YouTube touts $100 billion creator payout while arming itself against TikTok

At its annual “Made on YouTube” event, the video giant announced it has paid out over $100 billion to creators, artists, and media companies in the last four years, a figure meant to cement its status as the financial heart of the creator economy. Alongside the massive number, YouTube unveiled a suite of new monetization and AI-powered tools, including swappable ad slots and automatic product tagging, signaling a direct response to the explosive growth of social commerce on rival platforms like TikTok.

“We didn’t just create a platform. We built an economy,” YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said at the event. The announcement comes as YouTube’s advertising business continues to grow, with revenue climbing 15 percent in 2024 to $36.1 billion. The company is also seeing success in the living room, reporting that the number of channels earning over $100,000 from viewers on TV screens grew 45 percent year-over-year.

A new playbook for sponsorships and shopping

The most significant change for creators is a new, more flexible approach to brand sponsorships. YouTube is testing a feature that allows creators to dynamically insert brand sponsorships into swappable slots in their long-form videos. This means that instead of permanently “burning in” a sponsored segment, a creator can remove the ad read once a deal is complete and resell the slot to another brand. YouTube will begin testing the feature with a small group of creators early next year, with a broader rollout planned for 2026.

To further boost its shopping ambitions, YouTube is leveraging AI to automatically identify products in videos and display tags at the most opportune moments. Another upcoming feature will allow creators to add a brand’s website link directly to Shorts, giving them a clearer way to demonstrate the traffic they drive for partners. The company claims its shopping efforts are gaining steam, with gross merchandise volume (GMV) growing 5x year-over-year and more than 500,000 creators enrolled in its YouTube Shopping program.

The AI co-pilot is here

Beyond monetization, YouTube is integrating generative AI tools to streamline the video creation process itself. The platform announced it is integrating Google DeepMind’s Veo 3 Fast model into YouTube Shorts, allowing creators to generate video backgrounds or short clips with sound. Other new features include “Edit with AI,” which helps turn raw footage into a polished first draft, and “Speech to Song,” which can transform spoken dialogue from a video into a musical soundtrack for a Short.

These creation tools are part of a broader push that includes what the company called its “largest upgrade to live ever.” YouTube is leaning into live content, noting that over 30 percent of its daily logged-in viewers watch live streams. Its recent exclusive, free broadcast of an NFL game from Brazil attracted an audience of over 17.3 million, setting a new platform record for concurrent viewers and demonstrating its ability to host massive, global events.

The elephant in the room is spelled T-i-k-T-o-k

YouTube’s aggressive push into social commerce doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The moves are a clear counter to the staggering success of TikTok Shop, which in just two years has become a commercial powerhouse. According to one analysis, TikTok Shop has crossed $70 billion in global GMV since late 2022. In the US alone, its monthly GMV has grown from $15.1 million in July 2023 to $1.1 billion in July 2025, proving the power of its natively integrated, creator-driven commerce experience. By introducing dynamic ads and smarter shopping tools, YouTube is fighting to ensure its platform remains the most attractive destination for creators to build a business, not just an audience.