Dr Aurora Herrera, Journalism Course Leader at London Met, discusses the meteoric rise of digital-first content and the legacy of YouTube interview show Chicken Shop Date
Date: 11 September 2026
The way audiences consume content has changed and the end of Amelia Dimoldenberg’s Chicken Shop Date, first launched in 2014, is a useful marker of just how far that change has come.
What began as an independently produced YouTube series has now, according to Dimoldenberg, earned a place alongside established platforms such as The Graham Norton Show and BBC Radio 1 for stars promoting films, music and other projects.
Guests such as Jennifer Lawrence, Ed Sheeran and Paul McCartney are among those who have appeared on the show. This demonstrates how digital-first content has moved from the edges of the media landscape towards the mainstream.
The numbers on audience behaviour confirm this shift.
Ofcom’s Media Nations 2026 research found that the proportion of people watching traditional broadcaster content in an average week fell from 78 per cent in 2022 to 70 per cent in 2025. At the same time, average YouTube viewing on television sets more than doubled, rising from nine minutes per person per day in 2022 to 19 minutes in 2025.
Traditional broadcasters remain a major part of what people watch in UK homes, but audiences are increasingly moving between broadcast, streaming, social media and creator-led platforms.
Additionally, advertising investment is following audiences in the same direction. The industry body for digital advertising, IAB UK, published its Digital Adspend 2025 study which found that the UK digital advertising market reached £40.5 billion in 2025, up 10 per cent year-on-year. Investment in video increased by 20 per cent to £9.3 billion, while social media advertising spend rose by 21 per cent to £11.5 billion.
For communications professionals, however, the shift to digital is about more than deciding where to place content.
Digital platforms are not simply additional channels through which organisations can distribute material created for traditional media. They increasingly shape the tone, format and production of the content itself, as well as what audiences expect from it.
The challenge for industry practitioners is therefore not only to understand where audiences are spending their time, but what they expect to find when they get there.
The success of Chicken Shop Date demonstrates the importance of creating content that feels at home on the platform where people encounter it. Its informal setting, deliberately awkward interview style and highly shareable moments were not attempts to recreate a traditional television interview on YouTube. Rather, they were part of a format built for digital culture.
Digital formats can also create cultural value through their intellectual property. After learning that Chicken Shop Date would be axed, PETA UK offered to buy the rights to Chicken Shop Date, suggesting the series be reimagined with celebrities meeting chickens at an animal sanctuary, rather than eating them at a chicken shop.
This is a striking example of the cultural value that a digital-first format can generate. This idea is not new - in 2003, the rights to ITV Digital’s popular Monkey character were bought and donated to Comic Relief - but what is new is that a self-created YouTube concept can command the same cultural recognition.
It is not just that digital content is competing with traditional media for attention but that it is also generating valuable media assets for itself, a significant sign of how far digital-first content has come.
Dr Aurora Herrera is a Journalism Course Leader at London Met with a career in print and television spanning more than a decade.