YouTube Is TV Now — and Madison Avenue Is Listening

“Welcome to the YouTube era.” That’s how YouTube CEO Neal Mohan opened the company’s annual Brandcast upfront at Lincoln Center on Wednesday night, and he wasn’t being modest. With Zara Larsson kicking off the evening and Chappell Roan closing it out, YouTube didn’t just show up to upfront week — it showed up to win.

The message to the room full of media buyers was blunt: YouTube is no longer a platform where TV content goes to be clipped and repurposed. It is TV. And it’s time for advertising dollars to reflect that.

Per Nielsen’s The Gauge report, YouTube commanded 12.7% of all TV viewing as of January 2026 — up from 10.8% during the same period in 2025. Netflix, by comparison, inched from 8.6% to 8.8%. YouTube has been the No. 1 platform in watch time for three consecutive years, and the company says it reached 244 million viewers ages 18 and up in November alone — roughly 91% of the U.S. adult population. Those aren’t streaming numbers. Those are broadcast numbers.

A Slate That Looks a Lot Like a Network’s Pitch Deck

The centerpiece of Brandcast was YouTube’s expanded Creator Shows slate — a programming lineup that, in both format and ambition, resembles exactly what legacy TV networks present during upfront week. Only instead of showrunners and studio executives, the stars of this pitch deck are creators.

Trevor Noah, hosting the evening, set the tone early. “Some of you may recognize me from stand-up comedy. Some of you may recognize me from my podcast. Some of you might recognize me from The Daily Show,” he told the crowd. “But there is one place where you definitely see me, and that’s on YouTube. These days, everything is on YouTube, everything. Sports, entertainment, interviews, podcasts, you name it.” Noah is now putting that conviction into action with Trevor Noah’s World Tour, a travel series exclusive to the platform.

Alex Cooper unveiled an entire programming slate for her Unwell Network, including Before the Steps, a Met Gala docuseries; Pot Stirrer, a competition series; and Holiday Hard Launch, a microdrama. “Legacy media spent decades deciding who we should watch,” Cooper told the crowd. “Their problem is this generation stopped asking for permission. Networks didn’t lose this audience. They never had her. And she doesn’t just watch — she shows up, not because of an algorithm. It’s her choice. Her loyalty is not bought. It’s earned.”

Former NBA star Dwyane Wade announced a new season of Fly on the Wall. Soccer superstar Erling Haaland is planning both a World Cup docuseries and a fall competition series called Erling’s Gauntlet. Cleo Abram, Johnny Harris, Quen Blackwell (Feeding Starving Celebrities 2.0), and Dude Perfect (Squad Games) rounded out the roster. Julian Shapiro-Barnum — the creator behind Recess Therapy and Celebrity Substitute, which has cleared 500 million views — is launching Outside Tonight in June, a weekly late-night variety show he describes as the first of its kind built specifically for YouTube.

“I feel like YouTube has gotten to this amazing place where we are just making the TV ourselves,” Shapiro-Barnum said. “We’re not waiting on anybody to open any door for us or unlock any budget. We’re going to brands with an idea, getting it funded ourselves and are in production within less than a year of coming up with it.”

Kareem Rahma’s Road to YouTube — Through CNN’s Dead End

Perhaps no story at Brandcast captured the platform’s moment better than Kareem Rahma’s. The creator behind Subway Takes — the viral series that has put Cate Blanchett, Lil Nas X, and Ramy Youssef on a New York City train for hot takes — was supposed to be celebrating a television win. CNN had picked up his other show, Keep the Meter Running, in which Rahma rides along with yellow cab drivers to their favorite spots around the city. Then they sat on it. For three years.

“I did the whole rigmarole with television, and it was a disaster,” Rahma said. “I don’t want to wait anymore. I walked away from the deal and decided to do it independently on YouTube.”

At Brandcast, he announced Keep the Meter Running as a YouTube exclusive — nine episodes shot around New York and one international. CNN had required a rigid 45-minute runtime per episode. On YouTube, that constraint is gone. “Some episodes are 45 minutes, and some episodes are 12 minutes — we’re not really concerned with having an exact runtime. It’s more about the story and what is the best we can do for the audience. I was literally fishing with a Korean man in the forest yesterday,” he said.

Rahma’s pivot was well-timed. On the morning of Brandcast, a coordinated wave of coverage about him broke across the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Deadline, and others — a campaign that, as YouTube exec Adam Faze quietly acknowledged, had some help from Google’s own PR apparatus. That YouTube’s parent company now sees fit to lend its promotional muscle to individual creators marks a meaningful shift in how the platform thinks about talent retention.

The Retention Problem — and How YouTube Is Solving It

For all its dominance, YouTube has always had a version of the same problem: it builds careers that everyone else wants to buy. Justin Bieber was discovered here. So was Marques Brownlee. The platform’s algorithm, its monetization tools, and its sheer scale have made it the most powerful incubator for creators on the planet — which also makes it a prime target for poaching.

Netflix has been the most aggressive. In December, iHeartRadio brought 15 shows to the streaming giant — including The Breakfast Club and My Favorite Murder — on the condition that they stop distributing on YouTube. Netflix has also signed Pete Davidson and former NFL player Michael Irvin for original podcast-style shows. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos has called YouTube “a little bit of a farm league” for creators to “cut their teeth on.”

YouTube’s answer to all of this is Creator Partnerships, a newly reimagined product (previously called BrandConnect) that connects top creators directly with brand sponsorships, provides white-glove support across press, marketing, and technical needs, and now packages creator output into formal seasonal series with premiere dates and press kits. YouTube doesn’t fund or finance these projects directly — but it does everything else it can to keep creators happy enough to stay.

“All big creators today are multi-platform by default, but we definitely see YouTube as the crown jewel of the media portfolio,” said Taylor Kelly, chief strategy officer at Night Media, which manages talent including Kai Cenat, Hasan Piker, the Kalogeras Sisters, and MrBeast (from 2018 to 2024). “YouTube brand deals are usually bigger on a per-deal basis.”

MrBeast — Jimmy Donaldson, the world’s most-watched creator — is perhaps the clearest proof of concept. He has a sign in his North Carolina studio that reads “Rule #1: YouTube First,” even after producing Beast Games, the biggest unscripted series in Amazon’s history. Making that show, he admits, temporarily changed how he thought about his YouTube content — and not entirely for the better. “After the first season of Beast Games, we might have made our YouTube content a little too overproduced, where it felt inauthentic, which we’re curving back and fixing,” Donaldson said.

Mohan’s framing of all this is deliberate. “MrBeast can do a deal for a TV show, but he knows his brand, his business, and his community are built on YouTube,” he said. “They want to be entrepreneurs, own their work, and have a direct relationship with an audience. We give them that freedom.”

Brands Are Already Following the Audience

The brand side of the equation is catching up fast. Coach’s “Explore Your Story” creator-led campaign — which included episodic “Story Sessions” with Olympic gymnast Sunisa Lee and track and field athlete Tara Davis-Woodhall — drove a 60% jump in Gen Z brand awareness and a six-fold increase in consideration in a single quarter. Chanel has leaned into behind-the-scenes documentary-style content from its handbag campaigns and runway productions. Nike has used YouTube to distribute long-form athlete storytelling, including Grant Fisher’s first NYC half marathon and Keely Hodgkinson’s post-injury comeback, with engagement ranging from 50,000 to two million views per video.

Research by social and influencer agency Billion Dollar Boy found that 70% of marketers planned to increase production of long-form creator content heading into 2024 — and the trend has only accelerated since. “Brands simply follow where consumer attention is,” said Thomas Walters, chief innovation officer at Billion Dollar Boy. “A rise in YouTube consumption on TV and a rejection of passive scrolling habits in favor of more intentional media consumption has helped prompt rising brand investment in long-form.”

That audience is broader than it’s ever been. YouTube’s 2.7 billion monthly users skew younger — research from Vogue Business and youth culture agency Archrival found that 88% of Gen Zs and millennials use YouTube to discover new products — but the aging of millennials is quietly becoming one of the platform’s biggest selling points with advertisers. “The older millennials will turn 45 this year, and they really are the first generation to grow up with a supercomputer in their pocket,” said Brian Albert, managing director of YouTube Media Partnerships and Creative Works. “As they grow older, we just don’t expect them to consume media the way their parents did. They are filling in that 18 to 49 demo that really was at the heart of TV buying for decades.”

Up to 78% of Gen Alphas also use YouTube regularly, making it the dominant video platform in their media diet, according to research from GWI.

The Ad Tech to Back It All Up

Beyond the programming slate, Brandcast introduced a suite of new ad products aimed at closing the gap between attention and commerce. Buy with Google Pay enables a two-click checkout flow directly on connected TVs — and YouTube says conversions from CTV ads grew more than 200% year over year in Q1 2026. AI-powered Custom Sponsorships can dynamically build thematic content packages at scale, while new generative AI creative tools powered by Gemini, Veo, and Nano Banana take advertisers from brief to finished ad in a single workflow.

The platform also introduced a Masthead with Custom Content Shelf, letting advertisers pair hero creative with a curated video lineup, and an Affiliate Partnerships Boost to amplify affiliate-linked creator content directly on the platform. The message, as YouTube chief business officer Mary Ellen Coe framed it, is that YouTube wants to handle the full funnel — from the first impression to the checkout — without the buyer ever leaving Google’s ecosystem.

Over the past four years, YouTube has paid out more than $100 billion to creators, artists, and media companies — a number Mohan cited not just as a flex, but as a defensive moat. “There’s no platform on planet Earth that has invested in the creator economy to the same extent that we have,” he said.

Brittany Broski, whose Royal Court show has featured Harry Styles and Charli XCX, summed up the cultural moment as plainly as anyone. “We’re in a new, exciting era of talk shows right now,” she said. “We’re watching the demise of Hollywood and the influx of new Hollywood.”

Mohan, for his part, isn’t trying to predict which creator or format will define that new Hollywood. “My job isn’t to predict what content will be front and center in three years,” he said. “It’s to make sure that when the next creator has a brilliant idea, they have the tools to share it with the world.”

Chappell Roan — who was creating on YouTube years before she became a superstar — closed out the night. It was the kind of full-circle moment YouTube couldn’t have scripted better if it tried.