From YouTube to the cinema

Average Rob's latest video is available on YouTube, but I watched it in the cinema. And that's no coincidence: the video platform wants to focus more and more on long, high-quality content.

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Ask my dad which YouTubers he knows, and he'll be able to name just one: Average Rob. The Belgian who first gained fame with edited photos on Instagram – long before deepfakes and fake news became a thing – and then successfully transitioned to YouTube. Millions of people, including my father and me, watch the videos he makes with his brother Arno.

Not that my father has seen the videos where Rob and Arno rank the best fried snacks or make a summer hit with Lost Frequencies. No: he watched with me the heroic videos in which the two prepared for an Iron Man in just a year or cycled over the cobblestones of Paris-Roubaix. That was already impressive, but the brothers took it a step further: they participated in the Marathon des Sables.

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Does there still have to be sand?

The Marathon des Sables is a legendary race through the desert, covering about 250 kilometers by running, walking, or stumbling along. You complete it in six days, including one day where you cover 80 kilometers. You carry your own food—so your backpack quickly weighs over 10 kilograms—and must endure extreme heat of over 40 degrees Celsius.

The video that the brothers – along with cameramen Milan Cools and Luca Silvestre – made ended up being more than two hours long. In the first half, you see them training under the guidance of ultra-runner Karel Sabbe, and then they head to Morocco for the race. Without giving too much away: just before the race begins, both Rob and Arno fall ill. And trekking through the desert with diarrhea, an upset stomach, and barely any appetite is not exactly a good idea.

The great thing about the documentary – because that’s what you can call it – is that the focus isn’t just on the two brothers. No, it’s actually the side characters who bring the story to life. There’s a 70-year-old Brit who says he’s “gonna beat the crap out of them if they dare to give up,” a Dutchman whose knees are completely shot but who happily smokes a joint and says with a smile that he wants to walk the final ten kilometers, and an ordinary Flemish guy who walked the entire day (and night) of the 80 kilometers with Rob…

And then there was Veerle, a Flemish woman who appears briefly in the documentary. On the second day, Rob is feeling a bit better, but Arno is still too sick to keep up. In the Marathon des Sables, they work with a unique time limit: someone from the organization walks with two dromedaries, and you have to stay ahead of them. At one of the checkpoints, Arno tells Rob to go on alone because he needs to regain his strength. Rob leaves reluctantly—he doesn’t want to leave his brother behind—but a Flemish woman convinces Arno to keep going. However, a bit further along, she has to tell Arno to continue alone, as she can’t go on any longer.

You see Arno reach the finish line, but he looks confused, almost panicked, because she hasn’t crossed yet. Then he says, “I promised her we would finish together. She’s here for Make-A-Wish. After this, she has to go for cancer treatment.”

Later, you see Veerle finally reach the finish line. And in that moment, not just I, but many people around me in the cinema started crying.

Yesterday I went to the movies

The cinema? Indeed: I saw Rob and Arno’s documentary on the big screen, along with hundreds of others in Ghent, Paris, London, and Amsterdam. In collaboration with Kinepolis, M2K, and others, YouTube released the video in cinemas. And that’s exactly where it belongs, because even though the editing budget and team amounted to literally “two men and three weeks,” the result stands shoulder to shoulder with documentaries whose crews are dozens of times larger.

It is no coincidence that YouTube also brings content to the cinemas. For almost fifteen years, the platform has been trying to show that it's more than just a site where you can upload funny videos of your dog. That has often gone bad than good so far, I recently said in Computer Club.

In 2011, for example, it invested a hundred million dollars in developing original content for what was then called YouTube Red. This included a show with comedian Kevin Hart and a range of scripted series. One of those series only truly found its audience later, when the program was shut down and competitor Netflix took over: Cobra Kai.

Another attempt to invest in content creators who go viral flopped. After all, what’s popular can also be controversial. Just think of PewDiePie's anti-Semitic comments, or the video in which Logan Paul went to Japan’s infamous “suicide forest.” Advertisers don’t want to be associated with that – which is why running an ad on YouTube often costs barely a quarter of what companies pay for a television spot.

There’s still a perception that videos on a smartphone or laptop are “cheaper” (and thus lower quality) than what you’d watch on a big screen. YouTube wants to change that. It struck deals with manufacturers so that the YouTube app comes pre-installed on new TVs, and it also improved the platform itself. For example, creators can now publish their videos as full-fledged series, and ads appear when someone pauses a long video.

It's a strategy that's starting to work: meanwhile, YouTube is good for 12 percent of what people watch on television in the United States. YouTube is even bigger on TV than all Disney TV channels and streaming services combined. As far as I know, there are no official figures for Belgium yet, but soon we will undoubtedly see YouTube appear in the Digimeter when it comes to what the Fleming is watching on the television screen.