Good morning. Streetwear brands Supreme and Yori Sport welcomed their newest (and youngest) model yet: The Rizzler. Now it’s up to us to decide…10s across the board, or five big booms? 

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Brandcast 2025: What You Need to Know

YouTube held its 4th annual brandcast event in New York on Wednesday, pitching top advertisers to spend more on the platform and with YouTube creators. 

Here are the biggest impressions and creator takeaways, courtesy of our own Colin & Samir straight from the audience →

Set the scene: Brandcast is part product showcase, part cultural flex—with creators, celebrities, and advertisers all in one room. Musician Alex Warren opened the show, Lady Gaga closed the show, and both spoke to the importance of YouTube throughout their careers. Former NFL players Rob Gronkowski, Julian Edelman, and five fans played tug-of-war with MrBeast. Even the food was creator-made—served up by Hot Ones, Last Meals, and The Korean Vegan.

So what is YouTube focused on right now?

The living room is the clear priority, as YouTube remains the most-watched platform in the US across cable, broadcast, and streaming, per Nielsen. 

• Connected TVs are now the No. 1 way people in the US watch YouTube.

• Shoppable connected TV (or CTV) ads now drive over 50 million conversions per month, with a 4.5x better return on ad spend than ads on traditional streaming platforms.

YouTube announced a slew of new ad products:

• Peak Points uses Google’s Gemini AI to identify high-emotion, “peak” moments in videos to place ads more effectively. 

• Cultural Moments Sponsorships will let brands sponsor real-time moments—think live sports, major streams, and trending events, like Ryan Trahan’s Penny Series or The Sidemen’s Charity Match. 

• YouTube’s CTV Masthead Ads will now include full-screen, immersive ads.

And on the content front?

• YouTube’s new podcast leaderboard will show the top 100 US podcasts by watchtime. The top three at launch were The Joe Rogan Experience, weekly comedy podcast Kill Tony, and true crime podcast Rotten Mango. FYI: Podcasts have been a major selling point as platforms woo advertisers throughout the upfronts process.

• YouTube signed a multi-year deal with the NFL to produce the annual Super Bowl Flag Football Game with creators. The platform also recently announced exclusive rights to livestream the first NFL game of the season for free. 

• The only creator show announced at Brandcast? iShowSpeed’s Speed Goes Pro, a six-part series produced in collaboration with DICK’S Sporting Goods.

Big picture: With major events like Brandcast showcasing its commitment to long-form content and new media formats, YouTube is putting on a show for advertisers and creators alike—and cementing its place in what was once traditional media’s domain.

Sidemen Launch Venture Capital Firm

The Sidemen just announced Upside, their venture capital firm aimed at investing in consumer tech startups. At launch, Upside has already made investments between £100K and £500K in 12 companies.

How we got here: After the success of business ventures like KSI’s Prime energy drink and their chicken shop chain Sides, the Sidemen wanted to try their hand in the tech space, where scale can happen quickly. 

Here’s a snapshot of their portfolio so far →

• Ceartas, a platform that uses AI to protect creators from copyright infringement, unwanted data leaks, piracy, and deepfakes

• Customuse, a 3D model and AR lens editing tool

• MILE, a members-only vintage shopping app

• Howbout, a calendar-based social platform

Big picture: The Sidemen will promote companies in Upside’s portfolio across their social channels—something other creators-turned-VCs like Josh Richards or Noah Beck haven’t done regularly.

“It’s very rare to find anyone in this world who knows their fans and customers as well as [the Sidemen] do. When it comes to actually sitting down and dissecting a business and trying to figure out if it’s something we want to get involved in, the guys really do know what people will and won’t like,” James Elliott, a general partner at Upside, told The Times.

Creators Can Now Sell Real Products in Roblox

Creators are getting another way to monetize on Roblox with commerce APIs, enabling them to sell physical items directly within Roblox experiences. Shopify will serve as Roblox’s first integration partner.

Why now? The demand is there. Creator studio Twin Atlas integrated commerce APIs on three games and found that 90% of their in-game purchases came from the APIs—making over $100K revenue in the first few weeks after launch.

Zoom out: Roblox paid nearly $1 billion to creators in 2024 and is fast becoming a marketing tool for creators like MrBeast, who created a Roblox experience for Beast Games, or Karl Jacobs and Keekcraft, who run a Roblox development studio called Pixel Playground.

🔥 Press Worthy

• Filmmaker YouTube channel Sticks hits 1 million subscribers.

• Creator agency Whalar is now worth $400 million after an investment from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

• Talking Talk Tuah podcast rebrands as Talking Talk.

• TikTok will start interrupting feeds of users under 18 with a guided meditation.

• Fitness creator Demi Bagby hosts a YouTube F1 Creator Challenge.

• MomTok creators return for the second season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

📚️ Thank You For Pressing Publish

The content we’re looking forward to reading, watching, and listening to this weekend.

• Read: For her newsletter Maybe Baby, writer Haley Nahman explores whether it’s possible for creators to overstay their welcome online.

• Watch: Benito Skinner, aka BennyDrama, launched his new series, Overcompensating, on Prime Video. 

• Listen: Journalist Benedict Townsend hosts an eight-part exploration of Vine, charting the rise and fall of the six-second video app.