Michelle Khare on building Emmy-worthy content — one challenge at a time

Perhaps though, the content creator’s biggest challenge will be nabbing a Primetime Emmy Award this year after earning a place on the nomination ballet. Should the win come through, it’ll prove Khare and other YouTubers offer quality programming worthy of Hollywood (and the ad dollars that flow through it). 

“It is a sign of a maturing industry. It’s an opportunity to attract talent who want to work on the show, as well as the audience who will continue to support the show, and the advertisers who are interested in spending their ad dollars on high quality projects that will be seen by millions of people,” Khare said.

On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Khare shares exactly what goes into “Challenge Accepted” episodes, YouTube’s maturity curve and what comes next in the creator economy. 

Also on this episode: Paramount agrees to pay $16 million to settle its CBS lawsuit with the Trump administration, European publishers hit Google’s AI Overviews with an antitrust complaint, and TikTok is said to be building a new version of the app ahead of its expected U.S. sale. 

Here are a few highlights from the conversation with Khare, which have been edited for length and clarity.

‘Wrangling our white whale’

The process of taking an episode of “Challenge Accepted” from ideation to upload is a wild one. In many ways, we’re wrangling our white whale. In the beginning of the show, I was making tons of content, uploading weekly — or every other week — and we got to this point where our audience really latched onto longer, in-depth storytelling. The episodes where I would train like an Olympic figure skater for 60 days for one single video? That is what people latched onto and also what started performing better. 

The content greenlighting process

We have a huge spreadsheet of ideas, and these ideas come from lots of different places. Once we have a potential idea ruminating with us, it’s a heavy research process. Once we have a couple ideas, we pass them on to [our researcher], who does this big research document on the topic. She will go into the history, the pop culture, potential personnel we could reach out to to collaborate with them. From there, we continue to develop the idea. Last year, we did an episode where we simulated what it would be to be the president if nuclear missiles were inbound. We created this simulation with actors and role players playing the various heads of state. We brought in a professional from Harvard who studies all these types of conflicts in history to help us write the simulation. 

Monetizing IP for the long term

We’re going to be licensing our catalog. This has been announced on Samsung TV Plus, which is really cool. I just remain super honored and excited about syndication as a whole. Historically, it’s been a really special avenue for legacy television shows. To be in those adjacent and similar conversations is a dream come true. It’s a vote of confidence, and it’s special, because we are operating in a world where not everybody knows the quality of what’s happening in our space. I genuinely believe that there is just a crop of content creators who are making content that is so good it cannot be ignored any further.