UKC

I've followed the launch of GB News as I found it quite interesting that a new news channel was launching in the UK. I was perplexed at how a new channel could survive the way TV viewership has declined so much over the last ten years and early reports of zero viewers seemed to confirm the folly. 

However since launch I've noticed a huge amount of content gets uploaded to youtube and having just had a look at their channel they uploaded 39 videos yesterday and racked up a total of 138k views. These are quite high numbers for a youtube channel, most videos were in the 1k-2k range (the most viewed video being 28k).

They also post the same amount of content to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. 

I think GB News was set up to be a tool for content creation and the actual TV audience were never really relevant. 

GB news was not set up to be a profit making TV channel. It was set up by billionaire media barons as a way to attempt to shift the political conversation in the UK even further to the right. They know that social media is the best way to do that in this day and age and they try to just create content that they hope will occasionally go viral.

Their views on Youtube aren't really that high though when you compare to mainstream outlets like Sky and BBC, or even to outlets such as Double Down News and Novara Media, which get more views but operate on a budget orders of magnitude smaller.

Interesting interview with Angelos Frangopoulos here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0018183

He's scarily smooth and unflappable.

Surely the channel has to sustain itself if it's going to survive long term?   

I'm not comparing them to long established news channels which have different funding. Novara gets more views per video but overall less looking at last weeks views. GB News has twice the number of subscribers so can negotiate higher view rates. Also isn't Novara ad free? I watch their videos but use an ad blocker, I think they're ad free and funded by the viewers or maybe just sponsor free.

Err... no. Long term survival for the channel isn't an issue; as Ben explained, that isn't its purpose.

UKIP? Job done. Though one might argue it has merely hijacked the Tory party. but still, job done.

From the horse's mouth, cheers.   

What's the point of it then?

Ben said, to shift the political conversation in the UK even further to the right

It's not the same as having a single purpose, like UKIP, which was achieved.  

Influence through propaganda, essentially.

That isn't an abstract goal; it has a raft of associated aims, mostly down to improving things for the wealthy; deregulation of environment and employment law, removing public services, and replacing with private, or simply reducing the UK's influence on the global stage; we're already way down that route due to interference and manupulation.

The point is to normalise and popularise extremely right wing political views on a whole range of topics within the political conversation of the UK.

Whether they have been all that successful so far is hard to say. The launch certainly wasn't what they had planned. But if they judge they've been successful in 5 years time they have enough wealthy backers to keep them funded. Otherwise they'll probably just quietly shelve it and try something else.

I work in TV, and was quite interested in what systems they were using to run the channel.  They've got some quite nice, modern systems running there which have also been used by a number of other news channels around the world.

These systems essentially make it very easy to publish content to Social Media channels, you can read more about it here https://www.tvbeurope.com/live-production/the-dna-behind-the-gb-news-newsro...

I think any new broadcaster entering the market would seek to use media management systems that integrate easily with their social media channels, so I wouldn't take this as too much of an indicator of how much they do or don't value their linear channel audience.

Personally I can't stand GB News, I think it's an abhorrence on the media landscape.  It's original intentions of offering a wide variety of UK news, and utilising a wide network of regional reporters has been quickly jettisoned (along with Andrew Neil, a talented broadcaster who was interested in that aspect of the offering) in favour of absolute showers of sh!t like Dan Wootton and Nigel Farage offering up unqualified and inexpert opinion on their invented "culture war" positions. 

Thankfully outside of their core market of brexit supporting bigots, they don't seem to have found a niche that looks set to sustain.  I imagine it'll be bought/merged rebranded and relaunched before we're half way in to the decade.

I quite often watch GreatBoris News just to see what it is saying and actually it makes my blood boil and run cold afterwards.  It is a very very harmful influence and there are some very unpleasant people presenting - I can only imagine what the funding perpetrators are like

So 3 channels I follow

Lock Picking Lawer - uploaded 2 days ago - 350K views (literally a fella picking a lock)

Rainman Ray's Repairs - uploaded 1 day ago - 169K views (a mechanic doing his day job)

Donut Media - Uploaded 7 hours ago - 339k views

So they are not even doing the youtube world that well! 

How easy would it be (just as a thought experiment you understand) to edit your social media output to mislead or misrepresent a view in opposition to yours? And might this be an attractive option given the lack of regulation online? 

This is *just* idle musing on my part obviously ...

Don' t forget to tune in to their exclusive coverage of the Belfast Orange walk on 12 th July with guest commentator Arlene Foster!  -- I kid you not!

I nearly contacted them to suggest that a more fun commentator might be Robbie Coltrane playing "Mason Boyne" but I fear they nave no sense of humour!

Those are big channels with big money, plenty of youtubers survive off much smaller channels. My point about GB was that it's more like content spatter gun than channel making well curated videos. I was trying to work out how they fund themselves, maybe it is all donations. 

Anyway why are you watching videos about picking locks!   

Donut Media is a big channel I will give you that, Rainman and LPL are just 2 guys with some gopros & a phone, do their own editing etc. Certainally not the budget and staffing GBNews have I also wonder how many of them views 138k are the same people going from one video to the next, considering they are a "news" outlet it isn't a great look. I imagine in a few years time there will be a leaked document about how it is basically all the current tory donors are also donating to GBNews.

Ready for when the fascists take over and lock me up, got to have an escape plan What grade do we think the average prison wall goes at?

Will be interesting to see what happens to it, just googled LPL earnings and it reckons he makes half a million dollars a year from that channel.

Ah, fair enough. Thankfully I've never seen a prison wall from the inside  

Quite. My daughter has 600,000 views for one of her YT talks about Jane Austen.

Obviously it’s worrying that there’s only about 500 times as many people want to watch JA videos as GBN’s filth, but there are worse things online.

jcm

I know this was said but do you seriously believe it was ever true?

I'm talking about the way GB news is creating the content, not the content itself. I found your daughters channel and she makes about a video a week? It's a high quality, professional looking channel so I'm guessing she spends a long time thinking up the videos, writes script, sets up the video and audio, edits the videos ect.  

GB News has a completely different approach, they instantly upload anything they think might get any amount of views, no editing, no scripts. Any chat spouted by a presenter goes straight on, we all know they barely get any TV views so it's like the whole studio is a set for creating social media content. 40 uploads or so a day and the view count stacks up.

Being a new channel they have pretty decent growth of 1000-2000 subscribers a day.  With this approach they get an overall daily view count of about 25% of their subscribers which is high by youtube standards even though many of the individual uploads have terrible analytics. It costs nothing to upload a video once the content has been created. 

Youtube is ultimately about views, this is how you get paid. Each channel negotiates it's rate based on several factors, subscribers, growth and viewing demographic (older and richer is better). 

FWIW I see GBNews as a youtube version of the Daily Mail. I'm not interested in discussing the politics and bias, it's the business model that interests me and the merging old and new media. If it proves successful hopefully we'll see a similar channel emerge from the left.

She's always going to be "my daughter" to you John, but for all the rest of us, she may well be Prof Coxmysteriously - a preeminent expert on the works of Austin, or the coolest English teacher on Tiktok getting loads of kids through their A level English exams etc.

Reach on the internet is a funny thing. My 2009 UKC review of the then new DMM Torque nuts has had 66,000 page views! Who knew fancy hexes were that exciting?

That's a good question!  

I think amongst the senior management there some competing ideas about what their vision of the channel really was - some more on the side of factual UK News (certainly Neil was in this camp, and a few other execs who left early doors), some more on the side of discussion and opinion.

I think both sides were originally willing to tolerate the other type of content in order to produce the content they were interested in and that they could all coexist on one channel, where there would be plenty of airtime for both.

However, even before the thing launched the two camps had started a power struggle to try and push their vision to the fore.  It turns out that the people behind GB News are rather intolerant (who'd a thunk it?), and this power struggle turned into all out war with Neil and others bailing when they realised those who hold the power were siding with the other camp.

Did the people behind the organisation ever intend it to be more newsy?  Yes, I think they thought that being a serious provider of UK News with people like Neil on board would give the channel an air of legitimacy which they could then use as a platform to push their opinion/agenda led programming.

Did they want to be a serious provider of UK News?  No.  I don't think they cared about providing news content at all, it was only ever a means to an end, and once serious news types like Neil realised that they were left with no choice.

I feel you're still missing the key point that GB News was not created to generate direct revenue from it's content but to further the aims of its benefactors.

No idea.  I work in TV, not Social Media... Or should that be Social Manipulation?!

I for one quite like that they spatter everything on YouTube. It may not be to the same extent but BBC and Sky do something similar.

In fact most newspapers do this also.

The reason I like it is because when I cancelled my TV License, the only thing I was going to miss was the news. But, as it happens, I'm pretty much covered with YouTube from all the main news providers anyway so no big loss.

I get my news from youtube, Guardian and here. Never tune into TV news and mostly get it in 5-10 minute clips. I watch a huge variety of opinion, right wing channels such as GB news, Talk TV, The Spectator - left wing channels such as Novara Media and TLDR news, I watch right wing trans woman Blaire White and I watch left wing trans woman Contrapoints. I watch mad men like Alex Jones and David Icke and I read the contrasting reports from the mainstream media.

I don't have any strong opinions and I'm apolitical, it's a crazy world out there with huge range of different ideas on how things should be run and I'm both uninclined and powerless to enact any of them. But it's all fascinating. 

As for the TV licence I watch a lot of live sport so I'm stuck with it. Wish they'd do a sport only version.

I agree, all there presenters seem to very active on social media as well, a number seemed to have been employed because they are social media grifters.

I get that they were set up by investors but I wouldn't have thought those investors want to support the channel forever, if they can make the channel sustain itself surely that's best for everyone involved. 

I found this website I don't know anything about giving estimated earnings

https://gb.youtubers.me/gbnews/youtube-estimated-earnings

If these numbers are close this is just from youtube, I presume they make money from Tiktok and facebook too. Given that they are growing this doesn't seem too unreasonable to me, I think they have a small studio, they don't have any really expensive presenters. They're probably still a fair way from being profitable but if the channel grows to over a million subscribers then they'll be making much more than they are now.

Will be interesting to see how it plays out. 

Thats the question. Are they investing in a media channel or are they investing in a propaganda outfit? The latter is one they could keep investing so long as it achieves its aims regardless of it not making money.

The channel is just a loss leader. The money is made by changes in government policy, enabled by influencing voters to vote for the party that's in their pockets.