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NTU Management Review Vol. 33 No. 2 Aug. 2023

1. Introduction

Founded in 2005, YouTube has become one of the most dominant online video-
sharing platforms in the world. It is reported that there are two billion logged-in viewers
every month on the platform, which amount to almost one-third of Internet users (Spangler,
2019). YouTube users are allowed to upload user-generated content onto the platform. As

of 2022, more than 51 million channels exist on YouTube, and more than 500 hours of
video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute (Funk, 2022; Hale, 2019).
Revenue sharing of video advertising, automated content ID, and open viewer
metrics comprise a massive YouTube commercial ecosystem (Lobato, 2016). As a result,
creating content on YouTube has become an occupation recently. A person who invests
a lot of time producing videos on YouTube is commonly titled a YouTuber (Holmbom,
2015). According to Forbes, the highest-paid YouTuber in 2020 is Ryan Kaji, who earned

29.5 million U.S. dollars before management fees and taxes (Berg and Brown, 2020). For
more general expression, we use the term “creator” to refer to “YouTuber” or any similar
people on other video-sharing platforms throughout this article.
While creators typically focus on video production, they may lack the experience
and know-how to do business. Multichannel Networks, also known as MCNs, thus arise
as intermediary firms that connect entrepreneurial creators with advertising, marketing,
and screen production industries (Lobato, 2016). MCNs may also help creators increase
audience and advertising income. In general, the services provided by MCNs include
managing creators’ commercial relationships, cross-promoting affiliated channels,

providing technical services such as managing intellectual property, etc. As an exchange,
MCNs share a proportion of revenue (typically 20-50% of net advertising revenues) as a
commission (Lobato, 2016). Fullscreen, one of the largest MCNs nowadays, contracts with
about 2,500 content creators who together generate seven billion views per month (Weiss,
2020).
Since MCNs and creators split the revenue, they have the same revenue
sources. The major sources of income are advertising revenue paid by YouTube and

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sponsored activities, such as advertorial fees. When people watch videos on YouTube,

1 “Advertorial” is an advertisement that imitates editorial format. Advertorial Definition, MERRI-
AM-WEBSTER, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/advertorial (last visited Jan. 7, 2021).

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