The Case For a Public Service Fund for YouTubers
The World According to Zandland - Issue #13
The internet has not exactly turned out to be a golden age for truth. That is not a new observation. But what does not get talked about enough is what it actually means for the people trying to make honest, carefully crafted work inside that system, and what it would take to change it.
That is something we think about every single day at Zandland. And it is the reason I want to talk about what the BBC announced this week, because I think it gets to the heart of something bigger than any single channel launch.
I spent nearly a decade at the BBC early in my career. Since then, my team and I have built Zandland, we’ve made entertaining and successful films with broadcasters across the world, reported from war zones and made Zandland into a studio with multiple BAFTA noms that is going all in on original content, and a genuine daily bet on the idea that truthful, ambitious content can find an audience on the internet. We work with YouTube on these questions. We talk to Ofcom about them. This is not abstract for us. It is the thing we have staked a significant part of our professional lives on.
So when the BBC released the specifics of their new YouTube channel this week, aimed at 16 to 24 year olds, I had a lot of feelings about it.
What we are actually up against
We are living through a period where the incentives of the internet have quietly rewired what content gets made and what gets rewarded. Confidence gets more views than nuance. A video that tells you exactly who is to blame for something, in eighteen minutes, with a dramatic thumbnail, will almost always outperform a documentary that tries to show you why the answer is genuinely complicated.
That is not because audiences are stupid. It is because the system has been optimised, very effectively, for engagement rather than truth. And engagement and truth are not the same thing.
The people losing out in that system are the ones trying to make work that is honest. That does not oversimplify. That treats its audience as adults. Whether that is a serious investigation into wrongdoing, a documentary that actually takes you inside a world you do not know, or just entertainment that is crafted and real and does not talk down to you. All of it is harder to make, harder to fund, and harder to sustain in a media environment built around the performance of truth rather than the pursuit of it.
That is the battle. And it affects everyone, not just people who made content for a living.
So I was glad when the BBC made its move
The BBC announced a new YouTube-first documentary channel aimed at 16 to 24 year olds. Twenty films that are presenter-led, fast turnaround and YouTube-native.
My first reaction was positive. Because the BBC, whatever its flaws, is one of the few institutions left with a genuine structural commitment to truth. Not just as a value it talks about, but as something baked into its editorial process. Fact checking. Legal scrutiny. A duty of care to the people it films. A corrections policy. These things sound boring until you spend time in a media environment where almost nobody else is doing them.
We have written before in this newsletter about the rise of performative certainty online, about creators who present themselves as journalists but treat confidence as a substitute for investigation. The BBC is almost the exact opposite of that instinct. And that matters.
So yes, I personally want this to work. As a company, we are genuinely rooting for it.
But there is a structural problem at the heart of how they are trying to do it.
The problem
The BBC has to commission from a wide range of independent production companies. That is partly how the UK industry works and partly a genuine public service commitment to supporting a diverse market. These are not arbitrary rules. They exist for real reasons.
But those constraints create a real tension on YouTube. Because YouTube does not care about the structure of the British production industry. It rewards something completely different.
What YouTube rewards is consistency. Identity. The sense that a channel has a voice, a rhythm, a genuine point of view. It rewards the slow, compounding build of trust between a creator and an audience, the kind that takes a long time to establish and is worth an enormous amount once it exists.
What it does not reward is twenty well-intentioned films from twenty different production companies, each with a slightly different tone and a slightly different sense of what they are trying to be.
That might make for a rich programme of work. But it won’t necessarily make for a strong channel. And without a strong channel, you do not build an audience. And without an audience, the whole thing is just content that exists rather than content that lands.
The best YouTube channels are not just collections of good videos. They have an identity that runs through everything, a reason the audience keeps coming back. A slate of films looks impressive on paper. A channel has to feel coherent when you actually land on it. That gap is where a lot of well-funded institutional YouTube strategies quietly fall apart.
The economics are broken for the best people
The biggest problem is one that a lot of people will likely be thinking, but not saying.
The deal on offer has changed dramatically. In the traditional TV world, if you made a film for a broadcaster like the BBC or Channel 4, you would get a meaningful commission and keep the international rights. Rights meant you actually own what you made and can benefit from it long term. There was real upside to taking the risk.
That has largely gone in the digital space. Now, the proposition for talent and producers is to get less money, no rights, more pressure and a faster turnaround. And at the end of it you have not built an audience of your own, you have not built a brand, and you do not own anything that compounds in your favour over time.
So why would the best people in the creator economy take that deal?
The answer is, they increasingly will not. Not because they do not care about truth or public service. But because the numbers do not add up. You are taking on real risk to make low budget work for a platform you do not own, for an audience you are not building, with no meaningful reward if it goes well.
The people winning on these platforms are doing so by building their own things. Their own channels, their own audiences, their own long term value. And the gap between what that feels like and what a traditional broadcaster deal offers has never been wider.
The talent is already there
This is the thing is most exciting and most frustrating in equal measure.
There is a generation of British creators doing genuinely brilliant work on YouTube right now. Investigations that have actually changed things. Documentaries that take you somewhere real. Entertainment that is honest and crafted and does not treat its audience like idiots. They are doing it on tiny budgets, with no institutional backing, building real audiences through sheer commitment to quality and consistency.
The infrastructure to support them barely exists. The funding models were not initially built for them. And the irony is that they are doing exactly the kind of work that public money is supposed to exist to support.
So what if there was a different lane entirely?
Here is an idea I keep coming back to, but also haven’t fully formed yet so don’t judge me too hard.
What if there was a public fund, something like the BFI Film Fund but built specifically for YouTube, that creators and studios could apply to directly? Not to make content for the BBC’s channel. To make content for their own channel, under their own brand, building their own audience.
The public return would not be ownership of the work. It would be something more valuable in the long run: a healthier, more truthful content ecosystem. More honest work reaching more people. A genuine alternative to the confidence merchants and the algorithm feeders.
This is not a radical concept. The BFI funds independent films without owning them. Arts Council England backs theatre and music without controlling it. The principle of public money supporting honest creative work without the funder needing to own the result is completely established. The gap is that nobody has applied it to YouTube yet, even though that is where a generation of people now actually live.
A tiered system could work well. Smaller grants for emerging creators. Larger ones for studios with a track record. The criteria should not be about size or institutional prestige. It should be about a genuine commitment to truth, a real audience relationship, and the ability to make work that serves people rather than just flatters them.
Standards would need to be part of the deal. Not a commissioner sitting in every edit, but a clear framework around verification, fairness, corrections and public interest value. Accountability after the fact rather than editorial control from the outset. The BFI could be a natural home for something like this, sitting at arm’s length from any single broadcaster’s agenda. Ofcom could have a role in setting the public value criteria.
The key point is simple: public money for truthful content should not all have to flow through one institutional channel. There needs to be another lane.
What this means for us
At Zandland we are actively trying to be another lane.
We make documentaries. We run investigations. We make entertainment. What runs through all of it is the same thing: a genuine attempt to show people something real. Not to perform truth. To pursue it.
We are doing what the BBC is now planning to do, but building it as something we own, with a direct relationship with our audience, on our own terms. Some of our most ambitious work exists because of partnerships with traditional broadcasters and we value those relationships. But we are very conscious that the long term bet has to be on building something of our own.
Because once you have felt the difference between renting access to an audience and actually building a relationship with one, it is hard to focus the business in any other direction.
The battle for a more truthful media environment is not going to be won by any single institution. It is going to be won slowly and imperfectly by everyone who keeps choosing to make honest work in a system that does not always reward them for it. Creators, studios, journalists and filmmakers who believe that truth is worth the extra effort, even when the algorithm disagrees.
That is the battle we are in.
If this resonated, please forward it to someone who cares about what the media we consume is doing to us.
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— Ben
PS - the next episode of The Zandland Show will be coming this Thursday.