When a platform tells advertisers that creators are not an audience to reach but partners in production, it changes more than a sales pitch. It changes who holds the rights, who carries the risk and who keeps the brand. YouTube is presenting this tonight at the Lincoln Center as its main argument for the advertising season, and behind it stands a concrete tool, not just a slogan.
Brandcast, YouTube’s annual upfront for advertisers, takes place on Wednesday 13 May at 5:30pm New York time. Trevor Noah is hosting and Chappell Roan performs. Neal Mohan, head of YouTube, YouTube’s chief business officer Mary Ellen Coe and Sean Downey, president of Google for the Americas, take the stage. Among the creators on the programme are channels such as Dude Perfect with 61.8 million subscribers or Jesser with 38.5 million. But the format of the evening is not what matters most. What matters is a line that Downey told Adweek before the event: “YouTube is the future of media, and creators are the front door.”
What is actually being sold
The classic upfront is about where to place a spot. YouTube is selling something different this year. Downey described it as a shift from the question “where can I place an ad?” to “who can I build something with?”. Specifically, there are three things: creator takeovers, where a brand takes over a channel at the moment a creator launches a new show; channel slates, meaning a preview of a creator’s upcoming content shown to advertisers in advance; and YouTube Creator Partnerships, a platform that suggests to brands and creators who is a good fit for each other.
YouTube launched that third tool on 23 March 2026 at NewFronts. It was created by merging the former BrandConnect and the Creator Partnerships Hub into one place, connected to YouTube Studio on the creator side and to Google Ads and Display & Video 360 on the advertiser side. Matching is handled by Gemini. According to YouTube, it processes billions of data points, from audience similarity and organic brand mentions to subscriber growth, across more than three million creators in the partner programme. An advertiser builds a list of channels and sends a request straight to dozens of creators at once. Creators who open their channel data to the platform appear in search results 60% more often, according to YouTube.
It is a business model that looks like infrastructure. The advertiser gets access to a pool of talent, YouTube takes its cut, and the creator (this is the part the platform emphasises) keeps the show.
Why rights in particular
The difference from streaming services lies precisely here. In his annual letter of 21 January 2026, Neal Mohan wrote that the era when this kind of content was dismissed with the shorthand UGC is long gone: “These are shows, built by creators who green-light themselves.” He added that creators “are buying studio-sized lots in Hollywood and beyond” to shoot there. But bigger budgets are not the main change. What matters is who keeps the result. When Netflix or another streamer buys a show from a creator, it usually buys the rights to it too. YouTube offers the opposite logic: the creator brings the brand, makes the show, monetises it through the platform, and the rights remain with them. It is a move that keeps the most prominent creators on YouTube at a time when Tubi launches a long-form programme with TikTok and Netflix is poaching names for its roster.
Mohan summed it up in one sentence in the same letter: “When creators hold the keys to their own production and distribution, the only limit is their imagination.” From YouTube’s point of view, this is a comfortable position. The platform does not need to become a studio. It is enough for it to be the place where studios are born, and to collect a cut from every transaction between them and brands.
The numbers behind the pitch
YouTube presents itself at Brandcast as number one in streaming in the US and has the data to back this story. According to Nielsen, it reaches more than 238 million people aged 18 and over across all devices in the US. YouTube’s advertising revenue for 2024 was roughly $36.1 billion, but growth slowed from 45.9% in 2021 to around 12.5% in 2025. Since 2021, the platform has paid out more than $100 billion to creators, media companies and music partners, which is more than half of its revenue, according to Justine Ryst, YouTube’s head for France and Southern Europe. And creator viewing is moving into the living room: the analytics firm Spotter counted around 6,600 creator channels with an estimated 136 billion annual views in the US, 52% of which come from smart TVs.
YouTube also adds arguments about trust. According to the platform, 78% of viewers say that on YouTube the most trustworthy creators are the ones recommended to them; 79% of Gen Z viewers describe communities forming around creators that give them a sense of belonging. Downey draws a thesis from this: “The future of brand is trust, not social.” He adds that a brand does not have to choose between building image and driving performance, because advertisers promoting creator videos in Shorts see on average a 30% higher lift in conversions, according to YouTube.
Who bears the risk
The platform opens access for creators to advertisers they would not find on their own. In exchange, it controls operations, data and the transaction itself. Brands are promised that they do not have to do casting work, because the algorithm will supply candidates who match the audience and tone. And YouTube stays in the game against streamers without producing expensive content itself. The creator bears the risk, the infrastructure is held by the platform, and the brand pays for the result.
It remains unclear how equal the partnership really is. The matching tool runs on data owned by YouTube. Distribution is governed by an algorithm that YouTube tunes. And even a show that a creator produces independently still needs the platform to show it. Brandcast presents this picture as a win for creators. For the most part, however, it is a description of how YouTube has placed itself between creators and brands, so that every deal has to pass through it.
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