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YouTube to invest in new shows for its biggest stars to combat media rivals

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By John McCarthy | Opinion Editor

September 19, 2014 | 3 min read

Google has announced a plan to invest in YouTube’s biggest creators in order to get new show formats off-the-ground in a bid to fend off competing media-platforms.

PewDiePie has over 30m subscribers

YouTube will invest in its biggest channels to stave off rising video competition from DailyMotion, streaming sites like Netflix, and even Facebook which is now flirting with the idea of becoming a video-sharing platform.

YouTube claimed it will experiment with new video formats in the coming months to diversify its offering from the short-form formats many of its creators currently use to create content.

Also reported to be in the pipeline are several multipart series.

Alex Carloss, head of YouTube Originals, said on the YouTube blog: “We feel the time is right to make another important investment in our creators. That’s why we’ve decided to fund new content from some of our top creators, helping them not only fulfil their creative ambitions but also deliver new material to their millions of fans on YouTube.

“As any creator will tell you, making compelling new content isn’t easy, and we expect to learn a lot through this process. We’ll experiment with new formats and ideas. We’ll get our hands dirty. We’ll make some mistakes."

Carloss added: "Together, we’ll (hopefully) create some fantastic new content on YouTube. But one thing is certain: there’s no one we’d rather go on this adventure with than our creators.”

According to tech site Re/code, Google has offered an unnamed content creator a figure in the region of the “single-digit millions” to fund a ten-part series.

YouTube’s most-viewed channel is eccentric Swedish video-gamer PewDiePie, earlier this month he removed comments from his videos as he said the section was solely composed of self-promotion comments and spam.

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