NBCUniversal spent years trying to build a streaming service people would pay for on its own. This week it went a different way: from early 2027, Peacock comes free with YouTube Premium. A service that sells for $11 a month is now a bonus feature of a subscription most people bought to skip ads.

We also went into our own data and found the biggest single night we have measured on YouTube this year. Ibai's boxing event pulled 61.5 million views on one livestream, and that turned out to be less than half of what the night was really worth. In Creator on the Rise, we meet the 24-year-old who left a job at Goldman Sachs to teach people how to build AI agents, and now has 881,000 subscribers watching him do it.

Plus the skincare brand that built an 18,500-person campus network before recruitment season even started, and a week of releases led by MrBeast's biggest philanthropy swing yet. Let's get into it.

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This week's deep dive

Peacock Is Now a YouTube Premium Perk

On Monday, July 27, YouTube and NBCUniversal announced that ad-supported Peacock Premium will be included with YouTube Premium in the US at no extra cost. The bundle rolls out in early 2027, and the price of YouTube Premium is not changing when it does. Peacock Premium sells for $11 a month or $110 a year on its own, so the deal adds over $100 of annual value to a subscription that currently runs $16 a month for an individual and $27 for a family. Subscribers on the cheaper Premium Lite tier are not included, and ahead of the full rollout YouTube is letting people add Peacock through Primetime Channels this summer.

Read the deal from NBCUniversal's side and it is the more interesting half. One of America's oldest broadcasters has decided that the most effective way to get people watching Peacock is to place it inside YouTube, and that live NBC Sports events belong on an NBC Sports YouTube channel. That is a company choosing distribution through the platform over competition with it. Peacock has never found the scale of a Netflix or a Disney+, and rather than keep buying subscribers one at a time, NBCU is renting the audience of the service Americans already spend the most television time inside.

From YouTube's side it is both defensive and offensive. Premium has been raising prices, and dropping another hundred dollars of content into the same monthly bill is a straightforward way to make an increase easier to swallow. The larger prize is the living room. YouTube already claims the biggest share of US television viewing, and folding a conventional streamer into its subscription pushes it further toward being the single place you start with when deciding what to watch every evening, rather than one of six apps you flip between. As YouTube's chief product officer framed it, the company is "excited to expand our partnership with NBCUniversal, bringing new benefits to YouTube Premium members."

For advertisers, the detail worth noting is which Peacock tier is in the bundle. It is the ad-supported one. Millions of people who pay specifically to avoid advertising on YouTube are about to be handed an ad-supported service alongside it, which tells you how readily an ad-free promise gets traded for more content. The practical effect is that a growing share of premium, professionally produced, ad-carrying video will be watched inside a YouTube relationship, which makes the line between a television budget and a YouTube budget harder to draw every quarter.

Zooming Out

Bundling is what a platform does once it has stopped competing for content and started competing for the subscription itself. YouTube does not need Peacock's catalogue to fill its feed, it has more video than anybody. What it wants is for the recurring payment sitting in your account to be the one you never cancel, and every service folded in makes that a little more likely. The thing to watch now is which streamer goes next and on what terms, because NBCUniversal negotiated this from a position where YouTube already held the audience, and that is the position most of the industry will be negotiating from.

The story behind the numbers

From Our Data

One Fight Night, 148 Million Views

On July 25, six days after Spain won the World Cup, the Spanish streamer Ibai staged the sixth edition of La Velada del Año, his annual celebrity boxing card. The main broadcast ran eight and a half hours and has pulled 61.5 million views, peaking at 5.08 million people watching his YouTube channel at the same moment. For a channel with 17.1 million subscribers that posted exactly one other livestream in the previous three months, a stream that did 3.8 million views, the main event ran roughly 16 times his normal. What caught our attention, though, is that the fight itself accounts for only about 41% of the views his channel earned that week.

Ibai's own channel, July 22 to 29

The main broadcast · 1 livestream

61.5M · 16x

Build-up and clip Shorts · 87 videos — 51.2M

Individual fight replays · 11 videos — 29.3M

All three bars are Ibai's own channel across those eight days, where 100 uploads gathered 148.2 million views between them. Several of the supporting videos were outliers in their own right: the weigh-in stream the night before the fights did 6.3 million, the replay of Gero Arias against Viruzz did 5.8 million, and two teaser Shorts posted before the event, "¿Qué harías si ganas en La Velada?" and "¿Quién es el más fuerte de La Velada?", did 4.8 million and 3.9 million. Against a normal Short on that channel, which lands around 853,000 views, those two ran 5.7 and 4.6 times his usual.

Then there is everything happening outside his channel. Across the eleven days around the fight we logged 304 videos with La Velada in the title from 117 different channels, and the 116 that are not his added another 42.6 million views between them: predictions, walk-out reactions, post-fight breakdowns, arguments about whether a helmet decided one of the bouts, and speculation about next year's card that started before this one had finished.

Why it matters

A night like this is not one piece of inventory, it is four. There is the broadcast itself, the build-up content that runs for a week beforehand, the replay library that keeps accumulating views after the event, and the coverage from everybody who does not own the event at all. Most brands look at something like La Velada, see a headline sponsorship they cannot afford, and stop there. That last pool is the more useful signal, because the creators covering a moment they have no stake in are plentiful, easy to reach, and still priced against their ordinary numbers rather than the numbers the moment is about to hand them.

Links Roundup

Quick hits from across the web

→ HBO Max started testing HBO Max Shorts on July 28, a vertical scrolling feed of clips pulled from its own catalogue by an in-house model, which is the same convergence as the Peacock deal above with the roles reversed.

→ Arizona State is now offering a full bachelor's degree in content creation, a 120-credit program through its journalism school whose capstone requires students to grow a real audience with real followers.

→ Beauty on TikTok Shop did $980 million in the second quarter, up 82% on last year and the second straight quarter close to a billion, with K-beauty labels Medicube and Dr. Melaxin leading it.

→ After bbno$ drew 28 million viewers to a Roblox concert, the platform licensed a much bigger music library through the distributor Too Lost, so game builders can now score their worlds with tracks from artists like Teddy Swims and A$AP Ferg.

→ Earlier this month Content Partners launched Wonderloom Media to buy and operate YouTube-native businesses, opening with the true-crime channel Dr. Insanity and its 5 million subscribers.

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Creator on the Rise

Nate Herk

AI automation & no-code • ~881K subscribers • US

Nate Herk is 24, left a business intelligence job at Goldman Sachs, and now teaches people how to build AI agents that actually run something. His channel sits at 881,000 subscribers and moves at a serious pace, roughly 47 uploads in the last 90 days, and the format is refreshingly unglamorous: long, screen-recorded builds in n8n where he wires up an agent step by step and you end the video with a working system. His biggest hit is an eight-hour course on building and selling n8n agents that has done 1.69 million views, which is a remarkable number for what is effectively a full training program. Alongside the channel he runs a free community that has passed 300,000 members. For brands he is one of the highest-intent audiences on YouTube: viewers who sit through a ninety-minute build tutorial are people evaluating automation platforms, AI APIs, hosting and dev tools with a purchase in mind, and they arrive already trusting whoever walked them through it.

Watch the channel →

Advertiser Spotlight

Brand Strategies Worth Stealing

Bubble Recruited 18,500 Students Before Rush Week

Sorority recruitment is about to produce one of the largest creator moments of the year. #BamaRush alone carries 1.3 million TikTok posts, and get-ready-with-me videos from rush week reliably run for weeks. Brands are locking their plans in right now, several weeks ahead of the season, and the most instructive of them is Bubble Skincare. Rather than book creators when attention peaks, Bubble spent years building a campus ambassador network that now runs to 18,500 students, including about 300 at the University of Alabama and 200 at the University of Florida. During rush it ran on-campus experiences and gifting suites in Alabama that generated 3 million organic impressions, and in Florida it kept going all semester, reaching more than a thousand sorority members through sampling and events. This year it is also handing out 20 scholarships worth $55,000 across the US, UK and Canada.

The move worth stealing is buying the infrastructure instead of the moment. Everyone else will be bidding for the same rush-week creators in August, at August prices, with no relationship to show for it afterwards. Bubble already has thousands of students on campus who use the product, and when the moment arrives the content comes from inside the audience rather than from a media buy pointed at it. It is slower to build and considerably cheaper to activate, and the network is still there in October when the trend has moved on.

Trending on YouTube

What's going viral right now

MrBeast Grants 100 Wishes for Kids With Cancer

MrBeast's newest video, made with LeBron James, Dwayne Johnson, Disney and Stray Kids, granted wishes for 100 children living with cancer and has already cleared 31 million views. Alongside it, MrBeast, Amgen and St. Baldrick's committed a joint donation valued at $6.5 million and helped launch a Stand Up To Cancer pediatric research team. It is his largest philanthropy push of the year and it is drawing the reaction and behind-the-scenes coverage to match. Read the story.

Lamine Yamal Is the Most-Edited Man on YouTube

Spain beat Argentina in the World Cup final on July 19, and the aftermath has turned into a Shorts economy of its own. Yamal's own channel added 380,000 subscribers in a week, a 90% jump that pushed him into the global subscriber top 50, and in our index one edit channel's single Yamal Short has done 65.5 million views since July 23. Tournaments end, but the player-fandom clip machine they leave behind runs for months. See the rankings.

The "Dune: Part Three" Trailer Keeps Climbing

The second full trailer for the trilogy's closing film landed on July 8 and has kept accumulating rather than fading, sitting at 33.7 million views in our index three weeks later. With the release still set for December 18, film YouTube has a long runway of shot-by-shot breakdowns, book comparisons and lore explainers ahead of it. Watch the trailer.

Elden Ring Finally Arrives on Switch 2

"Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition" hits Switch 2 on August 28 at $79.99, bundling Shadow of the Erdtree with two new starting classes, four armour sets and fresh customisation for Torrent, with the new content arriving as paid DLC elsewhere. A four-year-old game landing on a Nintendo handheld for the first time is a guaranteed run of performance tests, first-playthroughs and difficulty debates. Read the details.