The horror series about endless empty corridors, which Kane Parsons started as an amateur on his YouTube channel, reached cinemas this year as an A24 studio film. That very movement, in which something from the edge of YouTube shifts to the centre of attention, is described in a report YouTube published on 10 September.
The material is called “In Search of Mainstream”, and YouTube prepared it with the company NRG. Its thesis is that mass culture has merely regrouped. Rather than a single broadcast centre, it now consists of fan communities and their shared interests.
Culture is more personal and less synchronised
Audiences have access to more content, creators and communities than ever, so they have splintered into smaller groups. Two thirds of surveyed Americans aged 14 to 44 (67%) follow more channels that nobody around them follows than they did five years ago.
According to the report, shared culture is not ending. Among people aged 14 to 29, 63% agree that when someone is into the same things as everyone else, they feel part of something bigger. And 65% of respondents aged 14 to 44 say that content seems more genuine or legitimate when it appears on YouTube in particular.
Creators are perceived almost as widely as Hollywood stars
The report's strongest figure is a comparison of cultural recognition. In the American sample aged 14 to 44, 77% of people said creators on YouTube were widely known. For Hollywood stars the figure was 79%, for internet memes 78% and for the Super Bowl 83%. The gap between a creator and a film celebrity shrank to two percentage points on this measure.
The report links this to the fan feeling that they co-create success. 63% of fans feel a sense of success when their favourite creator succeeds, and 60% are proud to have a stake in that success. The report sums this up in one sentence, which Tubefilter quotes: “Digital platforms fundamentally transform how audiences experience what they encounter. Digital culture is inherently participatory, and properties that actively embrace these dynamics can accelerate into the mainstream from unexpected places.”
From a YouTube channel to cinemas
Backrooms is concrete proof of this thesis. The series began as a fan project on YouTube and headed to cinemas in May 2026. On a budget of around $10 million, it earned over $393 million worldwide, roughly $197 million in the US and $196 million outside it. It overtook the A24 studio's previous record, the film Marty Supreme, with around $191 million, and became the studio's first film to pass $300 million worldwide.
At the same time, the pull of traditional cinema premieres as shared events is weakening. General awareness of the biggest films fell by around 10% since 2017, while the share of people who describe themselves as big fans of a particular title rose by 4%. Attention is concentrating in the depth of smaller communities.
The data are American and YouTube commissioned the report
The figures need to be read with two caveats. The data was collected by NRG in April 2026 on an American sample aged 14 to 44, with between 496 and 939 respondents depending on the question. This is a snapshot of the American market, and the European sample is missing from it.
The report was also commissioned by YouTube itself, and its conclusion that culture now flows mainly through YouTube suits the platform. For a European advertiser, the figures are a guide to where younger audiences' attention is moving. The direction is consistent with what is happening outside the platform too: a film that grew out of a fan series on YouTube now outperforms established studio names in cinemas.
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