Prince William’s new $95 million YouTube deal trumps Prince Harry
A big announcement by the Prince of Wales shows just how far the Duke of Sussex has fallen behind since Megxit.
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There’s big news out of London. Huge. You’ve probably already heard by now but King Charles has found the time in his schedule of receiving new Ambassadors and re-alphabetising his seed collection to turn down the heating in the Buckingham Palace indoor pool.
The pool, used by both the royal family and Palace staffers, has gotten that much icier, reportedly thanks to the King’s focus on reducing the monarchy’s energy use. (As Prince Harry told a 2018 doco about his father, “He’s a stickler for turning lights off.”)
But that nippy pool news isn’t the only royal development on the environmental front, a cause that the House of Windsor has become so focused on in the last few years that it’s a surprise that Charles has not started insisting Queen Camilla wears compostable knickers. (No, she’s an Agent Provocateur gal through and through.)
Rather, it has been announced that Prince William’s $95 million Earthshot Prize is partnering with YouTube and will work on “co-branded campaigns, events and creator collaborations” over the next two years.
While this might sound about as exciting as a stale Ryvita and about as earnest, this is a landmark moment- the first time that a member of the royal family has joined forces with a tech giant to work together. I’d say that everyone at William’s Kensington Palace and Earthshot offices deserves a second gingernut today at morning tea in celebration.
What is interesting here is not just what the prince is busy doing with his mornings but the degree to which William is showing up Harry of the Hummingbird Feeder.
Going back to the very beginning of the working royal careers in the aughties, the brothers shared similar charitable interests and work, for example, William becoming a patron of the conservation charity Tusk and with Harry working with African Parks.
In 2009, they came up with (or at least some badly paid but canny aide) the idea of the Royal Foundation, an umbrella organisation for their various philanthropic interests, with one of the biggies being all things environmental.
So, years pass, wives are added to the Foundation, the scope grows, money flows in until the Great Rupture when Harry and his other half Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex hightail it off to the US to turn sharing their feelings into a career. (Hang on, that sounds familiar…)
In 2020, after Harry had recovered from learning that Americans make tea using a microwave (having been coaxed out of the foetal position by a bodyguard dangling his Xbox controller in front of him, I’m guessing) he got back on the horse and back to beating the climate crisis drum.
Over the years since then Harry has done what he does best - talk about things passionately and then not do much - about the fact the Earth is melting such as last year when he addressed a partially empty UN General Assembly, saying “our world is on fire”.
Except what has become clear is that while Harry was getting in touch with his feelings in California and learning how to take the bins out, ‘Willy’ was back in London with a white board, some earnest, clever clogs sorts and the backing of more billionaires than you could poke a priceless stick at working on the Earthshot Prize.
(Some of the founding funders of the Prizee include Jeff Bezos, former New York major presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg, the family foundation of Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, and the foundation set up by Rob Walton, the son of the founder of Walmart, and whose personal worth is more than $90 billion.
Along with building a significant US footprint, the Prize has also attracted some serious international names including Jacinda Ardern and former UN climate head Christiana Figueres who played a leading role in the Paris Agreement.
The whole endeavour has only gone from strength to strength since then, with nearly $20 million already handed out in two years and with this year’s awards set to be ramped up from an awards night to a week’s worth of events in Singapore.
As Earthshot winner Sebastian Groh from SolShare, the world’s first peer-to-peer energy exchange network, recently told the Telegraph: “Suddenly Bill Gates will walk by your product and say ‘that’s interesting’.
“I was very surprised by the pull of the Royal Family, especially in the US.”
Which is to say, while Harry has been busy yelling ‘fire’, William has been getting on with manning the hose. (No snickering down the back there.)
What Wednesday’s YouTube announcement really cements is the fact that of the two royal brothers, one has effortlessly cemented his global leadership in the battle for us to not all drown in our beds thanks to rising sea levels. And the other is a man who was once duped by help pranksters posing to be Greta Thunberg to help move 50 penguins from landlocked Belarus to the North Pole.
Look at the numbers and the details here and William is leagues - stadium-lengths - ahead of his younger brother.
In its first two years, the Earthshot Prize has provided $19 million in funding to help climate projects; the Sussexes’ Archewell Foundation has given out $4.7 million across all of their myriad causes.
William has made a five-part BBC documentary about climate solutions and will now be creating videos with the biggest streaming platform in the world with an audience in the billions; Harry helped launch a platform for climate change content and was widely mocked for the line, “What if every one of us was a raindrop?”
So far the solutions and work done by Earthshot finalists has directly benefited 1.5 million people, helped protect more than two million hectares of the ocean (which is the size of Wales) and saved 35,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions. The only references to “climate” in the Sussexes’ Archewell Foundation’s Impact Report are donations made to Save the Children and UNICEF in response to catastrophic flooding in Nigeria and their ongoing support of World Central Kitchen whose work includes “efforts at the frontlines of climate disasters.”
Earthshot could have been a sound-and-fury-signifying-nothing-but-good-PR exercise; instead it has turned out to be a cracking success. (Even the New York Times Editorial Board took time away from the momentous 2020 Presidential election to praise the Prize.) Harry’s sustainable travel initiative Travalyst was launched in 2019 and yet to this day I could not tell you exactly what it does. When Travelyst ended its pilot phase and announced a new board it failed to make news.
Maybe a part of the reason is that William has only one day job - future King and to do that he has all the high level access, time and support to try and change the world for the better. Harry, by contrast, has a mortgage to pay and Netflix, Spotify, Penguin Random House, Wall Street outfit Ethic and tech company BetterUp to keep sweet. The duke has so many plates in the air he should buy up stock in Wedgewood.
And maybe, just maybe the William/YouTube marriage could lead to more official royal partnerships. Just imagine - Camilla’s cocktail-making channel (‘Now you’ll need about four jiggers of gin per person, five if Princess Michael of Kent is coming’) or Kate, the Princess of Wales shooting video after video of her unboxing Zara blazers. It’s a brave new royal streaming world but I’ll say this- Queen Mary never had to worry about people hitting like and subscribe now did she?
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as Prince William’s new $95 million YouTube deal trumps Prince Harry
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