Here is a sentence I did not expect to write this year: the single biggest live audience on YouTube right now does not belong to a network. It belongs to a Brazilian streamer named Casimiro, whose free World Cup broadcast has been pulling numbers that make prime-time television look quaint.

Also in this issue: the golf creators quietly building tours with bigger prize money than most of the pro circuit, and a Chili's campaign so strange it worked. We also shipped something of our own this week, our first Chrome extension, and you will find the link just below. Plenty to get through.

Let's get into it.

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This week's deep dive

One Creator Is Out-Broadcasting Television at the World Cup

The 2026 World Cup is being co-hosted across the United States, Canada and Mexico, and in Brazil the whole thing is playing out on a YouTube channel. CazeTV, run by the streamer Casimiro Miguel, has the rights to show all 104 matches free on YouTube, and the audiences have been staggering. Brazil's opening match against Morocco on June 13 drew a peak of roughly 12.7 million concurrent viewers on his channel alone. As Brazil advanced through the tournament, those peaks kept climbing toward the 17 million mark, the largest live audiences YouTube has ever recorded for a single channel.

To put that in context, the previous high-water mark for a live YouTube channel was the Spanish streamer Ibai Llanos, who pulled about 9.3 million for his boxing event La Velada. CazeTV blew past that in the first week of the group stage. The tournament has also pushed YouTube as a platform past 20 million total concurrent viewers for the first time, a threshold no livestreaming service had crossed before. This is not a creator having a good day. It is a creator operating at a scale that used to require a satellite and a broadcast license.

What makes it work is not the rights deal, it is the format. Casimiro built his following by watching football the way his audience does, loud, funny, reacting in real time, with none of the starch of a traditional broadcast booth. When he landed the World Cup, he did not sand that down into a network product. He scaled it up. Fans get the biggest event in sport for free, on the app they already have open, hosted by someone who sounds like their group chat. A national broadcaster cannot fake that, and increasingly it cannot compete with it either.

For brands, this is the part worth sitting with. Live sports has always been the last reliable way to reach millions of people at the same moment, which is why it commands the highest ad rates on television. That inventory is now moving onto creator channels, wrapped in a creator's voice and sold against a creator's audience. The reach is broadcast-sized, but the trust and the tone are the creator's own. When the biggest live audience in a country is watching a YouTuber rather than a network, the question for advertisers stops being whether creator media can carry a flagship campaign and becomes how fast they can get in the room.

Zooming Out

For twenty years the argument against creators was scale: fun, sure, but they cannot carry a Super Bowl-sized moment. That argument is now over. A single YouTuber just delivered a bigger simultaneous audience than any television channel in his country, for the most watched event on earth. The walls between broadcast and creator media are not blurring anymore. They are gone. What is left is a simple question of who tells the biggest story in sports today, and this year the answer was a guy on YouTube.

Links Roundup

Quick hits from across the web

→ CAA and TPG launched Compound Creative Holdings, a $250 million vehicle to buy up and operate creator-led businesses, the clearest sign yet that Hollywood now sees YouTubers as companies to acquire, not just talent to sign.

→ YouTube gave Shorts a viewer-facing redesign, quietly removing the dislike button, adding 2x playback and folding in a new AI editing tool called Reimagine, small tweaks that keep nudging Shorts closer to a pure discovery machine.

→ Google asked a court to toss a copyright suit over its Lyria AI music model, arguing that anyone who uploaded a song to YouTube already agreed to let it train AI, a position that could redefine what "posting" a track even means.

→ Rare's pirate sandbox Sea of Thieves is becoming a live-action movie, one more game franchise cashing in the enormous YouTube fandom it built into a Hollywood pitch.

→ For all the noise, venture money for creator startups has all but dried up, roughly $58 million across nine deals in the first five months of 2026, down from about $807 million a year earlier, as investors move from placing bets to buying proven businesses.

Add to your watch list

Creator on the Rise

Grant Horvat

Golf • ~1.7M subscribers • US

YouTube golf has quietly become one of the platform's best businesses, and Grant Horvat is its clearest breakout. He co-founded the golf collective Good Good in 2020, left in 2022 to go solo, and has since built his own channel past 1.7 million subscribers with slickly produced matches at elite courses. What makes him worth watching now is what he is building around the channel. Horvat and the Bryan Bros just announced Your Golf Tour, a series of creator tournaments with a $1 million purse backed by Wynn Las Vegas, while the rival Internet Invitational has swollen its prize pool from $1 million to $4 million, money that rivals actual PGA Tour events. He is so committed to the format that he reportedly walked away from a PGA Tour start when he was told he could not film it for YouTube. That one decision sums up where golf is heading. For creators like Horvat, the audience travels with the channel, not the tour, and the brands chasing golf's young and affluent fans are learning to spend where the cameras are.

Watch the channel →

Advertiser Spotlight

Brand Strategies Worth Stealing

Chili's Put Fast Food on Trial

Chili's has been on a tear reintroducing itself to a younger crowd, and its sharpest move was also its weirdest. The brand built a pop-up "food court" right next to a Union Square McDonald's and staged a mock trial, handing the creative reins to Trisha Paytas for a one-woman legal drama that put fast food itself on the stand. Everything about the set was designed to produce creator content, not a polished thirty-second spot. The creator was the campaign, not a bolt-on at the end of one.

The lesson worth stealing is the order of operations. Most brands build the campaign first and then look for a creator to plug into it. Chili's started with a creator's native format, the chaotic, extremely online character comedy Paytas is known for, and built the whole activation around what she does best. It is the same instinct behind their Lizzo baby-back-ribs push: hand the concept to someone whose audience already trusts their voice, then get out of the way. When the creator is doing something only they could do, the audience forgives the fact that it is an ad.

Trending on YouTube

What's going viral right now

The Tour de France Rolls Out of Barcelona July 4

The 113th Tour starts in Barcelona on July 4 with a rare opening team time trial, then runs to Paris on July 26. Three weeks of daily racing is a highlight, recap and analysis engine that keeps cycling channels busy well into the summer. Watch the stages.

Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" Hits July 17

Nolan's sweeping take on Homer's epic lands July 17 and is already one of the most dissected releases of the year. Expect a flood of trailer breakdowns, mythology explainers and shot-by-shot analysis across film YouTube. Watch the trailer.

Madonna Returns With "Confessions II"

Out July 3, "Confessions II" is a direct sequel to Madonna's 2005 dance landmark, reuniting her with producer Stuart Price. A legacy artist chasing a 2005 sound is catnip for reaction and nostalgia channels. Watch the rollout.

"DOOM: The Dark Ages" Gets Its Revelations Expansion July 7

id Software's story-driven Revelations expansion drops July 7, pulling the DOOM base back onto the charts with fresh playthroughs, lore videos and speed-run attempts across gaming YouTube. Watch the gameplay.

"Spider-Man: Brand New Day" Builds Toward July 31

Tom Holland's fourth solo outing opens July 31, with the marketing push climbing fast on YouTube. Sony shot it for the panoramic ScreenX format, giving trailer analysts and hype channels plenty to pick apart. Watch the trailer.