The BBC risks becoming the Titanic of the Media World and Culturally irrelevant to Gen Z
Jordan Schwarzenerger, the manager of the sidemen, who have more than 100 million subscribers between them, said that he believes that the corporation is making “good entertainment” and wants it to succeed.
However, he said that the BBC and other major broadcasters showed a “defeated mindset” by appealing to new rules that forced digital platforms such as YouTube to give their content prominence.
In an interview with the Guardian, he said that the BBC’s cultural connection with older audiences is not shared with younger audiences, which is increasingly undercutting traditional channels and streamers.
“It’s a Titanic,” he said. “That’s not to say it’s going to crash now, but it’s big and it’s not fit for purpose related to major changes that are too big for them.
“The way consumption habits have shifted in the last five years is almost more dramatic than in the last 50 years.
“That one question is a big one, because I don’t think that an answer that the BBC wants, that it doesn’t see. Why am I forced to pay?”
The sidemen, which include Creator, rapper and professional boxer KSI, are among the most successful YouTube collectives. Schwarzenberger, 28, said he intervened out of concern that no one would be “brutally honest” about Gen Z’s lack of relatives.
“They won’t come back until the minds shift for this new world, which is very different,” he said. “I mean they know it’s happening and they understand it, but it’s seismic, it’s the sidemen or the sidemen or the sidemen or the sidemen with many places between the Gen, and they’re just one Creator.”
The BBC and other leading broadcasters are pushing with enforced prominence on platforms such as YouTube, pointing to the quality, reliability of the culture they produce.
Schwarzenberger, in part, reacting to Patricia Hidalgo, the director of children and education at the BBC, who started the value of the Guardian at risk of your connection to British culture and language.
He said YouTube’s algorithm pushed content from us, like children’s creators Raquel and Blipi, to British children.
Schwarzenberger says the answer is not to “trick and bend the rules”, but to act as an investor in the next generation of top creators.
He said: “It’s really about leaning into the distribution kids are having now, and the kind of content they want, in the format they want and it’s going to be different and feel different from the rules we’re used to.
“My frustration is that it will be defeated in the mindset that there are many large Institutional Broadcasters, which is that we are against all the Behemoths of the Global US and Chinese Technology that we will never be beaten.”
Schwarzenberger says there is a link between the types of content young men watch and media consumed by BBC executives.
“A lot of people I talk to are not active at all,” he said. “There’s a disconnect between where the attention is and where the executives who run the industry are themselves.”