Another challenger wants a piece of YouTube’s audience, and this one is pitching itself as the platform that actually puts creators first. According to Business Insider‘s Peter Kafka, former CNN digital chief Andrew Morse is building Phareo, a video startup he hopes can one day compete with the internet’s biggest media platforms.

Who’s behind it

Morse has spent most of his career in big media. He worked at Bloomberg and CNN, then spent more than three years running The Atlanta Journal-Constitution before co-founding Phareo. The name is a nod to Pharos, the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria, which fits the company’s main promise: helping people find video, and helping video find people.

The pitch to creators

Phareo’s big selling point is its own AI-powered discovery engine, which Morse says will serve both viewers and the people making the videos. The problem he’s going after is one creators complain about constantly: they feel they’re getting worse and worse deals from the big platforms because they have no control over who actually sees their work.

To win creators over, Phareo plans to offer real incentives for exclusive content, including revenue share and options. Morse told Kafka he plans to launch in January with a starting group of 25 creators. The app will begin as a free, ad-supported service, and he hopes to add a paid tier later.

A trademark application for the Phareo name, filed by Phareo Inc. and listed in a USPTO record, describes a broad set of plans, including apps for discovering and streaming video, audio and written content, software that lets creators publish and monetize their work, and a platform for matching brands with creators for sponsorships.

The chicken-and-egg problem

Kafka didn’t go easy on him. He pointed out that viewers won’t try a new app without content they can’t get elsewhere, and creators won’t commit without an audience. Morse called it “the most important question we have to solve” and said the plan is to build with creators who believe there has to be a better alternative, grow a “super-passionate core” and expand from there.

He also admitted the irony: “we’re trying to solve the discovery problem, but we have to be discovered ourselves.” Still, he pushed back on the idea that viewers are happy where they are, saying, “I think consumers are on these platforms because they have to be.”

A warning about the creator economy

The most interesting part of the interview may be Morse’s worry about the very industry he’s building for. He said he’s concerned about creator businesses built on top of YouTube, pointing back to 2016 and 2017, when a lot of clever media companies grew on social platforms and then struggled to survive once the algorithms changed. CNN was big enough to ride it out, he said, but for smaller companies “it was disastrous.”

With more journalists and creators leaving big outlets to go solo, Morse said, “that’s what scares me,” adding that he thinks “the sands may begin to shift a little bit.”

The takeaway

Every few years a new app promises creators a fairer deal than YouTube, and most never reach critical mass. What’s different about Phareo is that its founder openly admits how hard the climb is. For creators, including the ones who sell subscriptions on OnlyFans and Fansly, the lesson holds no matter which app wins: if one platform’s algorithm controls your whole audience, your business can change overnight, so owning your fan relationships still matters most.

Featured image: AI-generated illustration.