Long-form creators eye taking over TVs – and chasing bigger brand budgets
By Alyssa Mercante • March 9, 2026 •
Ivy Liu
Long-form creator shows are landing on TVs, and Spotter, a creator growth platform that provides services and capital to facilitate growth and YouTube revenue share, wants brands to follow — but ad budgets are still lagging.
Audiences spent 52 billion minutes last year watching long-form, episodic creator shows across platforms, according to data Spotter released at its showcase event in NYC on March 4. At the event, which was a bid for ad dollars, Spotter pitched episodic creator shows as a growing premium inventory for brands, highlighting how audiences are increasingly watching them on the living room screen.
Spotter is trying to reposition long-form, episodic creator content as “TV-like” inventory but widespread big-budget adoption is still limited. Most brands still buy creator content like social ads or influencer campaigns, often via smaller influencer budgets.
“[Creator TV] is a bit of an untapped area,” said Tucker Matheson, co-founder and partner at marketing consulting firm Markacy. “In terms of brands really analyzing creator-led episodic content on YouTube and if they should be tapping into, it’s not top of mind.”
Still yet, Spotter is borrowing moves from the established adland playbook. The event functioned as a mini upfront featuring a select group of Spotter creators, including the Try Guys, Dude Perfect, Jordan Matter, and Kinigra Deon, all of whom publish long-form content across multiple video platforms.
Dude Perfect revealed that their sports-centric YouTube channel gets 2 billion annual views. “All reach is not equal,” Spotter president Nic Paul said. “Fandom matters. Creator TV is not influencer marketing, it’s always-on, predictable storytelling that earns loyalty over time.”
Creators in your living room
The shift to the big screen is clear: up to half of YouTube viewing now happens on TV, and the platform accounts for 13.4 percent of all U.S. TV viewing — more than Netflix, Hulu/Disney+, or any other single streaming services, per recent data from creator advertising platform Agentio. That means creators’ long-form content isn’t just reaching online audiences anymore; it’s landing in living rooms, giving advertisers a new way to connect with viewers.
Digital marketers say they’re also seeing audiences follow creators from YouTube channels onto TV screens. “People are tuning in to watch creator content,” said Brian Binder, senior director of innovation and growth at digital marketing company Tinuiti, who pointed to research that showed YouTube had seen a growth in watch time for videos longer than 30 minutes.
According to Spotter, “creator TV” sits at an untapped center of the social video ecosystem, representing around 7,000 creators making long-form (defined as longer than 20 minutes) episodic content that pulls in more than 28 billion watch hours annually in the U.S. That’s .02 percent of all videos published across the major social video platforms. Spotter data also suggests that 76 percent of creator TV viewers are watching on televisions and 72 percent watch more than three episodes a session.
YouTube creator content continues to work long after it’s published, touts Agentio’s report, comparing its discoverability to TV and social ads. Roughly 40 percent of views come from videos more than 30 days old, per Agentio, which connects brands and creators to automate campaigns. CPMs on Agentio blend 20-50 percent lower over time as bonus views accumulate, the company claims.
Agencies see the payoff, too. Crystal Duncan, evp of shared services at performance marketing agency Tinuiti, said creator TV offers an interesting value proposition for brands in the form of content that “lives on for eternity, endlessly being searched and rewatched far past its initial posting date.”
Creators took the stage at 2 Penn Plaza with the bustling city in the floor-to-ceiling windows behind them to share brand deal case studies.
Creator Jesser, who has 37 million subscribers on YouTube with 18.3 million CTV views a month, claimed his McDonald’s partnership drove 3.4 million in-store visits (the visits were measured using Google’s Store Visit Conversions methodology, where user’s location history are connected with ad engagements through anonymous aggregated statistics).
Kinigra Deon, who built her own production company in her home state of Alabama to make long-form series centered around Black actors, revealed an upcoming partnership with e.l.f. Cosmetics, which will be featured in her scripted beauty shop series. “Not as an ad, but as part of a story,” Deon said.
“Creators build direct relationships with audiences who subscribe to the creator rather than the platform itself,” said Matt Barash, chief commercial officer at creative ad tech platform Nova. That dynamic produces stronger trust, deeper fandom, higher engagement, and more authentic brand integrations, he noted.
“When those audience signals are combined with marketer data and modeled across screens, agencies can begin to treat social and CTV as a unified campaign environment, where creator-led storytelling moves seamlessly from feed to living room and advertising feels embedded in entertainment rather than interrupting it,” said Barash.
And that’s Spotter’s pitch to advertisers: a controlled, creator-led environment to watch from the comfort of their couches.
“I don’t want advertisers to think the only time they should really work with creator TV is when they’re going to do some really complex integration that requires tons of approvals,” said Spotter co-founder Aaron DeBevoise. “You should just be in this category, because if it were TV, you’d be picking this section of TV.”
