How Niche Media Players Like Megyn Kelly Won the YouTube Election 2024 Vote
As trust in legacy media continues to erode, more people — whether they’re voting for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump — are turning to YouTube for their 2024 election news.
Steve Krakauer, the executive producer of conservative SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Show, and David Pakman, who hosts his own progressive political show on YouTube, have seen it firsthand. Their shows — which each have more than 2.6 million YouTube subscribers — approach the election from different viewpoints politically. But both agree that their successes illustrate how it has become a golden age for political commentators who aren’t on traditional network and cable shows.
“YouTube has been enormous,” Krakauer told TheWrap. “We’re not bound by the old rules, we have flexibility.”
“The pie is definitely getting bigger,” Pakman said. “People are consuming more and more content on their mobile phones to begin with, and it’s way easier to get TikTok and YouTube on your mobile phone than it is to log in to your Comcast or Verizon account and try to get cable.”
Their viewership backs it up. The Megyn Kelly Show, which debuted as a podcast in 2020, banked 116.8 million views in August, its best month ever, and another 100 million views in September. The David Pakman Show had its own record-setting August, with viewership increasing 122% year-over-year to hit 100 million views, before pulling in 85 million views in September.
And things are ramping back up in the final month of the election, with Krakauer and Pakman saying their shows are well on their way to setting new monthly viewership records for October.
Kelly and Pakman’s YouTube success comes at a time when the public trust in mainstream media has cratered. A Gallup survey from earlier this month found only 31% of respondents expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media to accurately report the news — a new all-time low. In 1976, 72% of Americans felt that way. At the same time, nearly one-third (32%) of Americans regularly get their news from YouTube, up from 23% in 2020, a recent Pew survey found.
This is a trend that’s unlikely to reverse, streaming media analyst Dan Rayburn told TheWrap. More and more viewers are accustomed to watching the news on their phones, on the move, and when it’s convenient for them — something that plays into YouTube’s hands, more than cable outlets like Fox News and CNN.
“It’s information at people’s fingertips,” Rayburn said. “How many people – especially among the younger generation – are waiting until 6 o’clock to watch the news? They’re not. Or they don’t even have cable TV, or they don’t even know what the hell CNN is, frankly.”
Krakauer and Pakman point to a handful of reasons for their shows’ YouTube success, but the primary driver may be their “no sacred cows” approach to the news.
“Our mission statement has been no BS, no agenda, no fear,” Krakauer said.
“’What are the topics that are true that people are afraid to cover? We built up some credibility in the space of taking these very heavy topics seriously from a journalism perspective, so that when you get into this mode of what’s happening over the last three months, we’re able to ride that [momentum] and have credibility in that area.”
Krakauer pointed to Kelly’s willingness to question President Joe Biden’s mental acuity before his June 28 debate with Donald Trump as a prime example. After the debate, outlets like New York Magazine and Axios reported on the president’s mental decline — and how Democratic insiders were worried about it.
“We saw this brief, momentary flash of really great journalism between June 28 and July 21 [when Kamala Harris was named Democratic nominee],” Krakauer said. “But that even just shows what was missing for so long.”
From traditional TV and local radio to daily YouTubers
Kelly, a former Fox News talk show host who was pushed out of NBC News in 2019, has been outspoken about other hot button issues as well, including her disgust with trans women who compete in women’s sports. She recently shared she was voting for Trump on Nov. 5. (She said she has voted for five Republicans and four Democrats in presidential elections over the years.)
Pakman, who rose from obscurity via a show on a local radio show in Massachusetts, has been upfront with his audience: He does not want to see Trump back in the White House. Clips on his channel titled, in a YouTube-friendly way, “Trump speaking ability COLLAPSES, MANGLES English language,” and “Kamala Harris SCHOOLS Trump on emergency response,” help make that clear.
But he’s also willing to say things he knows his audience may not be happy to hear, like recently, when he pointed out Trump was surging in the polls relative to Harris.
Some viewers clearly didn’t like that, Pakman said, because he started to see a net loss of subscribers tied to those videos, which is rare with YouTube, where subscriber figures tend to climb with each new post.
“I’m always just a realist,” Pakman said. “I’m saying, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on. This should motivate us to vote rather than to stay home.’ But there’s definitely a slice of my audience that does not like to hear that.”
Kelly, similarly, has drawn the ire of some of her MAGA-leaning fans for dismissing claims the 2020 election was rigged, Krakauer said.
Pakman, who started his show in 2009, structures his channel around his daily show. Presentation-wise, it has shades of a traditional cable news program — Pakman talks directly into the camera, while addressing a variety of topics, from Trump’s McDonald’s appearance to something Alex Jones said, that are highlighted to his left onscreen.
He posts his linchpin show, which runs a little more than an hour per episode, each weekday. That main show is then chopped into a handful of clips that are shared on his channel, as well as made into YouTube shorts and shared on other platforms. (He has 813,000 followers on TikTok.)
Kelly’s channel follows a similar playbook. Her two-hour show, which is also broadcast on SiriusXM, is posted each afternoon Monday through Friday, before being broken into separate 10-minute clips and 30-second YouTube shorts. (Kelly has 873,000 followers on TikTok.)
Beyond their normal content schedule, Kelly and Pakman have also leaned into going live after big moments during the election. Kelly’s live show the night Trump was shot in Butler, Penn., in July has racked up 2.8 million views.
Pakman said this approach to political content is simply a better, more modern way to reach audiences in 2024.
“Cord cutting is a part of it, and shareability,” he said. “It’s really hard to share something you saw on TV, so you’re way more likely to receive a link from friends to stuff that’s already on those platforms [like YouTube or TikTok].”
How we got to this point is something Krakauer and Pakman disagree on.
“A lot of it has been, to be perfectly frank, driven by the Republican party saying ‘You can’t trust corporate media,’” Pakman said. “That hostility has been a big factor.”
Pakman, who announced in June that he was ending his TV and radio show to focus on YouTube, believes his large YouTube following is tied more to changing audience habits, how he presents his content and his years of consistent posting.
“I don’t think my audience is motivated to watch me or listen to me because they distrust corporate media,” he added. “They pick up on the fact that their interests may just not be served by what you see on cable news or on local news, and they’re just more interested in what I’m offering.”
Krakauer, on the other hand, said Kelly has benefited from mainstream outlets botching their coverage of major topics like COVID-19 in recent years. It’s left a void that the viewer is looking to fill, he said, and they’re turning to YouTubers to do it.
Kelly is well positioned here, he said, because she has one foot in each world. She’s brought her journalism chops from Fox News and NBC to YouTube, where she can be independent and voice her opinion more. And score big views.
“There are so many stories that, for various reasons — whether it’s financial, or whether it’s just too many cooks in the kitchen — these giant, behemoth news organizations can’t tell in a way that is just honest,” Krakauer said. “And now there are places like ‘The Megyn Kelly Show,’ where people come to us to tell the truth, as best as we can tell it.”
Loree Seitz contributed to this report.
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