MAX Caves and Restores Early ‘Last Week Tonight’ Access on YouTube

Today’s media landscape is constantly changing. I won’t pretend like I know the watching habits of certain groups. My parents still have a cable box, as do several of their similarly aged friends. So do a few of the young folk at my day job. That said, my best friend’s parents are incredibly savvy with streaming services, sending him recommendations regularly. Certain stigmas exist for a reason, but there are often exceptions. What I do know is that the more eyes you get on something, the better.

There’s a reason media companies spread their reach across different forms of social media when possible. The biggest example in my life is the WWE. The decades-old business has its routes in carnival barking, so of course it has adapted in terms of getting butts in seats. They have recently begun hyping up videos they post by announcing how many “impressions” they get across social media. Since they are on everything, the numbers they tout are often huge. It makes sense and makes Warner Brothers Discovery’s decision to delay releasing segments of Last Week Tonight on YouTube even sillier.

MAX pushed Last Week Tonight’s YouTube release from early Monday to Thursday last year in a move host John Oliver called “massively frustrating.” The idea was to get more people to subscribe to MAX instead of watching the segments on YouTube. If you think it was a dumb idea, you are correct. The idea someone would search for the clip, not see it, and then pull out their credit card to subscribe to MAX is objectively silly. The more likely response to not seeing the clip would be not watching it at all.

It was a true case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. I doubt MAX will ever reveal why they reversed course (though sources at Deadline claim the move did not increase MAX viewership, which, duh), but the main segment for the season premiere of Last Week Tonight was on YouTube in the early hours of this past Monday. The video has already racked up close to 4 million views as of this writing, which is nothing to sneeze at.