Future of Marketing Briefing: YouTube’s creator data play is an on-ramp, not a destination

But better data has a way of raising harder questions. The more precisely advertisers can measure creator audiences, the sooner they will ask what YouTube still cannot answer: can a creator actually sell something?

TikTok Shop comes closest – someone watches, taps, buys and never leaves, with attribution following the whole chain. But even that is less solved than it appears. TikTok Shop sits largely disconnected from TikTok’s broader ad stack. Instagram has tried to solve the same problem four times. YouTube Shopping mostly redirects users offsite, which is where the thread snaps. Suffice to say, the full loop from creator content to verified purchase remains unsolved across every major platform. 

YouTube’s version is just the most visible, because of how dominant the platform is everywhere else. It commands more U.S. TV watch-time than any other media company — 12.5% of the total, per Nielsen’s most recent data. And yet only 37% of advertisers cite it among their top channels for influencer marketing, against 57% for Instagram and 52% for TikTok, according to influencer Marketing Hub. The audience has always been there. The infrastructure to monetize it hasn’t.

“They [YouTube] spent the last five years talking about TV share shift,” said Oli Marlow-Thomas, chief innovation officer at Smartly.  “They missed the real opportunity, which is the consumer now living their whole life in these environments — shopping, searching, experiencing social and entertainment in one place.”

It’s fair to say YouTube is intent on making up for lost time. Creator content is now the most effective vehicle for pulling advertising dollars into YouTube’s paid ecosystem, and data is the thing standing between advertisers wanting to spend and advertisers actually spending. Better performance data helps brands identify what’s working; once they know what’s working, the next step is to boost it.

“What they [YouTube] have not done yet is connect the powerhouse that is Google on the outside to the creator ecosystem being built on YouTube,” said Pierre-Loïc Assayag, co-founder and CEO of  Traackr, an AI-powered influencer marketing intelligence platform. They are playing catch-up. But no one can forget that the company playing catch-up is the largest animal in the jungle.”

Which is a neat way of saying that the gap is more of a sequencing problem than a self-inflicted one. To understand why, it helps to understand what broke the old model. For years, brands selecting a YouTube creator relied on channel-level audience data — follower demographics, rough geographic breakdowns and average views. It was imprecise but workable. Then platform algorithms changed. Today, more than 80% of people who see a piece of creator content are not a follower or subscriber of that channel. The audience data brands had been using to make decisions bore almost no relation to the audience actually seeing the content. 

“It was almost blind,” said Tim Sovay, chief partnerships officer at CreatorIQ, one of the handful of companies given early API access. “The data that was being provided on the front end didn’t matter anymore.”

The API – or rather the data it facilitates – changes that. It tells advertisers which creators move audiences. The moment they know that, they’ll want to know which creators move product. The API, in other words, is a precondition for creator commerce on YouTube.

“You can’t get data you don’t have,” said Scott Sutton, CEO of Later, a social media management and influencer marketing platform also plugged into the API. “You first have to develop the rails and the mechanics, and then it enables greater transparency into outcomes.”

Building the on-ramp

What makes this significant in the near term, though, is less about what it eventually unlocks and more about what it changes right now. 

For the first time, creator inventory on YouTube can be evaluated and planned with the same data rigour applied to programmatic media – audience composition, engagement rates, content performance signals flowing into the same systems brands already use to make media decisions. Creators start to look less like a bespoke sponsorship play and more like a plannable line on a media budget.

That process has, until now, been surprisingly manual. Each platform, including Instagram and TikTok, has preserved largely human-driven workflows for creator boosting even as the rest of digital advertising automated around them. The API accelerates the move toward programmatic, connecting media spend to creator selection in the same automated, data-driven way brands buy everything else. 

That matters because it changes who makes the call. Creator marketing has historically lived in influencer teams, bought on gut feel. On the flip side, programmatic-style data pulls it toward the media desk, where decisions are made on CPMs and measurable return. 

 “The data from the API allows you to underwrite a creator the same way you’d underwrite any other media placement,” said Christian Dankl, CEO of audience intelligence platform Precisify. “That changes the conversation entirely.” 

Or rather, it changes it – but it doesn’t end it. 

YouTube’s move is being read less as evidence that it has figured out the creator economy and more as confirmation that it knows it has to. The advertisers closest to the API are under no illusions about what comes next. They’ll take the data, integrate it and come back asking for more — the metadata, the content signals and, eventually, the commerce attribution.

 “The top three things our biggest customers ask for is more insights, more insights and more insights,” said Sovay. “And then there’s everything else.”

YouTube has answered the first ask. The rest of the list is waiting.

Evan Shapiro on YouTube, reach, and why the algorithm is the audience

YouTube reaches 83% of Gen Z and 78% of millennials in the U.S., according to media intelligence firm Precisify. That makes it the rare platform that doesn’t force advertisers to choose between the two. But according to media analyst Evan Shapiro that reach number belies a bigger story. Digiday spoke with Shapiro, who has mapped the media habits of both cohorts extensively, about why the metrics advertisers are still buying on are the wrong ones and what the YouTube on TV shift actually means for how marketers should be spending. 

Shapiro on why outcomes matter more than reach

“Reach is a vanity metric of a past era. Action and outcomes are going to become much more the measurement going forward. Engagement is now a much more important metric than reach. Scale for scale’s sake is the cargo shorts of business models. Affinity, fandom — those are now truly the measurements that matter.

The good thing about social media, and YouTube being at the centre of that, is that they are much more demonstrable in their outcome-based measurement. Last-touch attribution seems to be much more provable on platforms like YouTube, Meta and TikTok. The measurement on connected television is just not great. When you look at the whole kerfuffle with Nielsen and MRC of late, you can see why that measurement isn’t seen as reliable.”

Shapiro on the platform-as-TV-screen shift

“YouTube is the only platform that goes back and forth from phone to television. More and more people are watching YouTube on their television, which is making it — based on research I’ve seen — more and more of a shared experience, as opposed to a solitary one.

But the sweet spot for YouTube on television is actually 25 to 55. I don’t think it’s teenagers — teenagers tend to watch much more content on their phones. Once you hit 25, 26, suddenly people are watching far more on the big screen. I did a study with Common Sense where 88% of kids said they prefer YouTube to any other form of television, so there’s also a co-viewing, digital babysitter dynamic running alongside. The CTV creator narrative is probably a trajectory call more than a current reality.”

Shapiro on why the algorithm is the audience

“People talk about the algorithm as this nameless, faceless blob that floats in the digital world, unfettered and uncontrolled. It’s not. It’s the behaviour of the people of Earth. That’s actually what the algorithm is.

When you start from that premise — that all media is now completely controlled by the user base — the ones who will win are the fans. They now get everything they want, whenever they want it, wherever they want it, and they choose the payment structure on a minute-by-minute basis with swipes of their thumbs. They are in complete control. The platforms and brands who disregard that are the ones who will lose. The ones who agree to that relationship are the ones who win.”

Numbers to know

1 billion: The internal target number of weekly active users for ChatGPT which OpenAI missed by the end of last year.

$19.8 billion: Total CapEx Meta spent on AI and data centers in Q1 2026.

$180 to $190 billion: Total projected AI / infrastructure CapEx Alphabet expects to spend this year.

$37 billion: Total annual recurring revenue of Microsoft’s AI business, according to its recent company earnings report

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