Pocket.watch SVP David B. Williams Talks Evolving Creator-Audience, Social-CTV-OTT Dynamics
Describing YouTube as the “Hunger Games of content,” pocket.watch SVP Channels David B. Williams explains how pocket.watch identifies the “apex predators” and brings those stars to additional streaming platforms, merchandising, and more as the relationship between the creator economy social media “farm teams” and traditional CTV and OTT platforms and the dynamic of creator and audience continue to evolve in this discussion with Streaming Media Contributing Editor Timothy Fore-Siglin at Streaming Media 2025.
Known for transforming YouTube stars like Ryan's World into multi-platform media properties, pocket.watch leverages the popularity of creators to expand their reach across TV, retail, and video games. Williams discusses the competitive nature of YouTube as a content platform and its role in building loyal audiences, contrasting it with other social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. He highlights the growth of YouTube on connected TVs and the evolving creator ecosystem, predicting an increase in its cultural dominance. Williams emphasizes the dynamic relationship between creators and audiences, suggesting that this interaction leads to rapid content improvement and a new golden age of media.
How pocket.watch develops ‘farm team’ creator talent
In an effort to understand exactly what role pocket.watch plays in this process of multi-platform media transformation, Siglin asks, “Do you act as agents for these creators?”
"We're not agents,” Williams says, “but we do, we see ourselves as a network with distribution, an ad agency, and a consumer products group."
"So if you look at social media—let's say, generic platforms like YouTube—is that sort of a farm team where you can say, 'Here's somebody who's got some traction, we can then help take them to the next level?'"
"Well, sometimes it's a little hard to tell which is the farm and which is the next level," Williams quips. "But in effect, yes. What we say is that YouTube is the most competitive content environment the world has ever seen. Sometimes it's the Hunger Games of content, and the creators who succeed are truly like apex predators, and they've risen to the top not because of some fluke or luck or algorithmic hacking. They've risen to the top because they've actually found magic between what they do and an audience who loves them."
"Fair enough," Fore-Siglin says. "It's a far cry from one of my first interviews years ago with the two guys who started YouTube way before they were purchased, where it was literally, 'I just want to show my friends what happened at the zoo today.' But to the extent that that's kind of carried forward, what about other social media platforms? Is there a farm team on Facebook or TikTok or Snap or what have you?"
"A hundred percent,” Williams agrees. “It's very interesting actually. First of all, YouTube is really the only platform that has had this scaled monetization for many years, and it also builds more loyalty than what we've found on other platforms in the sense that people really select into the content that they watch on YouTube and then they watch it over time. And we can see very stable levels of popularity and fan enthusiasm over time," he continues. "And also because it's longer-form and the video is in landscape mode, we've developed a terrific business that's completely incremental on what the creator themselves is doing on YouTube, where we essentially harvest the best of what they're doing on YouTube, put it into a transformation process that we say curate, cure, enrich, and package. That essentially turns it into TV-ready content that we bring to premium streamers and syndication partners around the world, over 40 partners across 80 different countries."
More unequivocally applying the 'farm team" label to TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram, Williams says, "We look at them and we think about them in terms of how they fit into this ecosystem of content and engagement, but it's much more difficult to monetize its scale and to leverage that content to the same degree. And it's less clear the degree to which the brands that emerge from those ecosystems will have resilience over time the way that we've seen brands that emerged on YouTube."
Farming landscape, square, and vertical video
Responding to Williams' comment about landscape mode YouTube content's TV-readiness "versus some of those other platforms," Fore-Siglin reflects on "working with a number of high school students and having to tell them to turn the phone sideways," and getting push-back because, as they say, "'In Snap and TikTok, I can do square.'' 'But if you want this content to be used for something later, think about those production values even at the basic level.' So that's an interesting point you make."
"[YouTube's] growth on connected televisions has skyrocketed over the past decade," Williams notes. "I believe that it's grown 130% over the past three years. And on TVs, YouTube is by far the number one streaming platform at around 13% versus 8.5% for Netflix."
"My younger daughters have grown up in this era where they'll watch Andy Griffith with me on MeTV, which is linear television," Fore-Siglin says. "But they'll also say, 'Hey, can we watch an episode of something on YouTube from these people in Alaska who are building a cabin?' They see no differentiation between those, with the exception of the fact that on the YouTube stuff, they could stop it, go get something to eat and come back where on linear tv, I've had to explain to them that's what commercial breaks are for."
Creators claiming more of the ‘attention pie’
Looking ahead to where this social-to-CTV trend (and overlap) might be pointing, Fore-Siglin asks, "So, where do you see the trend going, then with both YouTube and these other social media platforms in terms of growing this talent base that you're talking about? If we look out a couple of years from now, what's different?"
"I think what's happening within this creator ecosystem is going to increase its dominance and its position within the overall attention pie, if you will,” Williams says. “Just in the past year, there's been a real dawning on the rest of the industry what these creators and what this content means to people. Sometimes I say it's kind of like hip-hop, comic books, and rock and roll? It emerged from the sort of democratic cauldron, and then the incumbent industry looked at it with a side eye, and of course now it's become the dominant force in culture."
Fore-Siglin recalls a quote from filmmaker Quentin Tarantino: "We all have 13 bad films in us. We need to get those out of the way." He ventures that "maybe what's ultimately happened is you've got creators who have plowed along for years and they've gotten better."
"I think that a lot of it was either a willful or an unintentional myopia," Williams counters. "Honestly, I think that at some point there was a tipping point. Nielsen publishing that data every month in The Gauge and people not being able to avoid seeing those market share numbers [for YouTube] and recognizing, 'Oh my God, it's not just people on phones, or watching cats.'"
"And even Nielsen getting agreement from the traditional media to what those measurements should be has taken us almost a decade," Fore-Siglin says.
"There have been other watershed events just in the past 6, 12, 18 months in terms of the emergence of Mr. Beast as a real pop culture force," Williams says. "Frankly, the things that we've been doing in terms of bringing products to market, the shelves of Wal-mart and Target and what-not, I think it's become too much to ignore the force of this part."
A creators’ golden age?
Wrapping up with a final question, Fore-Siglin says, "We all talk about the golden age of film, the golden age of television, and you tend to say those things after you're well into it, or on the decline, like the Roman Empire. Where do we sit for this world here with the YouTubes: at the beginning of the golden age or the end?"
"I think we're actually at the beginning of the golden age," Williams says, "and here's why. I think what YouTube represents in effect is a kind of dynamic and it's a dynamic between an audience and creator that we've never really seen before in that there's an instantaneous and detailed feedback that comes from the audience to the creator and creators who are successful. Dig into that feedback, analyze those troves of data, and adapt rapidly. This is a whole new dynamic where creator and creators and audience evolve together and get better together. And I think it's going to yield more quality content and more entertained and informed and inspired audiences than anything we've seen before."
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