Hey Creatorverse readers,
A lot of hoopla has been made about YouTube trying to become the new Hollywood, but all of that hand-wringing is a bit misguided. YouTube doesn’t want to disrupt Hollywood; it wants to disrupt everything about the creator economy.
That was apparent during today’s Made on YouTube event, the company’s annual New York showcase of its latest innovations.
As per usual, the presentation unveiled several new tools, including auto-dubbing for livestreams, more advanced AI editing tools and the ability for living room viewers to leave comments from their remote. Since the start of the year, the platform has already rolled out more than 3,000 product updates and improvements. But what really struck me was how sprawling the video platform has become in recent years. Increasingly, tasks that creators used to perform across several platforms and social media sites can now happen all on YouTube.
Want to live stream? YouTube’s fan funding and Watch With options are a strong Twitch competitor, especially now that creators have the ability to collaborate with more creators. Prefer to have a more intimate relationship with audiences? YouTube’s Channel Memberships operate much like Patreon. Addicted to TikTok Shop? YouTube Shopping is becoming more sophisticated with plans to expand 35 countries by the end of the year. Need to give your audience an update? YouTube Posts appear in the feeds of anyone who subscribes to you, acting like a hyper-specific tweet or email blast.
This is without pointing out the well-documented strides YouTube has made with Shorts, podcasting and in the living room. Shorts viewership accounts for over 200 billion views per day globally; YouTube is the No. 1 podcasting platform in the U.S.; and YouTube has been the most-watched TV platform for the past three years, according to Nielsen.
Even streamers should be sweating more. A main reason why so many creators have packaged their shows on platforms like Tubi or Netflix is to better monetize their library content. But thanks to dynamic brand segments — an offering that lets creators plug current ads into older videos, thereby increasing their payout for older videos — YouTube is competing on that front too. The program, which was launched last year and is popular among bigger, most-established creators, has expanded from about 10 creators to more than 1,000.
“[YouTube] is the only platform where you can produce every kind of content — shortform, live, longform — and you can watch it on any device,” Amjad Hanif, vice president of Creator Products at YouTube, said at a roundtable after the presentation. “You can be listening to it in your car, big screen at home, mobile, desktop device, and then earn from subscriptions, earn from shopping, earn from brand deals and earn from ad rev share. Nobody brings it all together.”
Or put another way, YouTube doesn’t just want to be the one-stop shop for creators. It wants to be that for everyone.
“Our ultimate vision is to leverage our unmatched catalog to build a truly multi-format experience, where everything is seamlessly connected because we know that a viewer’s appetite changes depending on the hour,” Neal Mohan, CEO of YouTube, said at the start of today’s presentation. “Their feed should reflect that.”
Now onto the rest.
Kayla Cobb
Senior Reporter
kayla.cobb@thewrap.com
P.S. The creator economy takes the main stage at TheGrill on Sept. 30, with a look at how creators are becoming founders, IP owners and financeable media companies. Bonus: AI Creator Day on Sept. 29 gets into the tools, platforms and big questions reshaping how creators actually work. One ticket. Two days.
What’s New
Creators Grace Reiter and Saidah Belo-Osagie are joining “SNL”
“Saturday Night Live” is continuing its creator recruiting streak by adding Grace Reiter (3.9 million TikTok followers) and Saidah Belo-Osagie (55,000 Instagram followers) to Season 52, and boy, did NBC get it right with these two. Reiter is part of the production company and sketch group American High, which has a Netflix series in the works called “Minimum Wage.” She’s also the comedic genius behind “The Hunger Games (but better)” parody, which has scored 14 million views on YouTube. As for Belo-Osagie, her sketches about gentrification have hit millions of views, and she’s appeared on the NowThis shows “Are You Okay?” and “Standup Desk” as well as Kareem Rahma’s “Subway Takes.”
This is far from the first time that “SNL” has looked to the internet for its newest cast members. Veronika Slowikowska, Jeremy Culhane and Jane Wickline were all creators before they stepped into Studio 8H, and Ben Marshall was part of the viral sketch group Please Don’t Destroy (John Higgins and Martin Herlihy were also part of “SNL” for years but have since left the show). It’s a good look for “SNL,” a show that needs to be on the cutting edge to stay relevant.
VidCon combines with Cannes Lions and moves out of Anaheim
VidCon, the creator and YouTuber convention that’s been around since 2010, will be leaving Anaheim. In its upcoming iteration, the convention will join the Cannes Lions brand to form VidCon X Lions Creators. It’s a move that makes sense. VidCon and Cannes Lions have overlapped for years now, which has become a problem as the advertising festival in the south of France has started to focus more on creators. Moving forward, the primary home of VidCon x Lions Creators will be the Insight to Impact Festival, which will debut in Denver in October. The festival will then move to Nashville in 2027.
Unwell adds two new podcasts and an adventure series to its fall lineup
Alex Cooper’s Unwell is expanding its podcast slate with “Petticoat Revolution with Charlotte Long and Daphne Woolsoncroft” and “Chronically Out of Line with Molly Scheader.” “Petticoat Revolution” is a weekly series that explores history’s most iconic women, and “Chronically Out of Line” will follow Scheader each week as she breaks down the cultural conversations dominating the internet. Both podcasts are available now, and a new season of the podcast “Me and Who Els with Elsy Guevara” will return on Oct. 14.
But wait, there’s more. On Oct. 8, Unwell will also launch “Dani’s Side Quest with Dani Babes.” a 10-part YouTube series that follows Daniella Stockley as she tackles new adventures like fishing and running a farm to being a pop star.
By the Numbers
“Giggly Squad” hosts Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo sign a $160 million deal with SiriusXM
SiriusXM has signed an exclusive four-year deal with Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo’s podcast “Giggly Squad.” The deal, which came after a competitive bidding process, is reportedly worth $160 million and includes global sales for the podcast’s audio and video episodes. For those keeping score, this is a pretty massive deal considering that Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” scored a $125 million one in 2024.
Enterprise investment in creator marketing hits $8.8 million on average
Enterprise spending on creator marketing is up 66% compared to last year, according to CreatorIQ’s The State of Creator Marketing report. That’s about $2 million more than was reported last year. The average investment in creator marketing for organizations also increased 33% year-over-year, hitting $4.8 million.
CreatorIQ’s report contains all sorts of fun tidbits, like the fact that 48% of brands report earning three times as much return on investment from creator marketing compared to other forms of marketing or that 47% of respondents say that AI has increased the complexity of creator marketing.
Disney’s first-ever Created in LA event welcomes more than 350 creators to Walt Disney Studios
Last Thursday and Friday, Disney hosted its first Created in LA event, which welcomed top creators like Dude Perfect, Jordan Matter, Dhar Mann, Zach King, AdamW and Jenny Hoyos to The Walt Disney Studios and El Capitan Theatre. The event even set a Guinness World Record for “Largest gathering of people with over 10 million YouTube subscribers.” The two-day event continues Disney’s investment in the creator space, which isn’t exactly unusual for a major media company. What is notable is that the invited creators got the coveted Disney stamp of approval, which still means quite a lot.
“[At] the Walt Disney Company, we are at our best when we embrace the best-in-class storytellers, when we are unafraid and pushing to new frontiers,” Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro said to creators during the event.
Movers and Shakers
Like Nastya inks a development deal with Disney
Need more proof that Disney is investing in creators? Children’s and family YouTube channel Like Nastya (133 million YouTube subscribers) signed a content and development deal with the company. As part of the agreement, the Like Nastya brand will develop an original animated preschool series for Disney Jr. and Disney+ as well as new live-action content for kids, tweens, teens and families.
Max Klymenko, Kareem Rahma and Julia Nolke are all launching new series
Three new, major creator series to report. Max Klymenko (9.8 million TikTok followers), best known for “The Career Ladder” shortform series, launched a new series last week that explores accessibility, titled “How You Work.”
As for upcoming creator shows, Kareem Rahma (1.2 million YouTube subscribers) is partnering with YouTube Canada to release episodes of “Subway Takes” in Toronto. The new collab will premiere next month. Finally, creator Julia Nolke is planning to release a seven-episode dark comedy series titled “Becky and Miranda” on YouTube.
Creator Wesley Wang launches a YouTube competition series for aspiring filmmakers
Wesley Wang, the creator behind the viral short films “nothing, except everything” and “Violet and Marlowe Rob a Bank,” launched a YouTube competition series for aspiring filmmakers. Applicants need to submit a one-minute pitch on either TikTok or Instagram, and the winner will get $100,000 to make a feature film. The idea for the competition came from Wang’s frustration with the traditional Hollywood studio system, and the prize money is coming from angel investors of Wesley Wang Media.
Who to Watch
“What’s Your Source?”
Local News International, the media company started by former Washington Post TikToker Dave Jorgenson (444,000 YouTube followers), now has a longform show. “What’s Your Source?” is a weekly YouTube series dedicated to using Jorgenson’s silly brand of humor to combat misinformation. Each week, the team will take an audience call — yes, there’s an actual call-in number — to guide the topic of the week, providing researched explainers and interviews with subject matter experts.
“What’s Your Source?” also features experts behind the scenes. Carley Moseley and Felipe Torres Medina — two former “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” writers — are both credited writers on the show’s AI-focused first episode. Chris Vazquez is the episode’s third writer.
“I know how to make videos that are kind of funny about the news, but these guys know how to structure it, and they know how to make it into something that can be a weekly show,” Jorgenson told me. “What’s Your Source?” is the latest creator show that is actively hiring Hollywood talent. “Just because production is changing doesn’t mean that the talented people are gone. This has to be refocused, or they have to find their way. Hopefully, [creators] are the new hot spot for that.”
Bonus Content
- Quen Blackwell Is Coming for Hollywood (via The Cut)
- Colleges Mark Back to School With New Creator Programs (via The Washington Post)
- Gaza, I Couldn’t Not Speak Out’: Ms. Rachel on Controversy, Fame, and the Future (via Rolling Stone)
Want more? Explore WrapPRO now.
This report provides a weekly deep dive into the creator economy. It highlights key trends, political and technological developments, data points and industry leaders all with the goal of making you smarter about this constantly evolving space.
