Nieman Foundation at Harvard
When science journalists Adam Cole and Joss Fong decided to go independent, YouTube was the obvious place to start. They’re both natives of the platform: Fong cofounded the Vox YouTube channel, and Cole spent years producing Skunk Bear, the NPR science YouTube channel. Last May, after months of planning together, they launched a channel of their own. They called it Howtown.
In the months since they launched, Cole and Fong have published videos about the science of how dogs see color, an ancient hookup between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and (especially relevant for Nieman Lab readers) how X broke the news. I checked in with them in November, six months after Howtown launched, and again more recently, after a recent video about the spiciness of Hot Ones hot sauces hit 1.5 million views — the kind of numbers that might be considered viral.
I was curious about what it’s like to launch an independent YouTube channel today, and they were refreshingly transparent about the realities. Here’s what they’ve learned.
Going independent was a scary decision, Cole and Fong told me, but in many ways it also felt like the only way to keep doing the work they wanted to do. In December 2023, Vox laid off nine members of the award-winning video team that Fong had helped build, and it seemed the writing was on the wall: the space to make the kind of longform videos that Cole and Fong wanted to make was shrinking.
Or, at least, it was shrinking within the bounds of traditional media organizations. On YouTube, some of Cole and Fong’s friends and former colleagues, like Cleo Abram and Johnny Harris, had successfully built out channels with huge audiences (4.96 million and 6.31 million respectively, as of publication). Clearly, there were many people hungry for videos outside of the realm of TikTok.
Cole and Fong launched Howtown with a vision for a channel that focused on longform, science-focused videos guided by principles rooted in their journalistic training: They would rely on primary sources and interviews for their videos, post corrections to any factual errors with explanations of what they got wrong, and refuse to take money for coverage, thereby maintaining the traditional wall between sponsorship and editorial.
“If it does work, [it might be because] we are rightly seen as on our own and independent of any influence from the corporate media,” Fong told me in November. “From an audience funding perspective, it’s much more persuasive to say we’re doing this all ourselves than to say we get a paycheck [from someone else].”
At launch, the idea was to rely on a diverse set of revenue streams, from traditional monetization through Google AdSense to sponsorship deals and a Patreon (starting at $4 a month) where viewers who believed in Cole and Fong’s work could support them directly.
But Howtown launched in the era of YouTube Shorts — vertical videos, usually between 15 and 60 seconds long, that are the platform’s answer to TikTok and Instagram Reels — and in May, Cole and Fong told me they knew they’d need to experiment with adding shorter videos to their mix to try and bring in more followers, even if it went against their background of carefully crafted longform.
“A lot of people are following us through Shorts,” Cole told me in November, six months after Howtown launched. “It’s this easy way to get a big number that feels good. But it doesn’t really serve our mission of welcoming people into the nuance and uncertainty and challenges of scientific methods.”
Views on shorts also don’t add up to much monetarily: One short, of a vampire bat running on a treadmill, got 2.6 million views but earned only $272 through AdSense. The 1.5 million-view Hot Ones video, on the other hand, had earned $5,260 through AdSense by January 15, about a month after it went up. That video also had a sponsored spot — read by the hosts and baked into the video — from a sponsorship deal Cole and Fong had made, which was separate from the dynamic ads served by AdSense and brought in a few thousand dollars more.
The effort put into each video was obviously different (they spent a day producing the short, as opposed to over a month on the Hot Ones video), but it seems the extra work reaps extra rewards; Fong told me Howtown gained around 35,000 new subscribers from the Hot Ones video. The influx will likely make the YouTube algorithm recommend more of their videos, and having a bigger loyal audience will also allow Cole and Fong to negotiate a more predictable, sustainable rate with sponsors, who usually set their rates based on average view counts.
“The shift of attention into the shorts feed continues to be a major force in our lives,” Fong told me in an email in January. “It’s a reminder that, now more than ever, we can’t take anyone’s attention for granted. We’ll have to earn every second of every view to convince people that one of our deeper videos is going to be worth 20 shorts of their time. Fortunately, I think we are all starting to feel like shorts leave us a bit malnourished as viewers. When folksgo looking for something with more depth, we want to be there to make a great impression with thoughtful and creative work.”
Cole and Fong plan to spend a few more months experimenting with shorts, assessing various ways to tweak how they’re monetized — perhaps extending a short from a minute to three minutes, with a quick sponsor card in the middle, for example — before deciding whether or not to continue making them.
“The viral audience plays we’ve tried in the past might not be necessary to have some sort of continuing long-term relationship with a relatively small pool of people,” Fong told me last May.
From the day Howtown launched, it had a Patreon. This was for a simple reason: Like much of media, the dynamics of monetization on YouTube have changed over the years, and its built-in monetization tools (in a word: ads) aren’t the most viable funding option for most creators, especially ones with new channels.
“In our ideal scenario, I think we get the majority of our funding from our viewers,” Cole said.
“Our pie chart is wide open, and we’re hoping there might be some small grants out there for the kind of coverage we’re doing,” Fong added. “The serious thing about relying on brand deals, which is what the vast majority of YouTubers do, is that the rates are set by the performance of your last five videos. That’s a recipe for constant stress, and also the internalization of a sense of what is popular versus not popular. Sometimes we want to do something interesting that a small number of people are going to be interested in. When you have to worry about how every video changes your ad rates and therefore changes your ability to make a living, that’s pretty scary.”
In the months since they launched, the Independent Media Initiative connected Cole and Fong to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a major funder of science journalism. Sloan gave Howtown a grant that will help with overhead and potentially also allow Cole and Fong to bring in one or two people to help with particularly time-intensive tasks like animation.
“We don’t know if [this strategy] is going to make sense for us from a money perspective,” Cole said. “We’re in the ‘out on a limb’ phase, not the ‘we’ve discovered a new business model’ phase.”
Building out the Patreon has also allowed Cole and Fong to experiment with what they can offer their community outside of the YouTube channel. Starting at $4 a month, Patreon subscribers get access to perks like a Discord channel, bonus episodes, a newsletter, and a monthly science paper “book club”, where the hosts walk their supporters through the tangled web of jargon in one chosen paper each month. (There are additional tiers at $8 and $20, which come with additional perks; the $20/month “Howtown Council” tier comes with a one-on-one video chat with Fong or Cole, for example.) They’ve slowly been building support over time; they had 200 paying subscribers in November, which jumped to 350 in January after the Hot Ones video went up.
Those Patreon numbers are nice for revenue reasons, but, Cole and Fong told me, there’s another benefit too: Their audience doesn’t just feel like a large, unnameable mass of strangers, but rather a real community.
“I’ve been surprised how much it matters to me that there’s a very small group of people who have decided to give us some of their money,” Fong said in November. “I’ve made videos that have millions and millions and millions of views, and in theory, you know that’s a lot of people. I’d try to picture that many people in football stadium numbers. But when you have just 200 people who are like, ‘I believe in what you’re doing,’ and they come in our Discord, and they put a little emoji reaction when we post our latest video, that weighs so much heavier in my heart and my mind. It’s not the kind of strategy you follow if you want to grow and scale and be a big media company. [But] to me, having this monthly call with whoever shows up, even if it’s three people, to read a research paper with us? That’s going to sustain me more than if I had a viral video.”
