YouTube is building infrastructure for the full creator-brand partnership life cycle

Creator Partnerships will also eventually allow brands to reach out directly to creators on the platform, as well as edit and manage affiliate links sent to creators. 

Influencer marketers who spoke with Digiday say this is an infrastructure play from a major player in the creator space, showcasing the need to remove hurdles like discovery and scale in the creator marketing process. 

“This is the clearest signal yet that the platforms recognize the operational layer has been the bottleneck,” said Anders Bill, co-founder and CPO at influencer marketing platform Superfiliate. “The reason creator marketing hasn’t scaled the way it should isn’t a creator problem or a brand problem; it’s an infrastructure problem.”

For Bill, YouTube’s Creator Partnerships announcement offers solutions to infrastructure woes that have become more acute over the last year or two as the creator economy matured and more brands dedicated large swaths of marketing budgets to it.

John Hu, co-founder of creator shopping platform Stan, thinks this step is a natural one for YouTube, widely considered one of the highest-paying platforms in the creator space. “The creator ecosystem is growing quickly, and with it, there’s an increased drive from brands to tap into the network of YouTubers to increase visibility and find the right partners, ” he said. 

Platforms are increasingly building tools to ease the pressure on both creators and brands as competition for partnerships intensifies. YouTube’s push to scaled infrastructure for creator partnerships follows similar moves from rivals, including Meta’s recent launch of a beta connector linking its Creator Marketplace to brands’ workflows, giving businesses direct access to over 2 million Meta-verified creators. Meanwhile, last week shopping platform LTK announced its new Quick Collabs feature.

Using AI for creator discovery

Five influencer marketing experts Digiday spoke to believe YouTube’s suite of tools will benefit a specific segment of creators: low- to mid-funnel who are looking to build their business and reach. 

“The ones who can clearly demonstrate value will be the easiest to ‘buy’ at scale,” said Charlotte Stavrou, founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency SevenSix. 

YouTube’s creator discovery tools provide first-party insights into both organic and paid performance. Brands can see the breakdown of a creator’s audience by age, gender and country, as well as their engagement rate, average view duration and more. 

In the short term, YouTube’s new creator discovery tools will benefit creators with established audiences and consistent performance data, according to Bill. A recent study from eMarketer and TransUnion (reported by Forbes) found that half of marketers say their confidence in performance measurement hasn’t improved year over year, while 14 percent said it has worsened. 

Long-term, Bill thinks the opt-in analytics could help out two underserved groups: mid-size creators struggling to be seen amongst a sea of larger accounts, and high-view creators with a low subscriber count whose content consistently nets good metrics.

“YouTube’s AI matching on performance data rather than audience size changes the discovery equation for both. If this gives those creators a credible, platform-verified way to make that case, it can expand who gets access to brand partnerships,” Bill said. 

Joshua Gabay, YouTube strategy lead at creator marketing agency Creator Match, is optimistic for small to mid-sized creators. “They’ll start to learn their true value as they discuss pricing with brands that discover them on the platform.”

The agentic capabilities make searching for the right creator to kick off a campaign simple — the sample prompt given during a press preview of YouTube’s NewFronts presentation was “Find me U.S. tech creators reviewing sports gear with high Gen Z retention.”

The platform is also promising an evolution of its partnership API to better integrate with influencer marketing agencies (IMAs) and software companies, and creators can opt in to share analytics with third parties.

Alessandro Bogliari, co-founder and CEO at The Influencer Marketing Factory, thinks the Gemini-powered discovery tools could be a boon for brands, creators, and agencies alike. “Integrating data via opt-in is beneficial, as it provides more accurate data than the scraped data and forecasting typically used by agencies,” he said. 

Gemini’s ability to analyze video content, tone and audience interest could remove even more friction in the discovery process and marks the platform’s shift towards attempting to own the creator marketing process from start to finish. 

“What YouTube is building is infrastructure for the entire partnership lifecycle, from finding the right creator to measuring what that relationship produced. That’s a different ambition,” explained Bill. 

The need for a human touch

Almost all of the influencer marketers who spoke with Digiday stressed that despite the rise of automation and AI-driven tools, the human element – particularly the role of agents and intermediaries – remains central to how creator partnerships are negotiated, managed and scaled. 

In other words, automation may be reshaping workflows, but it’s not cutting agencies out of the process – at least not yet. 

“There will need to continue to be a human connection,” said Creator Match’s Gabay. “It won’t push away the IMAs of the world… [Creator Partnerships] will have to prove that creators can have a symbiotic relationship with it in order to work directly with the platform.” 

Gabay thinks third-party influencer marketing agencies will help fill in the gaps left in the outreach between brands and creators. But creator marketing is still an inherently human endeavor.

“Tech often overlooks the people component,” Bogliari said. And though brands negotiate pricing with individual creators, if scale is the goal, it could still result in a higher workload if brands discuss campaign fees with each creator that the new agentic discovery flags. And if they send out flat fees en masse, creators could feel undervalued.”

“You can’t standardize that part of the industry,” Bogliari explained. 

Though Creator Partnerships can help find creators and will eventually incorporate a direct messaging system and the ability to manage brand links, there are components of this process (like suggested edits, feedback and pricing) that IMAs help facilitate. 

A race to the bottom?

There’s also a concern that streamlining and scaling these kinds of campaigns could result in a race to the bottom in both pricing and content quality. With creators submitting content directly to brands, it’s unclear how the feedback process will go (if there is any). 

Bolgliari worries that creators activating for brands at scale could result in content that feels too transactional – the kind of content that dominated creator marketing 10 years ago. “Some platforms even had auto-approval systems for content, leading to large amounts of commoditized, often unreviewed content being published,” he said. “A key risk of using a platform directly is the loss of control, which is essential for managing last-minute issues or misunderstandings.”

And pricing may be an even bigger concern than usual. YouTube will let brands use a creator partnership boost to turn creators’ campaign content into “high-performing assets on Shorts and in-stream” to further scale reach. A YouTube rep confirmed to Digiday that creators will just get the “initial campaign fee as of today.”

“This is the biggest flag for me. If brands can scale creator content as ads, compensation needs to reflect that. If this moves towards a flat-fee model with no consideration for usage or performance, creators will feel undervalued very quickly,” said SevenSix’s Stavrou.