times you'll see Republicans running ads on it. We don't endorse that, and we don't care. You can say whatever you want to our audience. Our audience is open minded, open hearted, and we know how to tell reality from fiction. And so if you want to run the ads, that makes sense. Tons of undecided voters there, but we're not soliciting that. Now. Sometimes we do direct ads and I'm happy to do it, but generally speaking, it's with more progressive outlets or outlets that we agree with. So good example is Aspiration, longtime sponsor of ours. They're a financial institution that is more progressive, so they don't put your money in fossil fuel companies, whereas the major banks do. So we love Aspiration. They created a green marketplace where there's eighty two other good guy companies and so if you're a good guy company trying to do good in the world, oh, we love it. And that's the alignment we want. Because we're trying to set up win wins.
I say, I say, well, we will have more with jenk Uger after the break, be right back and we are back with Jenk Huger, CEO, founder lead anchor of the Young Turks and the Tyt Empire. Jenk, you'd referred earlier to your seminal role in, you know, the formation of pro content on YouTube. YouTube, is that still sort of the main platform because you are doing other things, You're on podcasts, you're on the other social media, But is that still the main attraction.
Yeah, that's where two thirds of our subscribers are. That's where the line's share of the audience is for the whole internet. Really, if we're you know, looking at it holistically, YouTube is the giant, and so we go to where the audience is. It's always been on YouTube, and it's still on YouTube today, but we are on all the other platforms, and sometimes different platforms, depending on how they set their algorithms, will spike. So for a while we actually had more viewers on Facebook than we did on YouTube. But then Facebook decided to deprioritize news because the Republicans yelled at him too much. So, actually, to be fair to Facebook, both sides yelled at them too much, and they're like, well, we don't want the headache of dealing with these politicians who demand that we cheat on their side, right, So I get why they did it, but snap's a big outlet for us. The fast channels are a huge outlet for us. So our strategies be everywhere. And that is juxtaposed, for example, to the Joe Rogan strategy, which is just be in one place so he aggregates and to be not only to be fair, but to give him credit. In terms of business strategy, when you aggregate all your viewers in one place, it seems bigger than it is, so people look at it and go, who I see a million people downloaded that stream? Right, Oh my god, that seems gigantic.
But that's the only place you can get it. It's sort of like an artificial scarcity.
I guess yeah, or you bring them there. And it's a perfectly fine strategy, and in fact it works better because it affects advertisers more. It affects media more once they see with their own eyes, oh that's a million people. Okay, you're a big show. We get three to five hundred million viewers a month, but they're dispersed through hundreds of videos. So for the media, that's a little bit harder to grasp. They're like, where where, And I'm like, well, here's the numbers, so you can see it. We can invite you to the behind the scenes and show you the actual numbers. And what's funny, Andrews. Sometimes I'll see online hosts do this. They're like, oh, you know Young Turns Saint, claiming they're the largest online news show. Let's look this up, and then the guy will go, holy crap when he sees the numbers. It's literally happened on air, and so they don't realize that. Also, tyit has all these different channels on YouTube and other places and all these different shows. So Rebel Headquarters is a channel we have on YouTube that's actually larger than the Young Turks.
Oh didn't know that.
Yeah, See, almost nobody knows that the Rebel Headquarters is twenty progressive hosts who are making content day in and day out, and so we're winning the Internet in ways that people can't even see.
Do you have a sense of what is sort of the next level of growth, what you want to achieve for the brand, you know, post election growth plans of any kind.
Yeah, So when we challenged our own side, as I mentioned earlier that takes a little bit of courage because you do lose some audience. So we lost some subscribers and we and in this election cycle, as we constantly call out both Trump and Kamala Harris, the partisans often hear only the criticism of their side, right, so they bake in that you're not supposed to like Trump. But if you ever criticize Biden or Kamala Harris, as I certainly did when I ran against Joe Biden, right, Yeah, then people get very mad. So then we lose some establishment Democrats from our audience, and that happened, right. But my goal for the long term is this is the online news show. This is where everybody can come and it doesn't matter which side you're on, and we're going to be tough to both of your sides, and you're going to need to brace for impact, and we're going to be honest with you even when it's painful. Okay, but what you're going to get is the one place where we're actually telling the truth.
But when you say that you've got this goal for the long term, and in the same breath you're talking about having thrown your hat into the presidential arena. Who's to say in twenty twenty eight you're not there again running and maybe actually sticking it out for the long term. What happens to your media business if you've sort of pivoted.
Yeah, So it's a great question as to why I ran and how does that interact with the business right. So I ran out of desperation, and I said that clearly when I announced in the first interview, I said, this is an act of desperation because I try to get other people to run against Joe Biden for about a year. So I talked to about a dozen progressives and said he's incredibly weak. He's going to lose to Donald Trump. Please take him on, not just for the progressive base, and so progressives can win. And by the middle of the way through that, I dropped the progressive part because I'm like, look, he's going to lose to Trump. There's no question about it. The professionals understand that. That's why, not just me, but David Axelrod and James Carvill and Nate Silver and Ezra Kleine. We were all out there saying, for God's sake, look at the numbers. He has no chance of winning. Please get him out of the race. So that's why I ran because I deeply care about the news. I deeply care about the results. So and I don't mind being activists. I started Justice Democrats. That is the group that got aoc Rashieta to Lee bilhan Omar and Aana Presley elected, and then Corey Bush and Jamal Bowman, et cetera, etcetera. There's now eleven Justice Democrats in Congress. Actually, with the loss of Bowman and Bush, it will be down to nine. So my point is, I'm not dispassionate about the news. I'm passionate about the news. I don't understand the old model of the wolf blitzers who read the prompter and go, well, all these children died, but I don't care. We're moving on. No, all these children died. I care a lot. Sixty eight thousand people die every year in America because they don't have health insurance. I care a lot about those sixty eight thousand. I think we should change it. And if you want to get into how you change it, well then you have to be honest and say our politicians are all taking legalized bribes called campaign contributions. They take them from the drug industry, the health insurance industry, the oil companies, the banks, and they do exactly as their donors tell them. So that's why we do predictions on the show, and we're right almost every time. It's not because we're geniuses, it's because the answer is super simple. Follow the money. That's what journalism was supposed to do, and we lost track of that. If you follow the money, you see that the politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, vote with the donors almost every single time.
If you take that tack, and I don't want to be so cynical as to call it attack, but you know, are politicians themselves going to come on your air as you guests to talk or are they going to be too scared? Is the position that you're taking. I guess I'm saying, come at a great cost if you can't do the things that might help even take your audience even bigger.
Yeah, it does come with a cost, and the cost is it might surprise you. It's not access to the politicians themselves. That yes, that happens. So there's brave folks who come on and we give very tough interviews. So we're traditional in that sense. I got Bernie to change his position on counting delegates in the middle of twenty sixteen in the when it was the most heated in the middle of an interview. Okay, and because he wasn't right about that, And even though I supported Bernie in every other way, I challenge them on the that he was wrong on and he conceded it. Okay. We had bare knuckle brawls almost with Toulcy Gabbert, John Delaney, Tim Ryan, Rocanna, but the brave ones, the honest ones like ro Coanna and Tim Ryan, and I agree more with Road than I do with Tim, but I give Tim a ton of credit. They both keep coming back on and saying, this is my position, I'm willing to defend it, and our audience deeply respects them for that. Okay. But when we lose, do we lose access to politicians because we give super tough interviews. Definitely right, Kamala Harris wouldn't be caught anywhere near the young turns, but neither were Donald Trump. I mean, there's no way on earth they'll come on. And I tell them, if I was you, I wouldn't come on because you're not going to do well. We're going to challenge you on the truth and you're you're gonna flounder. Okay, So it doesn't get any more honest than that. So how does it hurt us? It doesn't hurt us with the audience. The audience is not interested in boring interviews with politicians that just give their talking points that are unchallenged. If you do that kind of interview, it'll get like two thousand views, it'll die. It's not interesting at all. Everyone else is doing it.
So, yeah, you mentioned earlier you had the foresight to see that Joe Biden's candidacy would be problematic. I'm curious putting aside your assessment of her as a candidate as a policy maker. I guess I'm asking for an assessment more of the campaign because Kamala entered the race with a real head esteem, a lot of momentum, and it seems to have receded. I'm curious to get your take.
So this is why we talk about predictions. So you know that we're not Monday morning quarterbacking. We're doing constructive critique. Right. So I want to Buyden out of the race because I was positive he's gonna lose a Trump, and I think Trump is a unique danger, and by the end, I'm like, for God's sake, Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, all these governors please get in the race. So they wouldn't do it. So I had to do it in an active desperation to try to push him out. And we did. We. You know, obviously Pelosi Obama were the largest parts of that. But I'm proud that I contributed to a more sane Democratic Party. Okay. So now when we go to the next level of that in Kamala Harris, we said, okay, we were right about Joe Biden. Good check now Kamala Harris. In the beginning, we immediately said, oh my gosh, she's doing wonderful things. We're shocked that she picked Tim Walls, who's a populous progressive that is very similar to the way that we think about the world, but also very popular. And people say, oh, yeah, he agrees with you. So you're saying he's popular. No, look at the polling among the four candidates in the race president and vice presidential level, Tim Walls is by far the most popular. Okay, best because people like populist progressive, they like paid family leave, they like higher minimum wage, they liked that he took care of the kids and gave them free lunch for the kids who needed it, etc. So we say, great job, Kamala Harris. Then she does a progressive populist economic agenda where she says, we're going to tackle price couging, we're going to tackle the housing prices. We go terrific. We think her numbers are going to go up, and they do, and we were right about that, and we gain more trust with the audience. See, they're not against the Democratic Party. When the Democratic Party is doing wrong, they call out that they're doing wrong. When they're doing right, they call out that they're doing right. So then about a week what is today, October twenty first, two weeks ago on October fifth, I said, uh, oh, she's going to start heading down. And so now at that point she hadn't started heading down at all, Okay, And I said, here's why she's going to head down. She's got every sergeon on cable news saying how much she loves corporate CEOs and she's going to be more business friendly than Joe Biden. Stop stop, that's a terrible idea. And then she started saying, oh, I love Dick Cheney. I loved Liz Cheney, and she's now campaigning in Pennsylvania. That's great. She's campaigning with Liz Cheney. Not great. Not great. So we said she's going to start heading down because people hate the Cheneys. He left office with a thirteen percent approval rating. You're not going to get the Republicans you think you're going to get with by wrapping yourself around Dick Cheney. You're going to lose populist undecided voters who hate Dick Cheney, whether they were formerly Republican or formerly Democrat. Those independent undecided voters, the one thing they're united on is anti war and hating the Cheneys. So don't go in that direction. Saying you love big business is the worst electoral strategy you can imagine. It isn't about left and right, it's about populis versus establishment.
Well, but as a matter of media strategy, let me ask you have this. You're saying there's this sense of establishment versus populism. I understand you're passionate about that, but how do you know that there truly is this mass audience that feels the same way.
Yeah, I mean, first of all, a lot of times Fox News will say Hey, we are the country because we're the largest cable outlet. That's a little misleading because at the end of the day, there's still only one to three million people watching in a country of three hundred and thirty million people. But do they have they proven that they at least resonate with some portion of the American people.
Yes.
Right. In our case, we're the largest online news show. We didn't get there by accident. And when we started twenty two years ago, we had absolutely no money, no connections, no nothing. We started in my living room. My name was Jank Yuger. No one knew me, no one wanted to know me. Okay, so we started out with zero viewers and zero dollars and we built up this empire that now has twenty nine billion views and twenty seven million subscribers. We did that because it resonated. It doesn't mean that we're right about everything. It just means we did find a track that a lot of people went, Yes, that that's what I was looking for. That's the answer. It's not the right spectrum, it's the populous establishment spectrum.
Last question, but a big one, which is give me your sense of the future of news media and Tyt's place in it. Obviously, we have the established powers of CNN and Fox News and the New York Times and such. Do you see this ecosystem undergoing changes starting in this next election cycle?
So I'll give you a little bit of business intelligence that and I can say this, even though it might give away a competitive advantage we have because I know the rest of the industry isn't going to believe it anyway, And whenever I say things, they don't. That's been my experience that they don't believe it. When we started the company, I said online video is going to be TV. They said, you're the craziest person we've ever met. There's no chance that's going to happen, right, And here we are, of course right, And I can give you many other examples. We're trying to be in the reality based world as hard as we possibly can. So with that preface, let me say what's going to happen next is DAI Dynamic ad insertion has finally come to YouTube. And so what a lot of people don't understand about digital media is that it's still a very nascent industry. So a lot of the tracks, the pipes, the infrastructure is still being laid down, and so people sometimes will say to let's even take people that people perceive as our competitors. They're not really our competitors, but Vice, Vox, BuzzFeed those type of people, right, and they'll say, why haven't you made billions already? What's wrong with you? Well, how can you get all of the money if the tracks aren't built, or if the pipes aren't built. There's no pipes for the ads to flow through. Right, So it got built on the vod end and that's what's made us profitable and that's what made us survivors of this industry. But on the dynamic ad insertion, which basically just creates live television with ads inserted in there. You take that as a consumer as a given, but we know in the digital media space it's not a given. It didn't exist on YouTube until very recently, it didn't exist anywhere until a couple of years ago. And so now that the ads are finally being put into live breaks, what will happen next to Andrew is a huge number of twenty four hour hour channels will start to break out on YouTube because they will realize, oh, right, now there's ads throughout the day. When I do more live content, So all of a sudden, live content, especially twenty four hours, will start to take over the landscape. So we're at the very front of that line and we're seeing that trend just as we've seen all of the other trends in this industry that's allowed us to survive for this long and to thrive. And so what I believe will happen is we will win that battle. And when we do, there's a second thing that's happening that is going to to us passing CNN, MSNBC and all of them. So if you look at it today, you go, Okay, jenk I get it. You're winning on YouTube, you're winning on Facebook, you're winning on some of these platforms. But saying that you're going to beat CNN, that sounds crazy. They're so much larger than you right when you're take in their TV audience. But remember they grew grew up in an ecosystem that had infinite money. They had one hundred million subscribers and they were getting paid you know, different ranges, but a dollar to four dollars on cable news that is a world of money. And then you add to add money on top. But now you're in a world where you're at seventy million, sixty million subscribers and dropping. So you just lost forty percent of your subscription revenue. Let alone the fact that now the average age watching cable news is about sixty eight on MSNBC, CNN and Fox News Fox News around seventy. So now you're losing your twenty five to fifty four demographics. So you're losing advertisers at a great rate. But your costs are still super high. So when you have an industry with sky high cost that got used to those costs, right, as Bain would say in Batman, victory has defeated you. Right. So they're fat and soft, and they have unbelievable costs and no longer have the revenue to keep up with those costs. That's why you're seeing them cut anchor after anchor after anchor. ESPN started it, and now it's going to all of cable and so those forty twenty million dollars a year outrageous salaries are gone, yep. And so as they tip over and we rise up, we're going to be the number one news network in the whole country, and I hope the whole world.
Well, that sounds like a great prediction to end on. Jenk thank you for coming in. Good luck with covering the rest of this election season.
Thank you so much. Andrew really appreciate it.
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