YouTube, 20 years after it launched and soon became the most massive video repository on Earth, has been an economic engine that powers a huge part of what’s known as the “creator economy.”
Today, a class of entrepreneurial creators distributes their shows on the platform and take a cut of the revenue from ads served on their channels (a 55% share under YouTube’s standard deal). They have leveraged that footprint into other lines of business like merchandise, live events and more.
Those include Jimmy Donaldson — aka MrBeast, currently the biggest YouTuber with 370 million subscribers — Rhett & Link of “Good Mythical Morning,” Mark Rober, and First We Feast, producer of the Sean Evans’ talk show “Hot Ones.” YouTube CEO Neal Mohan calls them “the startups of Hollywood.”
YouTube remains the dominant internet video platform despite challenges from other players. One early rival, Vimeo, adopted a creator-subscription business model instead of an ad-supported one. In recent years, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter (now X) have each tried to lure video creators with various monetization programs.
But none has achieved the scale of YouTube — or its earning potential.
“Like, you can make a lot of money on YouTube,” says Evans. And on YouTube, he says, there are zero barriers to entry. “It certainly would not have been launched without YouTube,” says Evans of “Hot Ones,” a show he created at Complex with Chris Schonberger.
“I dreamed of being on TV, but it’s not like you can just say, ‘Oh, my first job is just going to be hosting a talk show.’ But here, we were allowed to do it,” Evans says.
The dawn of the internet creator economy arguably was in 2007. That’s when YouTube, one year after getting acquired by Google for $1.65 billion, introduced the breakthrough YouTube Partner Program, which shares ad revenue with creators who hit minimum subscriber and viewing thresholds. The program, known as YPP, gave rise to a brand-new job and career path: YouTuber.
Says YouTube’s Mohan, “We are the biggest player in the creator economy. And we intend to remain that way.”
Donaldson says YouTube is second to none at helping creators reach massive audiences and monetizing them, and that it has continued to enhance the platform with features like autodubbing audio tracks into multiple languages.
“YouTube gave millions of people a career,” he says. “Honestly, I can’t think of much they could be doing better.” His company, MrBeast Industries, is now seeking to raise several hundred million dollars in funding at a staggering valuation of $5 billion, per a Bloomberg report. (His reps declined to comment.)
A recurring theme among top YouTube creators is that they love the creative freedom they have. There are no studio or TV execs telling them what to do or when to do it.
“The beauty of YouTube is it sort of democratizes creativity,” says Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer (who worked on the Curiosity Mars rover) and designer in Apple’s special projects group. “I didn’t need some pedigree of being a film person or have connections in the film industry. If it’s good content, then it’ll rise to the top as voted by people’s mouse clicks and attention.”
Rober has produced one YouTube video per month for the last 13 years, focused on science-y topics with fun twists like “World’s Largest Jell-O Pool” and “Egg Drop from Space.” He now has more than 64 million followers and more than 10 billion views to date.
Rober’s 100-person company, CrunchLabs, now generates most of its revenue from a subscription box service that sends fans a build-it-yourself toy every month, starting at $25/month. Next: He’s spending $30 million to develop a 96-lesson science curriculum for kids in grades 3-8, and his company plans to make it entirely free to teachers. CrunchLabs is aiming to release it in 2026. “This is just something that we feel is the right thing to do,” he says. YouTube “gives you the freedom to pursue projects that mean the most to you.”
If Rober worked for a traditional media company, he might be pushed to expand the brand with offshoots like live tours, books, podcasts or movies. He won’t say how much his company pulls in but says he doesn’t crave a bigger paycheck.
“I have enough money,” Rober says. “Like, I don’t need 15 Jet Skis. I’m fine.”
Michelle Khare worked as a video producer at BuzzFeed before quitting her job in 2017 to become a full-time YouTuber after she got her first rev-share check from the platform. The following year, she launched “Challenge Accepted,” a series following her trying out the world’s toughest professions and stunts, ranging from training with the Secret Service for a week to performing Harry Houdini’s famous water-tank escape in front of a studio audience.
As a YouTube creator, she likes setting her own production schedule. Khare has been approached by traditional networks about adapting “Challenge Accepted.” But they have specific requirements she has found restrictive: “You know, ‘Can you make 10 episodes in two weeks?’” she says. “I think the magic of ‘Challenge Accepted’ is we don’t release an episode until the story is ready. We genuinely have more freedom, ownership and financial opportunities with YouTube.”
One of Khare’s goals for 2025 is to recreate Tom Cruise’s stunt from “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” rappelling off the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. That, and “to get a selfie with Tom Cruise,” she laughs.
Rhett & Link, hosts of weekday comedy talk show “Good Mythical Morning,” have produced over 2,500 episodes since 2012. It started with a low-fi aesthetic: two guys at a card table in a converted garage.
Now Mythical, their 100-plus employee company, operates from a 17,000-square-foot studio in Burbank, Calif., and “GMM” has over 19 million followers on their flagship channel. The duo — Link Neal and Rhett McLaughlin, who are childhood pals from North Carolina — believe the production values they put into “Good Mythical Morning” today let it rival anything on old-fashioned TV. But because “GMM” grew up on YouTube, Neal says, they’ve been able to preserve a rapport with their audience where “you didn’t feel like an outsider.”
“Our show is very understandable in the context of television but then has the depth of connection that I think you really only get from a creator-owned property,” says Neal. Adds McLaughlin: “There is this intrinsic connection that people feel because your audience knows that they could put something on this platform as easily as you did.”
At the same time, Hollywood’s seismic shift to streaming has elevated the perception of YouTube as a source for premium entertainment, Neal says: “You can click on YouTube just as easily as you can click on Max, Hulu, Netflix, all of that.”
Adam Waheed, a comedy YouTuber known online as Adam W, once played Division I college football as a defensive back at Southern Methodist University. Today he has nearly 20 million subs on YouTube, and he’s gearing up for a national stand-up tour this fall after opening for Jo Koy and Dane Cook and working with Kevin Hart.
Waheed says that in college he fully expected to be drafted into the NFL. “Thank god it didn’t work out,” he says. “I have the best job in the world!”
To Waheed, the quality of viewer engagement on YouTube is what sets it apart, along with the different content formats and powerful tools available to creators. “You have fans on other platforms,” he says. “You have a community on YouTube.”
Over 2025 Super Bowl weekend in New Orleans, Adam W participated in the first ever NFL-YouTube Creator Flag Football Game, part of a broader partnership between YouTube and the NFL that includes distribution rights to the Sunday Ticket package. Waheed made a diving catch to intercept a Hail Mary pass to clinch a 30-29 win for the team led by IShowSpeed (aka Darren Jason Watkins Jr.) over the squad headed by popular streamer Kai Cenat.
The NFL wants to tap into the viral content that creators like Adam W make for their YouTube fans. Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s SVP of social, content and influencer marketing, says the league — working with YouTube — offers select creators footage from tentpole events like the Super Bowl and the NFL Draft to use in their online videos. “Creators are a fundamental part of what we’re doing,” he says. “We want them to share that content out to their millions and millions of followers.”
Among the myriad content formats on YouTube, it also has become a major outlet for podcasts after Google Podcasts was phased out in mid-2024. About 31% of U.S. weekly podcast listeners choose YouTube as their preferred service over Spotify (27%) and Apple Podcasts (15%), per Edison Podcast Metrics research released last October.
Last week, YouTube announced that it now has more than 1 billion monthly viewers for podcast content. Marques Brownlee, a tech reviewer and vlogger with almost 20 million subscribers on the platform, puts out weekly tech podcast “Waveform” (aka “WVFRM”), part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, on YouTube and via other platforms as audio-only podcasts.
“It was a no-brainer to make it a video-first podcast on YouTube,” Brownlee says. “There’s nothing like the content discoverability on YouTube. It kind of fit together like a puzzle piece with our other channels.”
John “MrBallen” Allen, a big podcaster who rose to fame after his true-crime tale went viral on TikTok in 2020, said that YouTube provides great ways to engage with followers compared with other platforms (including audio platforms). “This is going to sound corny, but we developed more of a community on YouTube,” he says. “The way we motivate people to go listen to the podcast off YouTube, is on YouTube.” When he and Nick Witters, CEO of Ballen Studios, “think about talking to fans, it’s through YouTube,” says Allen.
And of course, musicians and record companies have been a major part of YouTube’s history. Many of the platform’s most-subscribed channels are music artists: Blackpink, Justin Bieber, Eminem, Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny, to name just a few. The top 10 most-viewed videos ever on YouTube are all music, including Korean rapper Psy’s 2012 “Gangnam Style,” the first video on the platform to hit 1 billion views. Reflecting music’s popularity, YouTube bowed its first subscription service in November 2014, Music Key, with ad-free song streaming and offline viewing. Now called YouTube Music Premium, it continues to be a significant competitor to Spotify and Apple Music.
And YouTube remains a major way artists get discovered. Singer-songwriter Teddy Swims began sharing song covers to YouTube in 2019. At the time, the Atlanta-area native was “between bands” and waiting tables. His first YouTube video was a rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You,” uploaded June 25 to commemorate the anniversary of Jackson’s death.
“I was trying to get heard any way we could,” says Swims (real name: Jaten Dimsdale).
Overnight, Swims’ cover of “Rock With You” rang up 10,000 views — astonishing him. That led him to record more covers, and soon he was a viral hit. After six months, he had 1 million YouTube followers. He signed with Warner Records in December of that year.
“We just stumbled into it,” says Swims, a 2025 Grammys nominee for best new artist. “And then we kept pouring gasoline on it.”
YouTube, like any content-licensing business, has hit bumps in the road with the music biz. Last fall, songs by Adele, Nirvana, Bob Dylan, Green Day and more artists were blocked for several days on YouTube in the U.S. over a dispute with performing rights organization SESAC before the two sides reached an agreement.
As part of building ties to the music industry, in 2016 YouTube hired Lyor Cohen as head of music — bringing to its senior ranks the prominent exec who had previously served as CEO of Warner Music Group and head of Def Jam. In his original memo to YouTube staff, Cohen said he wanted to strive to create a “more collaborative relationship between the music industry and the technologies that are shaping the future of the business.”
Today, Cohen says, that’s still the mission. “We have to continue earning our seat at the table,” he says. YouTube works with the labels and artist teams “to really integrate ourselves into understanding what our partners need.”
Being a YouTuber can be lucrative. But it’s also a potentially all-consuming occupation that has led some creators to quit. The platform’s earliest stars included Fred (aka Lucas Cruikshank), nigahiga (Ryan Higa), Jenna Marbles and Smosh comedy duo Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox. Of those, only Smosh continues to actively post on YouTube.
Elle Mills is a former Canadian vlogger who posted on YouTube from 2012-22 under her handle “ElleOfTheMills.” She had more than 1.7 million followers on her channel, but she became overwhelmed and eventually abandoned the YouTuber life.
“It was a lot. There was a drive in me to get to a certain level — to get a certain level of subscribers, to get to VidCon,” Mills says. “Once I got there, I felt like I was on a treadmill that I couldn’t get off.” She says there was “a sensationalism on YouTube that I couldn’t top… There are real people and relationships involved. I think it all blew up in my face.”
Mills, 26, is now pursuing a career as a filmmaker. This year she’s set to release her new short film “Don’t Forget About Me,” a reflection on her past YouTube success with a storyline involving two teens who are unexpectedly visited by their favorite childhood TV character. “I feel like YouTube has given me a leg up with finding opportunities in writing and directing,” Mills says.
Mills doesn’t blame YouTube per se for her burnout. “I think it’s across all social media platforms,” she says, where “success is measured with likes and views, with popularity.”
Mohan says he understands the kinds of challenges YouTube creators face. In New Orleans for Super Bowl weekend, his schedule included swinging by a YouTube Creator Collective meet-up at an event space in the French Quarter. In remarks to those in attendance, he explained that the Creator Collective concept came out conversations he had with YouTubers who wanted to connect with other creators. To date, YouTube has hosted hundreds such events in cities around the world.
“Being a creator can be very rewarding,” he said, “but it can also be an isolating experience.”
As CEO, Mohan has embraced hobnobbing with YouTubers — he seems to really love it. And it serves as a diplomatic gesture: The message is, the head of YouTube understands the wants and needs of its creator base.
One of Mohan’s first collabs was with Airrack (aka Eric Decker), a popular creator who trades in stunt and prank videos. In a meet-up at Coachella in April 2023, the duo donned “commemorative best-friend T-shirts,” ate pizza, unsubscribed from MrBeast’s channel and invented a secret handshake. Mohan also signed a “legally binding agreement” that the YouTube algorithm would prioritize Airrack’s videos over all others. The tongue-in-cheek bit, with Mohan playing the straight man, helped establish his willingness to engage with creators on their own terms. The YouTube Shorts video from the encounter has generated more than 2 million views.
Incidentally, Mohan’s Airrack collab also was a way to support a business partner: Under a long-running series of deals, YouTube has exclusively livestreamed Coachella’s performances since 2011.
YouTube once directly funded larger-budget productions for select creators, part of its now-defunct effort to compete in the subscription video space. But YouTube backed off that strategy because it found that top creators were already creating high-quality content that was extremely popular, according to Mohan. Plus, he says, “we weren’t good at picking content.”
Mohan says YouTube is continually investing in developing the platform to support its creator base. And how does he determine the return on that investment?
“I have a simple rule: When our creators succeed, we succeed,” Mohan says. “That’s literally our business.”
Pictured above (l. to r.): MrBeast, Rhett & Link, Michelle Khare, Adam W
