It’s about to get even easier for YouTube creators to partner with advertisers. YouTube Creator Partnerships — the AI-powered offering that was formerly known as BrandConnect and that helps pair creators with advertisers — will be integrated directly into YouTube Studio for creators. The company announced the change in a blog post on Monday ahead of YouTube and Google’s 2026 NewFront presentation.
YouTube Creator Partnerships works by using Google’s Gemini to analyze billions of data points, including how similar a creator’s audience is to the one a brand wants to target, how organically that creator mentions the brand in question and that creator’s subscriber growth. After analyzing that data, Gemini then suggests creators to brand who specifically fit with that brand’s identity and campaign goals. This program has been an option for several months now, but now the process is going to become more streamlined. That means brands will have access to the more than 3 million creators within the YouTube Partner Program.
In addition to YouTube Creator Partnership into YouTube Studio for creators, the offering will also be integrated into Google Ads and Display as well as Video 360, two of the options the company has for advertisers.
“We understand that it’s historically been challenging for advertisers to find the right creator to work with and then scale their efforts globally. We want to bring even more opportunities for collaboration with brands and creators to the creator community,” Melissa Hsieh Nikolic, director of product management for YouTube Ads, said during a press briefing that included TheWrap.
Hsieh Nikolic referred to the feature as a brand’s “one-stop shop for managing collaborations and creator campaigns, from creator discovery and outreach to campaign management and measurement.”
“So you can say, ‘Find me U.S. tech creators reviewing sports gear with high Gen-Z retention’ and our AI will surface creators who match and will include insights about their channel, their audience, sample videos and more,” she explained. “It’s designed to save time for brands who traditionally have had to manually sift through eligible creators in the YouTube Partner Program and may have missed some really great creators. It also gives creators of all sizes more opportunities to be discovered.”
Once a brand finds a creator they want to work with, soon they’ll be able to contact that creator directly through the YouTube Creator Partnerships program to explore a collaboration. The ability to edit and manage all the brand deal links through YouTube Creator Partnerships will also be added at a later date.
Creators will also have the option to share more of their channel’s analytics with brands. When brands have a better understanding of a creator’s audience, it can lead to stronger and better partnerships. On average, creators who shared channel insights appeared 60% more often in search results, according to data from YouTube.
The company also rolled out its YouTube creator partnerships boost, which will allow advertisers to put paid media behind creator content as ads. This option will be available to all advertisers that use Display and Video 360, the Google-owned platform that lets advertisers to manage programmatic ad campaigns, display ads, video ads, native ads and CTV formats all in one place. Creator takeovers will now be available for Display and Video 360 campaigns for the first time.
Pause ads on YouTube will soon be an option on Display and Video 360, meaning that ads will appear once you pause a YouTube video, and cost-per-hour mastheads will soon appear on both YouTube and Google TV. The company is experimenting with how frequently these new ad offerings will appear.
