Channel 4 in Leeds: How 4Studio spent five years transforming broadcaster's YouTube and social media output

Janine Smith is buzzing with passion for the power of digital storytelling - she’s been doing it since before we all knew what ‘online’ even meant.

“I started off in a completely unrelated field, long before there was such a thing as the Internet,” says the interim co-managing director at 4Studio, Channel 4’s in-house digital content department.

“I got very interested in the rise of the Internet. I'd seen it in a lab at university, which is kind of where the Internet started, and I started doing some voluntary work for a guy who was building dot com sites back in the mid-90s. You know where you go on the street and take pictures of people's outfits? That kind of thing.

“I was one of few people who had experience of doing something for a website when websites became a thing.”

She has never strayed too far from that area professionally and, 30 years on, has been at the helm of developing 4Studio in Leeds.

Janine previously worked as head of digital entertainment, comedy and drama at ITV but was hired by C4 and started in January 2020, being the second to join a then unnamed new digital content department after Matt Risley, the former 4Studio managing director who left in September this year and is now chief digital officer at the National Theatre.

She arrived “just in time to do a lot of interviews and then go into lockdown,” she says.

However, the department is now celebrating five years of operating in Leeds, where it started, and beyond in a number of C4’s other bases around the UK.

The idea was to use social media not just as a promotional tool for the main channel and its programmes, but to develop the broadcaster’s online content as a business in its own right.

Janine says: “It wasn’t that Channel 4 had never done any social media content - of course, they were on Twitter, as it was at the time, on Facebook and all of those things, but it wasn't a huge push to grow that as a business, it was more of a marketing function for our programmes.

The 4Studio team publishes up to 30,000 pieces of content each year. Over the first half of this year, UK views of full episodes of Channel 4 content on YouTube grew 59 per cent year-on-year to 85million.

This helped Channel 4 amass more than 1.3 billion UK views across its social output in the first half of 2025, up 7.3 per cent year on year.

The YouTube full episodes growth was driven by documentaries, homes and crime programming including, with the biggest shows being 24 Hours in Police Custody (8.6M), Manhunt (4.9M) and Murder Case: Digital Detectives (1.8M views). Channel 4 Homes: best performing full episodes come from Grand Designs (4.5M views).

Janine says: “What's been almost revolutionary for us is the moment where we started to put our full episode content on to YouTube. That is not something that you would think is a natural thing that a TV broadcaster would do but actually it's particularly forward-thinking, I think, of Channel 4 to lean into that because that is reaching audiences that we're not getting elsewhere. We know that there's young audiences on YouTube that are not necessarily coming to our streaming platform or watching TV in the corner of the living room, but they are still interested in our content. Our documentaries (YouTube) channel, for example, has had huge growth this year as our highest performing channel. We've been able to more than double our full episode views year on year, and that was a big breakthrough for us.”

Across 2024, its UK YouTube views rose 26 per cent to 340 million, with full-episode viewing up 169 per cent.

C4 has a partnership deal with YouTube allowing it to sell its own advertising, which benefits its social media revenues.

Last year, the company says that total digital advertising revenues - of which social is one part, the other being streaming - increased nine per cent to £306 million, accounting for 30 per cent of total revenue, which C4 says is double the market average and ahead of its 2025 target.

Elsewhere, the 2024 Paralympic Games was another standout moment in Janine’s mind, as C4’s social media channels had 1,300 hours of live streaming from every televised event.

“TV was based on big events and highlights packages. We had every single event. Quirky little events that would never make it to TV, we were able to give out to the world.”

Meanwhile, spin-off content for Russell T Davies’ 2021 television mega hit It's A Sin was another proud moment as it added to what was “another big moment culturally, and had some real life impacts - the amount of HIV testing went up off the back of it, World AIDS Day had its biggest ever engagement. Those kinds of things are really exciting for me personally”.

The 4Studio department of nearly 100 people is now split across numerous offices but the majority, more than 75, are in Leeds, where there are more than 350 roles across C4.

Janine says: “Most of the people haven't necessarily worked in television but they are experts in creating content or editing or social media management or analytics, whatever the skill set is that we need, they’ve existed in other types of businesses,” she says.

With relatively close proximity to various northern cities and the willingness of some to move up from London, they had a wide pool to choose from, says Janine, but the opening in Leeds - now based in the Majestic - has allowed younger locals who might previously have never thought of working for a broadcaster to get that chance to pursue that career.

Before joining Channel 4 in 2022 as a social media apprentice with Film4, Amber Fox was at university in Manchester. She wasn’t feeling fulfilled so changed university, moved to York, but then realised further education wasn’t right for her at all.

She was working in Boots when her mum spotted an ad on Facebook for the Channel 4 Apprenticeship Programme.

Amber, 22, from Denby Dale near Huddersfield, initially didn’t get the apprentice role but was called back a few weeks after to be offered another position.

“I remember when I was applying for the apprenticeship, I was like, I don't actually have that much knowledge of apprenticeships because I didn't learn about it in school, so I wasn't actually that keen on applying, to be honest, at first. But I'm so glad I did because I'm here today and I enjoy it so much.”

Now, she works as an assistant digital producer for Channel 4 Sport.

Part of that is creating digital content while also supporting Channel 4’s “linear programming” - good old telly - and attending matches, interviewing players and making videos to appear on apps such as TikToks. She interviewed Arsenal player Declan Rice, for example, when they did an England football and Crufts collaboration.

“They were training dogs. That was really random but it was really fun,” she says.

The Paralympics was also a highlight.

“I jumped in the deep end because I was new in the job, but I gained so much experience from it straight away.”

Meanwhile, after finishing his A-Levels, Leeds man Oscar Jackson, who grew up in Adel and later Meanwood, also tried university but found it challenging during the Covid lockdowns.

Oscar, 24, who attended Ralph Thoresby High School and Allerton High for sixth-form, discovered a Level 4 Apprenticeship position in the social analytics team at Channel 4 and now a full-time insight analyst, specialising in social data, collaborating daily with 4Studio. He is now saving for a house deposit but one thing he has already achieved is a boost to his self-confidence.

“Particularly in that university period, I was really at a low in myself,” he says.

“I'm so grateful to have landed the position here because I’ve just excelled so much. I look back on myself from two, three years ago and it's really positive to see where I've got to.”

His role involves providing data to colleagues to identify how the company can grow and achieve more views, while also making the stats more presentable and accessible for other employees to find themselves.

He adds: “I wanted to be a footballer when I was younger and now I'm working with data, but I wouldn't change that because I absolutely love it.”

If anything grabs people’s attention on social media, it seems to be food, as millions of people now get exposed to recipes through short cookery videos on Instagram, YouTube and the rest.

Channel 4 now has its own food brand for social media, 4Served. The broadcaster has a long history of food programming with the likes of Jamie Oliver, but digital food content is a very competitive and a crowded online field.

They had an informal philosophy of “food to get comfy with” - simple recipes, repeatable content by “creators looking at global dishes but at a local level”.

In comes Imran Ali, a Burnley content creator who through C4’s partnership with Leeds- based production company Sticks and Glass, is one of the hosts of 4Served.

Imran, 32, says: “There are content creators everywhere that have a lot of talent and a lot to offer and a lot of things to bring through video, through pictures, through any sort of media. But usually the people or the content creators that are highlighted are in places like London, and that's due to accessibility because it's just easy. If you're in London, it’s like ‘let's meet up here’, and then you can just meet up. Whereas when you're in a small town like Burnley, it's not as common.”

Now he’s able to commute to Leeds when needed to film the videos at Sticks and Glass’s offices in the city centre.

Imran says that he has a master’s degree in engineering but decided to be a content creator instead, building a successful channel under his @WhatInTheChef brand.

“I did some food reviews initially, but I didn't do too well,” he says. “But I'm actually glad, because the impact that I can make through cooking food and helping people to cook is different.”

Like Jamie Oliver, his videos are family-friendly - he’s a father himself - and informal with no explicit language.

This is not just about Channel 4 giving Imran a platform but also providing the broadcaster with the kind of presence it needed to boost the 4Served idea.

Keeping skilled media operators in Leeds is an important part of all this.

Sticks and Glass co-founder Verdy Oliver says: “There’s definitely talent here, but we’ve got to work hard to retain it because there was a bit of a break in that talent coming through so now we’ve got to repair that gap and make sure they stay here.”

Historically, the universities in Leeds would nurture young professionals looking for careers in the creative industries but once they graduate go down to London, he says.

As people in the city’s media circles have been saying for years, he believes it’s about “shouting a bit louder about the fact that we’re here” while also “taking the time to develop people rather than just giving someone a train ticket up from London or someone who’s established.

“Budgets and time restrictions are always a big factor in it but if we’ve got (a project where) we can step back a bit and go ‘Ok, we’ve got a bit longer on this’, why don’t we give such a person a chance?”

As its fifth anniversary year comes to its close, that’s something C4 knows it needs to keep doing. As Janine says, having enough people is a hurdle.

“I think we scooped up almost everybody in a 200-mile radius that does what we need them to do, so that's why things like our apprenticeship and trainee schemes have become really important, so that we have a pipeline of talent for when people move onwards, upwards, sideways - all of those things have happened - so (we need to be) making sure that we can attract the right talent that will want to be part of what we're doing here.”