Creator Economy Strategy for Streaming Platforms

Behind closed doors in 2018, people in tech and media started to whisper about one very unusual secret piece of market research. While the streaming wars were at their peak -- Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon, and Disney were spending billions on original content -- people were doing something else when they turned on their TVs. Most people in front of their living room TVs weren't opening a premium streaming app, not even Netflix... instead they were opening YouTube¹. The totally free service, that also gets its content for free from creators, was actually winning the streaming wars. A few years later, this secret was made prominently public when Nielsen's The Gauge started publicly reporting on it in May 2021.

And even though this big news debuted 5 years ago, we're at an inflection point where this strategic problem is finally front-and-center. A number of economic and competitive dynamics have forced the streamers to find ways to compete with lower content costs and they've set their sights on YouTube:

• Amazon is 2 years into a relationship with MrBeast (Beast Games season 2 dropped in January with a Survivor crossover, and season 3 is already greenlit), and it's broadening the bench: the Kelce brothers' New Heights podcast is now on Prime Video, and Amazon's unscripted slate is filling up with creator and celebrity hosts (Travis Kelce, Nick Cannon, JB Smoove).
• Netflix is suddenly courting creators: Mark Rober for kids and family, The Sidemen for Gen Z, the Jordan and Salish Matter family for tweens, plus a wholesale podcast play (iHeart, Spotify/Ringer, Barstool) where the contracts pull full episodes off YouTube.
• Tubi launched a Creatorverse Incubator with TikTok to develop original long-form series from TikTok creators for its free service.
• Instagram quietly launched a connected-TV app this winter -- first on Fire TV in December, then Google TV in February.
• Roku launched a whole creator destination in its OS and announced a larger licensing push for podcasters and influencers.

The battle for creators is really just a battle with YouTube

This is totally uncharted territory. Building original content around creators has been happening for at least a decade with mixed results. What's different now is that mainstream Hollywood is competing with YouTube on the same turf: before, the fight was between cable and mobile phones; now, every major media company has some foothold in the living room, just one arrow key away from YouTube.

But this is going to be a much harder battle than anyone is prepared for. While Hollywood was fighting with each other, YouTube was slowly and methodically building a living room business with several compounding advantages:

• Content in the right format. YouTube diversified way past short-form and has been incentivizing creators to make mid- and long-form content since 2012. And while many thought YouTube would have to play catch-up with mobile vertical content, the tables have turned in the living room: TikTok and Instagram have almost no 16:9 library, and YouTube has the largest one ever assembled.
• Living room UX and personalization. YouTube is one of the first video platforms to have a true living room experience. As smart TVs and consoles arrived, YouTube was first to market with bespoke apps (back when I was at Revision3, it was really just us and them!). They've been learning about living room consumers for more than a decade, and more importantly, so have their machine learning algorithms.
• Individual accounts. Since YouTube started on web and mobile, people already have profiles and accounts there. YouTube already knows your viewing habits, subscriptions, and watchlist. When a viewer signs up for the other streamers, those platforms have a cold-start problem and are learning the viewer from scratch.
• Offering for Kids. YouTube has maintained a separate Kids app since 2015, and a 2019 FTC ruling ironically forced them to spend even more resources on bespoke children's content and products.
• Multi-app ecosystem. YouTube TV and Google TV (Google's TV operating system) don't count toward Nielsen's Gauge numbers for YouTube. But as anyone who has searched for content on those surfaces knows, they are valuable front doors that drive traffic back to the main free YouTube app. They are also fronts to build complementary competencies in Sales and GTM.

The obvious theme here is just how long they've been working on putting creator content on your TV. A decade-plus head start, with a product, audience graph, and creator pipeline that all reinforce each other.

What YouTube really does for viewers

This could seem insurmountable. Instead of thinking about YouTube as a competitor, let's think about the viewer, where all great content strategy starts.

What does all this creator content actually help YouTube accomplish? My favorite way to think about creator content in the living room is to back into a jobs-to-be-done framework. People think of YouTube generically as a boredom-killer helmed by creators, but that's pretty superficial. Think a layer deeper about what problems users "hire" YouTube videos to solve. From that angle, YouTube isn't a creator platform. It's a living room superapp:

• Helps me stay informed with news and podcasts
• Helps me get healthy with fitness instruction
• Improves my home with DIY videos and inspiration
• Saves (or makes) me money with advice and instruction
• Educates my family with free lectures, classes and tutoring
• Helps me relax or fall asleep with music and meditation
• Helps me find community with others interested in my niche hobby (magic, anime, crafts)

And we could keep going for dozens more.

It would be very hard to dismantle all of the synergistic ways that YouTube serves consumers. You can't out-YouTube YouTube! But by breaking the platform down into discrete viewer jobs, suddenly there are many fronts on which you can attack for market share.

Which front you pick is going to depend on the streaming service. That's where we'll head next.

Find the viewer jobs where YouTube's scale becomes a weakness

The next question on the way to a creator strategy:

which YouTube living-room use cases are structurally vulnerable to us?

Answer that by looking at areas where your platform has an advantage and YouTube's scale creates weakness.

You can use a 2x2 like this to help visualize it. I've temp'd in generic "streaming platform" as an example:

The interesting strategy lives in the diagonals: pair one of your strengths against one of YouTube's weaknesses, and you have a wedge.

Take breaking news. YouTube is not an ideal product for it. I'm sure there are very smart people there thinking about news. But because YouTube has to be a generalized product for all-things-video, they can't design and build around that isolated use case. Their scale means there's a lot of untrusted content there. And in a breaking news situation, it's pretty hard to find truly moment-to-moment coverage. How could CNN or X/Twitter -- would-be streaming platforms that already own a similar immediacy on desktop -- better serve breaking news moments in the living room? You could even do it in partnership with curated creators.

Or consider sleep and meditation. YouTube is the largest library of sleep content in the world, but the product itself is... hostile. Mid-roll ads kick in over a soothing forest sound. Autoplay rolls you into another unpredicatable video. Calm and Headspace have built billion-dollar businesses by removing exactly those issues. A streaming service with a clean, full-screen, ad-light wind-down product could own that hour of the evening without ever picking a fight with YouTube head-on.

Or fitness instruction. Peloton, Apple Fitness+, and Nike Training Club have shown that purpose-built workout experiences (timers, heart rate overlays, structured progression) beat YouTube's open-ended buffet for people who actually want to follow a program. A streaming platform that wraps creator-led workouts in a real coaching layer is attacking a high-intent job YouTube can't easily redesign around. Several big fitness influencers have proven this on their own.

And those aren't even the most inventive ones. You can run this exercise on every single use case, including very niche ones. Each one is a wedge.

YouTube's free experiment is your testing ground

Why all this obsession with YouTube?

We've covered how YouTube's first-mover advantage built their dominant market share, and how creator content benefits living room consumers. So what is YouTube's "creator economy strategy"? Ironically, there isn't really one. Their strategy has been to lower the barrier of entry to make content across the board: free uploads, audience-driving algorithms, monetization tools. That's not a creator content strategy in the traditional sense. It's not a portfolio of investments like the other streaming platforms. It's more like a spray-and-pray approach: at YouTube's scale, uploads play survival of the fittest, and the creator economy works itself out into a diverse group of creators doing those "jobs". Their corporate strategy team isn't picking video verticals to target; by tackling all of video, it happens on its own.

That giant scale turns out to be a huge advantage to non-incumbents.² Creators are already experimenting in every type of content every day, to the tune of 500 hours uploaded every minute. And YouTube is expertly matching them with audiences. We get to hatch our strategies after that, with the benefit of the experiment being already underway. Your zero-to-one problem just got that far past zero. In fact, you can go ahead and poach creators right from YouTube who already have product-market fit.

That's the move. Don't fund unproven creator concepts and hope they land. Use YouTube as your live A/B test:

1. Pick the viewer job. Use the jobs-to-be-done lens to find a use case where you have a structural advantage and YouTube has a structural weakness — news, sleep, fitness, kids, finance, community, whatever fits your platform.
2. Find creators who already have PMF in that job on YouTube. They've already proven audience demand at scale. You don't need to guess.
3. Wrap the creator in product YouTube can't or won't build. You build a product or complementary content offering that pairs with those jobs. The creator brings content and audience; the streamer brings a trusted brand, product or other moat.

From there, you can migrate audience, negotiate some exclusivity, work on a flywheel and more... but that's the beginning of a real content strategy.

Nobody is taking out YouTube. But you also don't have to. YouTube is running the world's largest, free, real-time market research project on what creator content America wants to watch in the living room. Pick your target, source creators and build the offering around them that YT never will.