YouTube To Renew The Young Turks’ Original Channel

It’s official: One of YouTube’s 100 Original Channels has secured it’s place in Google’s reinvestment plan. The Young Turks‘ Town Square channel has confirmed it will continue to be included in the project, and has noted it believes it is the only news channel to achieve such a goal.

Town Square, which features the passionate commentary we’ve come to expect from Cenk Uygur‘s media conglomerate, offers a more peripheral and expert-oriented examination of key issues compared to The Young Turks’ straight ahead political analysis. Young Turks’ COO Steven Oh explained the process behind the renewal:

YouTube funded four channels last year from their news vertical: Town Square (a property of the TYT Network), Slate, Reuters, and Wall Street Journal. Town Square has been approved to receive funding for the 2nd cycle. To date, it is the only channel in the new vertical that will be receiving 2nd cycle funding from YouTube.

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Town Square’s traffic has been fairly limited; it has thus far accrued just 29,000 subs and a tick more than 4.7 million views, despite having been around for a good while

. Therefore, it’s clear Google likes something else about the channel, whether it is its potential for the future or its association with one of YouTube’s biggest news hubs. Given the success of other YouTube Original Channels launched by popular creators, our guess is the latter; after all, a couple of the other news channels have bigger subscriber bases.

And there’s still no absolute definitive news yet on whether or not Slatester will also receive a check from Google’s next round of funding, thus still leaving room for our previous predictions to be correct. Go Townsquare, and…go us?

Got a tip on what other channels will be funded? Let us know.