Five Questions for Cenk Uygur

This month marks the beginning of the rollout of more than 100 new television channels. But you won’t find them on your television set. In fact, you’ll find them on video website YouTube, where its owner Google is making a new, $100 million foray into original content. For Google, it’s the first move in what looks to be the next big tech battleground: TV.

One of these channels is Town Square, run by Cenk Uygur. Portfolio.com readers might remember Uygur from a story we ran earlier in the year about his response to having his cable news show canceled. But in addition to being on old-school TV, Uygur has been running and hosting the liberal Young Turk network of shows since 2002, which it launched on Sirius Satellite Radio with the help of a small amount of startup funding. Later, it moved over to YouTube, and last year the show began to make a profit, pulling in more than $1 million a year.

With more than half a billion views and counting and an already-established partnership with YouTube, the Young Turks were a natural fit for the new channel initiative. Portfolio.com spoke with Uygur from Occupy Oakland.

Portfolio: How does the new channel system work financially?

Uygur: What I can tell is what’s public information, which is that they give you a certain amount of funding and that they recoup that funding through the revenue of that channel initially, and then there is a split afterwards. But because of our contract, I can’t tell you how much or any of the other details.

Once YouTube recoups its costs, then you share the revenue of that show and the revenue will almost exclusively be through ads and sponsorship.

How interactive is your new politics show The Point going to be?

All of our shows are interactive in the sense that we are really open to our audience's suggestions. Sometimes old media says that, but they don’t really mean it; they had an intern that might read through the emails, maybe.

We’ve flipped that on its head. I assume that if the audience agrees upon something that they are right. It’s not always the case, but it’s almost always the case. It’s in our DNA to listen to the audience and to interact and respond to the audience in that way.

Do you have any revenue goals for the new channel?

We don’t even have aims for that at this point, and I’ll tell you why. Online shows take a long time to develop financially before they’re profitable. The reason for that is that you don’t have lead-ins. So in television, if you’re on at six o’clock, say, well how well you do at six o’clock is enormously dependent on how well the five o’clock show did. So there’s this system that delivers audience for you. Whereas online, you almost always start at zero and you’ve got to build that audience over a long period of time, and you’ve got to be able to have the perseverance to do that and the strong branding that carries you through it. So if you thought, “Hey, I’m going to make a killing in my first year or two years, and I have goals of making X amount of revenue,” you’re in for a rude awakening.

Do you think the YouTube channels are the future of television?

A lot of cable networks brag about being in 100 million homes—YouTube is in, like, 3 billion homes. So they have this enormous power, and it’s a matter of time before that begins to overwhelm the traditional TV structure.

YouTube has traditionally been the place people go for videos of cute animals. Do you think it can adapt to being almost a mainstream media outlet?

The kitten thing drives me crazy, it’s like four years ago, right? And people still talk about it. It’s amazing how incredibly slow people are to adapt to what’s happening. The beauty of online is that everything can be additive, so the fact that you’re doing professional TV shows doesn’t mean you can’t do user-generated content. You can just put the shows on top of user-generated content. You don’t have to choose.

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Nicola Kean is an assistant editor for Portfolio.com.