I cover creators at Like & Subscribe, a standalone Ankler Media newsletter that’s being sampled today for paid subscribers to The Ankler. I reported on why some creators might not hit Cannes Lions this year, wrote about Alex Cooper’s unpopular Unwell deals, and spoke to two Chernin Group partners about betting on creator empires. I’m natalie@theankler.com
Last week I spent five very full days in New York, and today I’ve got a jam-packed newsletter to show for it.
I was in the city to attend YouTube Brandcast, but also to check in on New York’s creator scene, which has seen an influx of talent in recent years and carries an energy that is sometimes lacking in L.A. Across NYC, veterans of the Vox, Vice Media and Refinery29 era are making some of the most interesting content online today; the blogging stars of earlier decades have transformed themselves into Substack Bestsellers; and Instagram influencers are becoming Fashion Week “it” girls overnight.
But the bigger story I kept running into all week was this: Everyone is rebuilding television outside of television.
Nothing captured the spirit of Gotham’s creator community better than Thursday night’s premiere of Keep The Meter Running from Subway Takes host Kareem Rahma and producer Adam Faze. A who’s-who of the New York new media elite — from Emily Sundberg to Jack Coyne to Meredith Hayden to Nico Heller — packed into the Metrograph on the Lower East Side to celebrate the reinvention of the show that debuted on TikTok in 2022.
A decade ago, Keep The Meter Running would have felt at home on HBO or Viceland. Today, the series — in which Rahma asks New York cabbies to take him to their favorite spot in the city — is streaming proudly on Rahma’s YouTube channel, with backing from AND Media. In fact, Rahma recently told the Wall Street Journal that he walked away from a deal with CNN for the show because he didn’t want to give up his independence.
That detail says almost everything about the moment we’re in: The creator class no longer needs to graduate into legacy TV to be taken seriously. In some cases, legacy TV is the thing they are trying to avoid.
“You go home, you sit on your couch, you open the YouTube app, and you watch this television show the same way that you would any other television show,” Rahma said during a post-screening Q&A with Ramy Youssef. “That’s the future of television.”
At Brandcast the night before, YouTube was making essentially the same argument — only to a room full of advertisers.
Keep reading for more on why YouTube — with a little help from audience-savvy creatives like Rahma and Faze — is positioning itself as the future of the television business.
Plus, in this New York-centric edition:
- Brandcast recap: how YouTube is finding new ways to challenge legacy TV
- My scoop on the new Vox Media podcast from Brooklyn-based food creator Andrew Rea, aka Binging with Babish
- An inside look at the explosive growth of New York Times Cooking’s YouTube channel
- How NYT Cooking’s Pizza Interview brings fresh spice and “a little chaos” to the celebrity press circuit
- The eye-popping numbers for the Grey Lady’s cooking content, and which social platforms are seeing Pizza Interview spikes
YouTube Touts ‘Trust’ in Creators
“Welcome to the YouTube era,” YouTube CEO Neal Mohan announced Wednesday night from the stage at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall before unfurling a slate of creator-driven shows. His pitch to the audience of CMOs and ad buyers — the company moved Brandcast to the same week as the network TV Upfronts in 2022 — was a fine tuning of the message he’s been sending for the better part of the past year: that YouTube isn’t just reinventing television, it is television now.
The twist is that YouTube wants TV money without acting like a TV network.
In addition to Keep the Meter Running, which hosted its premiere party the day after Brandcast, YouTube announced more than 20 shows, including:
- Pros vs. YouTubers — A competition series from Jesser that pits legendary athletes against creators (premiering 2027)
- Feeding Starving Celebrities 2.0 — An interview show in which Quen Blackwell invites celebrities into her kitchen (premiering fall 2026)
- Pot Stirrer — One of several new shows from Alex Cooper’s Unwell Network, this miniseries will gather reality stars and internet personalities for a Thanksgiving dinner where they must determine which guests have been planted to sabotage the festivities (premiering winter 2026)
- Outside Tonight — A live weekly late night series from Recess Therapy’s Julian Shapiro-Barnum (premiering June 17)
- I Acted in a Microdrama — A microdrama series from Hope Allen (aka HopeScope) about what it takes to be a vertical video star (premiering winter 2026)
YouTube doesn’t plan to financially back these series the way a traditional television network would. Instead, it’s helping matchmake creators with blue chip brands to help fund production.
It’s another inflection point as the creator economy increasingly merges with and outpaces Hollywood: In its own disruptive way, YouTube has officially joined the Upfront ad market.
“The best thing about these creators and what they do on this platform is they built something really important, and that thing is called trust,” Sean Downey, Google’s ad sales chief, told attendees at a pre-Brandcast gathering at Dear Irving. “YouTube is the number-one trusted platform. These creators, these really talented people, are the most trusted people to consumers.”
YouTube has spent the last three years as the top destination for streaming television viewing, per Nielsen, as rivals like Netflix race to catch up. But in spite of its dominance, the Google-owned platform still doesn’t capture the ad rates of traditional TV, and it’s gunning to change that. (It’s the same reason the company is helping some of its bigger stars chase Emmys — advertisers notice.)
Still, YouTube continues to stand apart. A lot of the shows announced at Brandcast aren’t new, they’re just being repackaged in an advertiser-friendly way. And creators will keep making new videos — organized as shows, or not — regardless of whether they secure upfront commitments from brands.
A lot of creators like the way YouTube still operates as YouTube. Take Trevor Noah, who hosted The Daily Show on Comedy Central for seven years — but announced last week that his travel series, Trevor Noah’s World Tour, will stream exclusively on YouTube.
“YouTube has given me a completely new world that’s been pretty foreign to me my whole career,” Noah told the Dear Irving crowd during a roundtable with fellow creators Rahma and Cleo Abram, who is bringing new episodes of her Huge If True series to YouTube this spring. “When you’ve lived in a world where people have told you when something should or shouldn’t happen for arbitrary reasons,” he continued, “it’s really exciting to allow your creative spark be inspired whenever it needs to be.”
Binging With Babish Tucks Into a New Podcast
If Brandcast showed YouTube courting Madison Avenue, Andrew Rea shows what happens when a veteran creator keeps professionalizing without abandoning the platform that made him.
Rea started his channel, Binging with Babish, in 2016 to post videos of himself cooking elaborate dishes inspired by his favorite TV shows and movies. (His most popular video, featuring a ratatouille dish inspired by the Pixar film, has 31 million views.) Over the years, he expanded the Babish universe, adding videos from other chefs and eventually launching a spinoff channel.
Now, I can exclusively report that he’s stepping into the podcast booth with a new interview series. In the Booth with Babish will premiere May 26 with TV chef Alton Brown as its inaugural guest — but the platform plan says even more about where creator media is headed.
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