The Market Signal: YouTube Demonetizes AI Movie Trailers

Fake trailer channels test the business models for IP in the AI era

The Medium identifies essential signals on how technology is shaping the business of culture, and how the marketplace is evolving in response.

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The Market Signal

YouTube has stopped two major fake movie trailer channels— Screen Culture and KH Studio—from monetizing their AI-powered videos. The move responded to:

1. Demands from some Hollywood studios that YouTube redirect ad revenue from these fake trailers; and

2. An investigation by Deadline’s Jake Kanter into the “scale and sophistication” of both channels.

Why It Matters

There are two reasons this story matters to readers of The Medium.

First, it offers a market case study of a hypothetical from last Thursday’s “‘The Ghost's Apprentice’ Tests Disney's New AI Boundaries”: A “rogue outfit” somewhere in Asia using AI tools to generate scripts for very well-known IP and then flooding the internet with hundreds of thousands of videos.

AI Filmmaker and entrepreneur Tom Paton imagined two-thirds would get pulled down immediately but the remainder of videos will each make “$50 here, $1000 there”. That outcome would create $52.5 million in back-of-the-napkin-revenues for a single piece of IP, incentivizing studios to strong-arm their way into a revenue share.

That’s sort of what happened here.

Second, YouTube’s central role supports my prediction for 2025 that “Only Spotify and YouTube will have outsized influence in the IP licensing marketplace for AI”.