Television writers and creatives in Hollywood spend a lot of time focused on the differences between linear television, streaming and online platforms. Is YouTube really TV? Is a movie that’s released on streaming inherently inferior to a theatrical movie release? Is so-called “creator” programming equal to what is being produced by legacy studios?
The truth is those questions are a lot less important than you might think. The lines between all of it have blurred so much that it almost doesn’t matter anymore. What matters now is how you get that content in front of audiences. How you best monetize it and build a relationship with audiences. Whether you are working for Jimmy Kimmel Live! or the Try Guys, the challenges are the same.
I recently spoke with Chronicle CEO Aaron Sisto and co-founder Scott Greenberg about how that company can connect creators with their audiences on YouTube.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity:
Aaron, let me start with you first. When I originally saw the press announcement about your recent deal with digital food and lifestyle studio Simple Alien, it was a little vague about what you do. It was something along the lines of "Oh, we're an agentic AI marketing and distribution platform that uses AI to help discovery." Can you talk a bit about what process looks like in practice?
Aaron Sisto: Just to set the stage, the whole premise here was YouTube is the new TV in a lot of ways, especially by share of the market. That means it's become top of funnel for everyone in the creator economy, everyone in the traditional media world, so that's studios, networks, and then every brand out there that needs to get in front of a consumer.
This is a really interesting kind of aggregation of all these different segments that were sort of off doing their own thing before this growth of YouTube happened.
But the challenge is that you know you have to be on YouTube, but because of the way these social networks and platforms operate, you no longer have that kind of lever you can pull to get in front of your target audience directly or even know who they are.
If you're a creator, you put a video on your YouTube channel, it gets 100 views, and you're like, why? What do I do? This is the success of organic growth, it is really lightning in a bottle, and that's because there's an algorithm standing between you and the audience now. And that's the major technical shift that makes YouTube and social look very different than traditional, than linear.
And it's something that people really have not wrapped their heads around yet. This is the kind of dark art of how do you grow on social? And that's the problem that we're solving.
So, broadly speaking, it's how do you make sure that as a creator, a brand studio, a network, you can get in front of your highest value target audience, and bring them to you? As opposed to just waiting for it to happen, waiting for the algorithm to organically find them, which in most cases does not happen.
And when you look at it from that perspective, what Chronicle does is it basically let you tap into this top of funnel audience that you may not have even known existed, and drive them to your brand, to your creator channel, to your merch store, to a destination that you own and control, so that you can actually engage with them directly.
What that means more practically speaking is that our platform has indexed over 99% of YouTube channels. So we have this bird's eye view of the social landscape, and what that lets us do is that we're able to start simulating how your content plays with niche audience segments across YouTube, which isn't something you can do today. There's no other way for you to be able to know "I'm a food channel, but my content plays really well with people that like watching daytime sports on their phone." Right? Or people that wake up in the morning and like to watch podcasts on their TV.
We are finally able to give you visibility into this audience map on YouTube, and because we are able to simulate your content with these cohorts, we can tell you which ones actually like your content and want to engage with you. And that's the big unlock, this audience simulation capability, because what we're able to do from there is we can actually target those audiences, drive new viewer traffic to your channel, and then optimize your channel and content for these new audiences to be able to capture and retain them. So, we're essentially growing your fan base and giving you full control over that growth.
Scott, you came from BentoBox, and I'm curious how your experience there informed what you did when you came over to Chronicle, both learning from the challenges you had there and the situations where you think, this is something we should concentrate on.
Scott Greenberg: I was blessed for 10 plus years to work on the best shows on television, with the best creators, you know, starting at Film Roman and Starz and Bento, where the gatekeepers were the buyers, right? It was networks and cable, and the streamers still becoming the gatekeeper. And the promise of social was the democratic opportunity of it, but it was very hard to capture, we couldn't build a pro forma.
The last thing I did for Bento, was Hazbin Hotel, from a young creator named Vivienne Medrano who had made her own pilot on YouTube, and she had 80 million followers. She made her own pilot on YouTube, and we acquired the rights with A24, and then we self-produced it. She already had an audience, right? She had that following, we cultivated it, we produced the show, and then ultimately we auctioned off and Amazon bought it.
It was a huge show for Amazon Prime, and that was an example of, here was a great creator, with a show that may have never made it through development. At best, it might have been acquired and would have been a different show. And that was an aha moment. This can work if you connect with the right audience.
Even with the biggest shows, YouTube was always challenging, You'd have big views on the platform, but the notion of can you find an audience on social and have an economic model, that's been more challenging.
An analogy I like to give is that this is like syndicated television. Two creators can put something up. One might get a ton of views and one might get nothing. Now, is it because one content is better than the other? Or did the audience not find it? And you really have no control over that on YouTube, because the algorithm is really built for the consumer, not the publisher.
Everybody's talking about generative AI or content creation. I was not really that interested in the tools, but distribution and marketing is always the problem. So, what if - and this is the thesis Aaron had, and the tech teams put together, and the technology that Chronicle built - what if you could accurately identify your total addressable audience for a piece of content on social?
What if you could use the audience simulation Aaron talked about, and like syndicated television, what if you could go and get full national coverage at the same time zone at the right time? And that is basically what Chronicle does. We're giving you eight o'clock, we dropping on Thursday or Sunday night, it's an animated show. You got the slot.
That, to me, is really compelling. And that's what we're showing with the Chewed Up team, because I think lifestyle is a great opportunity, because it's the right price point.
Marissa and Nick are really great producers in what they're doing with creators. And I think, ultimately, we're content agnostic, so we can do it with lifestyle, we can do it with animation, we can do it with sports, any category, we can do it. So, for me, I think this is where social really can create the next television stars.
You're seeing all these companies now, investors coming, wanting to go build things, it's almost the next evolution of cable. It's niche, and we're really that operation layer in this.
The tools help do that, and ultimately, we're working with the platforms. Because we're not gaming the system, we're actually helping, as Aaron talked about this micro-targeting. There's really a notion that people will go buy views, but those are what we call vanity views. Okay, go buy numbers, but those views never stay.
It wasn't retained views and returning viewers, and it wasn't a growing audience. But using the simulation technology, we're using inorganic spend to go get in front, get the impression. And what we're showing is that that audience retains equally or better than organic.
And to me, that's the wow moment. To me, it's a problem to solve. I always love looking at opportunities at technology for the entertainment industry. Aaron is one of those unique guys from Silicon Valley who understands that Hollywood has been afraid of AI, and that Silicon Valley is thinking, "Oh, we can do this better." And he really understands the real problems. And so for me, that's what excited me.
And so, to me, I think it's a great, great, great, great place in the business. And that's what excited me and why I'm here. And so bringing my expertise, and I just love building new things.
Aaron, I think there's a perception in Hollywood that there's creator stuff, and then there's Hollywood stuff. And they have different needs and different business models and there isn't even a lot of overlap in the way they marketed. But one of the things that fascinated me about this recent deal that included Michael Symon is that he is doing basically the same show he was doing for the Food Network. But now he's doing it for himself on YouTube. Do think that is where more and more of the industry is headed moving forward?
Aaron Sisto: Well, I would say it's already there. I totally agree with you that even a year ago, I think there was still this huge disconnect. And now I think they're starting to collide because we were at NAB this year, and there's a whole kind of social creator segment. So I would say that in real time, that all of these worlds are colliding.
And I would say these creator owned networks, like Chewed Up, this is the new model. The economics are there, right? You have full control, you can actually make money on your own terms, you can own your IP.
And you can grow it right. And you can grow it outside of a system that wasn't really designed to let you monetize and become become independently successful. I think that is the other side of this that we're seeing in real time. Look at Markiplier, right?
YouTube native IP and creators are now bubbling up to more traditional markets. Even the director of Obsession got his start on YouTube. In so many ways, that's the dream of YouTube . That it's a discovery engine and it's where fans discover their next favorite show. Or their next favorite IP. That's becoming very real. And I think Hollywood is looking at those signals. And using that as fan validation to go and launch feature films and TV series.
That's exactly what Scott was doing, which was why it was so such an influential kind of inflection point for us. We saw that that was a path. And, again, the only thing holding people back, creators, filmmakers, indie filmmakers, from following in those footsteps is the inability to go and control that growth, to be able to find your fans. Until you can control that and make that kind of reproducible, it's not going to become a model.
It's going to become one-offs, it's going to be, "Oh, wow, that Markiplier, like that one blew up, they found their fan base, and it worked. But for the other long tail 99% of people that try that out there, it's not going to be successful, which means it's not going to professionalize until this infrastructure is in place.
Scott Greenberg: And, Rick, just to double click on that for a second, I think Simple Landing is a great business. I think Marissa and Nick working with those chefs, and, you know, they are the professionals, right? These are people who made it traditionally.
But I actually think there's opportunity to go back to the late 70s, early 80s, where you had Spelling Entertainment, you had all these companies, Tri Star, there's an opportunity to turn independent production on again. I think we're going to service the independent creator, maybe it's the quote, unquote, creator economy, or maybe it's that person who couldn't sell it traditionally and now they can actually prove it works. But I also think it works for all these established creators. They have the opportunity to actually have a business model and drive demand. I think that's a huge opportunity for maybe what's the new best thing.
We're also working with some of the biggest studios. Attention is getting harder, there's more stuff out there. And, to be honest, the best content companies and networks don't use social well.
So even for them, the big networks, cables, streamers, where content lives, it's where your audience is, and how do you engage them? And what's the goal? Do you focus on platform revenue, or engage them here and move them.
And so I really think this could drive box office. It's gonna even drive view time. This approach services both the current and the next JJ Abrams. This is basically giving people an opportunity.
They get to keep ownership and monetization. So I actually don't really see the distinction anymore. This is really what type of content, what audiences want. And, again, we can't manufacture a win.
Scott Greenberg: Right. And the content has to be good. A good creator has to have be given the space and the opportunity to get in front of that audience and monetize it.
Aaron Sisto: It's democratizing access to the audience, not trying to outspend your competitor on ads, which is essentially the model today. Which ultimately does not, does not equate to success or revenue.
Scott Greenberg: And this also helps YouTube and Meta because they want creators on there and winning. So we're giving them the tools, this helps YouTube, this helps Meta with Facebook video and IG, helps TikTok, helps all these because we're giving them the tools to find the audience and win. And they're gonna spend more ad dollars on there.
And they're going to monetize on platform. So we think this product is really great for the social platforms as well. Because you can't live on the one spiky 1%.
Everyone see Mr. Beast. But what if you can even have a baseline where, you can make a living doing this? I've seen people using this in your world. You want to do interviewing, well, all of a sudden, you have enough of an audience to do that. 1000 true fans, right? If you have 1000 true fans paying 20 bucks a month. That's a living.
Well, yeah, I'm very aware of that. That painful crunch. That's a daily battle.
Let me throw this out to either one of you. It seems that if you're able to try and figure out where that audience is, to attract them, to bring them into a project, the next logical step would be to say, looking at this project, our data tells us that if it's called The Mr. Cook Show, you get this audience. But if you call the show Hot Dish, you're making X amount more money.
Scott Greenberg: Yeah, That's what we do.
Aaron Sisto: The first step is being able to quantify your plan, who are the really high value segments that you should go after. But then to be really successful, it's about finding them, bringing them to your channel, and then making sure you're constantly optimizing everything you're doing for the audience that's coming in. You mentioned thumbnails early on, and that's a big part of it, right? That's the initial move as far as like hooking the audience and bringing the top of funnel into the channel. Give them something they have to click.
The thumbnails really are a huge part of it. But today, there's no way to optimize your content, to know how long should the video be? What format should it be in? What should the topic be? What should the title description thumbnail look like? Unless you know who your target audience is, you're kind of just going blind, you're going off of intuition.
So in order to optimize, you have to know who you're actually going after. And that's why this is the missing ingredient. We automate all optimization across the entire channel. So from the second you post a video, everything that happens after that, we're automating the audience journey.
Scott Greenberg: So if you're like, I just want to do great interviews, record it and post it. Well then, okay, great. This will help you do it with your goals and help you achieve it. We can drive you to your audience. And that's really what's compelling. And we give content insights, not really creative notes.
For instance, "Hey, you know, your interview with these two really good looking guys from Chronicle did really much better than this one. You can use agentic AI to get feedback and know at this length, your CPM was greater than at this length. So we're not telling you what to make. We'll say, "Hey, this worked better," or "Similar audiences are watching these things.
I think it's really this mix of the machine intelligence and assimilation with these agentic tools to go do it, which is, which is really what makes us unique. And you don't need a media buyer to help you do this stuff.
And if you can't afford to go a social agency or hire somebody, this really helps you, that helps do it for you.
So where do you see Chronicle a year from now? I know it's really hard to predict, but where does the future look like? Or is there something that you think "I'd love to be able to do this, but we're not there yet?"
Aaron Sisto: Well, we're building and growing fast. So the second, there's a lot in that second bucket.
We have a super aggressive roadmap, but I guess the whole vision for the company is to be able to plug into any social channel out there and automate growth. We do that through a combination of a very kind of proprietary audience targeting and agentic automation to make sure your channel is constantly optimized for your audience.
And so, a year from now, I think it's very likely that the YouTube side of this will be turnkey that any YouTube channel manager, any YouTube channel owner out there will be able to plug in and start to see their numbers take up and not have to rely on any outside agency consultant to run ads, to be able to kind of give them content insights, be able to tell them who their audience is or optimize their content and packaging.
And because we're now very quickly branching out into Meta platforms, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok X. I think a year out, we're going to now be starting to manage more of a holistic social strategy, which is obviously very important to be everywhere as a brand and not just on a single platform and creating that funnel across all social.
So that's the goal for a year from now. Ads should not be run based on intuition. It shouldn't necessarily be run by hand anymore. And I think that's the big inflection point for the industry now is going to be data should be driving every decision you make. You shouldn't be doing anything manually. If data isn't driving your decision, if you don't have a platform like Chronicle, you're probably going to be left behind.
I guess that the real message there is that I think the teams that are in place and can move faster and be more effective, if they have the right data at their fingertips and the automation in place to supercharge what they're doing, because you still have to own the strategy. You're still thinking about how you want to grow the brand and what your own goals are. And the creative side of it is not something that we're touching. We're not a production company. So there's still a lot of secret sauce in the actual content and brand building.
Scott Greenberg: I would say, Rick, I think the opportunity here is that we can help independent creators find an audience and monetize an audience and that we're going to do that on a mass scale. That's going to be a win. I think we find independent production companies who are doing stuff like what Simple Alien is doing and others we're working with and talent, find a way for them to own their IP, build an audience and win and monetize that.
That's going to be a big win. And even with the big studios, how do we use this to go build awareness and go drive this monetization at scale.
So ultimately, helping brands with their content strategy, go to find and convert right into that. How do I go find my audience to get them to go to do something and, and possibly even matching brands with the right content creators.
I think that's really a huge opportunity. I think as these platforms grow, there'll be a world where if you're a small creator in Middle America, you're a small business who's making really fun, interesting stuff, you'll want to drive people to your place. Storytelling is entertainment, but it's also commerce.
I think we can empower the independent producer again. And I think that's the big win. People growing and monetizing. I think that's the big opportunity and it's really empowering people to make great stuff, entertain and make money.