Remember when YouTube was cute kittens, epic fails, and movie clips? You’re middle-aged.

At Fast Company, Chris Stokel-Walker reports on a new development that shows, if nothing else, how it is displacing traditional network TV. Its channels are now sought-after products:

YouTubers dedicate their lives to building a following in hopes of creating and sustaining a livelihood. For top creators, the rewards are immense: MrBeast, the world’s biggest YouTuber, is estimated to be worth $1 billion.

It’s no surprise, then, that YouTube channels are valuable assets, often bought and sold for significant sums. A new study published in the Cornell University archive arXiv reveals that 1 in every 400 YouTube channels has changed hands on third-party platforms, frequently undergoing complete transformations in the process.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University analyzed Fameswap—a kind of eBay for social media profiles—cataloging 4,641 YouTube channels with a combined 823 million subscribers listed for sale between October 2024 and March 2025. They then tracked which of those channels sold, confirming more than $1 million in transactions during that six-month period.

“YouTube channels are being sold and repurposed to spread scams and disinformation, says new research,” August 1, 2025

YouTube says it’s a violation but with that many channels, policing may be hit and miss.

Licensed via Adobe Stock

From the open-access paper:

We confirm that these repurposed channels share several characteristics with sold channels — mainly, the fact that they had a significantly high presence of potentially problematic content. Across repurposed channels, we find channels that became disinformation channels, as well as channels that link to web pages with financial scams. We reason that abusing the residual trust placed on these channels is advantageous to financially- and ideologically-motivated adversaries. This phenomenon is not exclusive to YouTube and we posit that the market for cultivating organic audiences is set to grow, particularly if it remains unchallenged by mitigations, technical or otherwise.

Alejandro Cuevas et al, Chameleon Channels: Measuring YouTube Accounts Repurposed for Deception and Profit, ArXiv

The scam element is likely a future big headache for YouTube. But, in the larger picture, as commentator Stephen Kruiser notes at PJ Media — commenting on the controversial recent cancelation of Stephen Colbert’s late night TV show,

Movies dealt a blow to vaudeville. Television dealt a blow to radio, as well as to movies (at first, anyway). Television and cinema would eventually learn to live in harmony. Now we’re seeing the rise of streaming platforms and YouTube. I honestly can’t remember the last time that I watched an episode of “Saturday Night Live” on a television. In fact, I don’t ever watch full episodes; I merely check out clips on YouTube. They’re usually available the next day on the SNL YouTube page, because the show’s producers understand the future.

“From Vaudeville to YouTube: Late-Night Is Dying Because That’s How the Entertainment Industry Works,” August 4, 2025

For better or worse, YouTube is better suited to a more fragmented age than network TV is.