YouTube Turned Coachella Into a Mass Event - Now the Market Needs to Catch Up
How crucial are live events to Google's ongoing CTV invasion?
As much as YouTube has made great strides in being considered for, and capturing its share of Big TV Ad Dollars, you still have eye-opening reports such as a recent Wall Street Journal article illustrating how far the company has to go in convincing some brands that it’s just like TV.
“The budgets that are allocated for YouTube, both from a media perspective and a creative and production perspective, are still lagging dramatically behind the budgets that are allocated to TV projects,” said Frank Cooper III, chief marketing officer at Visa.
The answer might be - get more Coachellas.
I’ve written about this before - but as much as YouTube’s audience, and particularly its TV audience is massive - it’s primarily on-demand. Which isn’t a bad thing - but what so many brands have loved about TV ads are:
Their immediacy - reaching 10 million people all in one night. etc.
Their shared cultural experience (everyone saw that great ad during March Madness, for example)
Which is why I’ve advocated for YouTube to go after even more sports, and why the Oscars makes so much sense.
“What YouTube doesn’t have is what big television does, which is big events that require simultaneous viewing,” said Michael Wolf, CEO of Activate Consulting.
I had Wolf on the Next in Media podcast this week, during which we talked about YouTube, TikTok, gaming, VR and more. Activate is known for its annual report on the state of media and entertainment, which outlined just how big YouTube has gotten. But….
“It’s not just the Super Bowl, it’s the Oscars, it’s the Grammys, it’s the Country Music Awards, it’s so many big events where everybody’s watching at the same time, very large audiences.
“And YouTube has only now begun to get those guns. if you look at YouTube, Coachella is one of YouTube’s biggest simultaneous events. Coachella is gonna go to right now it’s about 200 million people watching Coachella concurrently. Probably in a couple years it’ll be 500 million.”
That is a bold prediction, but it doesn’t seem that wild. Coachella, which kicked off this past weekend and runs through April 19, has become a juggernaut. It’s a rare case of a streaming/tech service making a live event into it’s own tentpole, rather than having to snag the rights to something from traditional media.
“Unlike competitors who spend billions on exclusive rights to “rent” audiences, YouTube has leveraged a long-term partnership to drive product evolution,” said Donna Budica & George Karalexis, co-founders of Ten2Media, which helps music artists master creator-like businesses.
“By treating the festival as a persistent product surface rather than a one-off broadcast, they avoided the traditional rights inflation cycle and maintained end-to-end control over distribution and user experience.”
Indeed, over the past dozen or so years, YouTube has used Coachella as a vehicle to test out various live streaming products and infrastructure, the pair noted.
“This evolution reinforces YouTube’s ability to operate as a global live distribution system capable of handling Super Bowl-level demand without a traditional cable backbone. This capability extends naturally to other cultural moments, such as awards shows or political events, where interactivity and multi-angle viewing are structurally superior to linear broadcast.”
This past weekend saw Sabrina Carpenter generate 2.7 million views and Justin Bieber puzzling viewers by - watching YouTube clips of himself.
Brands such as T-Mobile and Sonic are major sponsors. And agencies such as NoGood are touting it as the next Super Bowl
That may be going a bit too far. you could argue that Coachella has been undersold - as you hear about YouTube CPMs still being on the low side. And a few buyers I reached out to said that Coachella isn’t quite upfrontworthy - yet.
I’m surprised that YouTube hasn’t put out any total audience numbers for Coachella on CTV - assuming they are impressive. I tried getting those from iSpot and Nielsen - but no luck, yet.
“The shift to connected TV has fundamentally changed the nature of the event,” said Budica and Karalexis. “Coachella now functions as a global live television moment, and as viewing moves to the TV screen, it creates a lean-back environment with significant real-time spikes around headliners. Features like multiview, live chat, and social integration offer a viewing experience that traditional broadcast cannot currently replicate at scale.”
As for whether Coachella is priced to compete with big TV events, that’s up for debate. “Regarding monetization, the market often misreads YouTube’s structure. The “cheap CPM” narrative incorrectly conflates the open marketplace with YouTube Select.”
My question is - what else is out there like Coachella that YouTube could potentially elevate? And can it do the same to longstanding events like an NFL game or the Oscars? Or should YouTube start creating its own tentpoles (like say a Good Good Golf tournament - the anti-Masters)?
Or is it time to start bidding on whatever sport comes up next?
Check out the full episode here: