Boosting the UK's creative and cultural industries

What can a 22 year old on YouTube teach the the Royal Shakespeare Company about entertaining audiences? Quite a lot, it turns out, when the YouTubers are stars like Danisnotonfire, who has had a 90% growth in traffic in the last year, or Michael Stevens, who is fast approaching 500 million views for his channel VSauce.



More than 300 British leaders from the arts, creative and cultural sector packed our Central St. Giles office in London to learn from each other - and from some of the new YouTube upstarts - how best to reach and entertain a global audience online. Together with us, the Arts Council, Creative England, Culture24 and the European Creative Industries Alliance organized the two day celebration. On the the first day, we focused on access to finance, and on the second, seizing online opportunities.

Two recurring big themes emerged:

• Personality - Art galleries and museums must engage online in a way that has authenticity, character and even intimacy. One great example was from Whitechapel Gallery, where young people at the gallery have set up their own blog, Duchamp and Sons, and twitter feed to talk about arts and their gallery in their own voice

• Collaboration - The British Postal Museum and Imperial War Museum explained how our own Cultural Institute online exhibitions has helped them not only reach new audiences but enabled collaboration with other institutions.

Every seat was taken for the two-day celebration

All too often, content industries have rushed to blame the Internet for hurting culture. It certainly is bringing change - but as this event shows, it also presents great opportunities for both traditional and new players.

Posted by Theo Bertram, Policy Manager, Google UK