The one thing to know this week

YouTube sold $11.2 billion of ads between July and September, up 9% on a year earlier. That was below what Wall Street expected and its slowest growth of 2026, and more than a third of the money came from people watching YouTube on a TV.

Alphabet reported its third quarter on Wednesday, and YouTube's ad business grew more slowly than analysts wanted, while YouTube Music and Premium passed 150 million subscribers. Here's what the results and the earnings call mean if you buy YouTube creators, and what they don't.

Keep reading to find out

what YouTube's executives said about TV screens, Shorts and Premium on the call

how many channels with more than a million subscribers ran Whatnot sponsorships before its first TV ad

why Shopify's YouTube reads started talking about Black Friday in September

which board-game channel turned a card game into 1.2 million views in a week

Let's get into it.

This week's deep dive

What YouTube's Slower Quarter Means for Creator Buyers

The numbers. On Wednesday, after the market closed, Alphabet reported its third-quarter results. YouTube sold $11.2 billion of ads between July and September, up 9% from $10.3 billion a year earlier. That came in below analysts' forecasts and was YouTube's slowest ad growth this year, after 11% in the first quarter and 13% in the second. Alphabet as a whole grew 25% to $127.6 billion, with most of the lift from Google Cloud, which more than doubled.

The market's reaction. Alphabet's profit per share, $2.12, landed far below the roughly $3 Wall Street had forecast, partly because of an $8.7 billion loss on its stock investments. Its shares fell between 7% and 10% in after-hours trading, depending on when outlets checked.

Where the growth came from. Chief Financial Officer Anat Ashkenazi said brand advertisers drove the largest part of YouTube's ad growth, and Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler said the living room, meaning people watching YouTube on a TV, brought in more than a third of YouTube's ad revenue in the quarter. He also said small and medium advertisers keep moving to Demand Gen, Google's ad campaigns built to drive sales and sign-ups across YouTube and its other feeds. On Shorts, he pointed to Shorts series, which let creators organize their Shorts into seasons and episodes, according to the call transcript.

“We view YouTube as a flywheel of creators, viewers, and advertisers”

Philipp Schindler, Chief Business Officer, Google, on Wednesday's earnings call

Subscriptions keep climbing. YouTube Music and Premium passed 150 million subscribers worldwide, including trials, up from 125 million in March 2025. Google's subscriptions, platforms and devices revenue, which also covers Google One plans and hardware, grew 11% to $14.3 billion, TheWrap reports, and Schindler said subscriptions continue to grow faster than ads.

What it means for buyers. YouTube's ad sales and creator sponsorships are separate budgets. An ad bought from YouTube runs around a video, while a sponsor read is bought from the creator and sits inside it. A slower quarter for YouTube's ad business tells you nothing about how a given creator's read will do, so keep judging sponsorships on the channel's own views and audience. What the call does show is where YouTube is putting its effort this year: the TV screen and brand advertisers.

Zooming Out

A growing number of YouTube viewers pay to skip YouTube's own ads. Premium removes the ads YouTube places around videos, not the sponsor reads creators record inside them, so a Premium member watching a sponsored video still hears the read. If you are planning next year's creator budget, our guide on measuring YouTube sponsorship ROI covers how to tell which reads are worth booking again.

The story behind the numbers

From Our Data

Whatnot Bet on YouTube Before Its TV Ad

On Sunday, during the New York Giants game, Whatnot, the live-shopping app, aired its first national TV commercial, a 30-second spot called "Cam's Trip" starring Giants running back Cam Skattebo. Whatnot didn't arrive on TV without a creator plan. Between September 1 and October 27, 158 YouTube channels ran a Whatnot sponsorship in at least one long-form video, more than two and a half times the 61 in the same weeks of 2025. We count a video when the creator names Whatnot as the sponsor or reads its ad script, and a Whatnot link sits in the first lines of the description. 78 of the 158 have more than a million subscribers today, against 22 of last year's 61. — 158

channels, Sep 1 to Oct 27 — 78

with 1M+ subscribers today — 93

first Whatnot read after May

It scaled in the spring. In January and February of this year Whatnot ran sponsorships on about two dozen channels a month. That climbed to 59 in April, jumped to 96 in May and 102 in June, and has stayed between 78 and 93 in every month since. The biggest jump, in May, came about five months before the TV spot. 93 of this fall's 158 channels had no Whatnot sponsor read from January 2024 through May 2026.

It moved past the card table. In the first half of 2025, about two in three of the channels running Whatnot sponsorships made collectibles videos: sports cards, Pokémon, Funko, coins and comics. This fall it is about one in seven. Many of the new names are entertainment creators running giveaway reads. Jack Pembrook's I Secretly Built a House in the Richest Neighborhood, past 6.3 million views, calls Whatnot "my favorite app" and "this video's sponsor" before a $1,000 giveaway. Sam and Colby gave away 10 iPhone Duos through Whatnot in a video past 6.4 million views, and Kurtis Conner 20 Nintendo Switch 2s in one past 4.5 million. The collectors are still there: the card channel Western NY Cards has run 10 Whatnot-sponsored videos since September, more than any other channel.

Its videos grew by more than half. Whatnot's sponsored videos in those weeks went from about 130 to about 200. Over the same weeks, NordVPN's spoken reads fell 46%.

Whatnot's creator roster stepped up in the spring

Jan 2025

Oct 2026

Channels with at least one long-form Whatnot-sponsored video, by month, January 2025 to October 27, 2026 (October is 27 days). Sellers' plugs for their own Whatnot shows do not count.

Why it matters

Whatnot moved its YouTube sponsorships into mainstream channels before its first national TV spot aired, and the TV plan that started on Sunday still lists influencers among its channels. If you sell to the audiences of YouTube's big entertainment channels, you are likely to keep meeting Whatnot on the giveaway channels this holiday season, now with a TV budget behind it. If you buy collectibles audiences, the card and Pokémon channels it started on are still running Whatnot sponsorships this fall.

Links Roundup

Quick hits from across the web

Netflix said on October 19 that it will stream La Velada del Año exclusively live from 2027 to 2029, moving the Spanish streamer Ibai Llanos's creator boxing night, which peaked at 9.3 million concurrent viewers in 2025, off his Twitch channel. Its sponsors, like the snack maker Grefusa, named on air as a sponsor since the first edition, will be buying into a Netflix broadcast.

Mastercard and MrBeast's Beast Industries announced a partnership on Monday covering co-branded cards for fans and creators plus business tools for creators, with no launch dates or card issuers named yet, while Step, the banking app Beast bought in February, already got a spoken read in MrBeast's "Lose 150 Lbs Together" video, past 160 million views.

Meta told investors on October 21 that Partnership Ads passed a $15 billion annual run-rate, up more than 97% in a year, and that its Creator Marketing Hub, with more than 10 million creators searchable, is now open to every advertiser.

Instagram is testing horizontal uploads up to 90 minutes long, called Features, with long-form creators in Brazil and a small group in the US, and since Meta says it is too early to share a long-term monetization model, brand deals will be most creators' money for now.

Whop, the digital-goods marketplace whose Content Rewards program pays people to clip and repost creators' videos, raised about $200 million at a $5.1 billion valuation from Sequoia and Shopify Ventures, more than three times the $1.6 billion it was valued at in February.

Partner message With Instagram chasing long-form video, your next creator brief may start on an Instagram profile. The free ThoughtLeaders Chrome extension matches that profile to the creator's YouTube channel and shows subscribers, typical views and sponsor history right on the Instagram page.

Creator on the Rise · add to your watch list

No Rolls Barred

459K subscribers • Board-game comedy

No Rolls Barred is a UK comedy channel whose cast plays board games, from Blood on the Clocktower to Monopoly with a twist, every week. Its September 15 game of FLIP 7 with Smosh Games reached 1.2 million views in its first week, more than 11 times what its videos posted since YouTube's August view-count change usually do at the same age, and "Monopoly, but SERIOUS." from April keeps climbing, past 3.1 million. Surfshark has sponsored 22 of its videos since January 2024, across three separate campaigns, and Raid: Shadow Legends has sponsored three of its videos since November 2025, each in a separate campaign.

80%

Male

United States

34.1%

United Kingdom

22.2%

Australia

4.7%

Canada

4.6%

Subscribers

459K +30% in 2 yrs

Median age

25-34

Projected views

169K at day 30

Partner with the channel →

Advertiser Spotlight

Brand Strategies Worth Stealing

Shopify Started Its Black Friday Pitch a Month Early

Shopify sells the software small businesses use to run online stores, and this fall its YouTube read changed. From October 1 to 27, 31% of long-form videos with a spoken Shopify read mentioned Black Friday, 100 of 320. In the same days of 2025 it was 2%, and in 2024 it was 4%. The read sells a deadline, not a discount: launch your store before Black Friday, at a shopify.com address with the show's own name on it.

Between September 1 and October 27, 85 long-form videos on 52 channels carried that line, starting with Regulation Podcast on September 30. In the same weeks of 2025 none did, even though Shopify ran more reads then, 868 videos. Last year the line waited for November, when one in five Shopify reads carried it. The rest of YouTube is not early this year: in the week of October 19, Black Friday came up in fewer than 3 of every 1,000 long-form videos, against more than 4 in the same week of 2025.

The biggest placements are on talk shows and podcasts: Rotten Mango's October 23 episode, past 2.1 million views, SmoshCast's Smosh Mouth 164, past 1.1 million, and Bad Friends, past 700,000. The strongest reads come from hosts who run their own stores. The Young Turks talk about their own merch shop, and on Kallmekris's October 21 video, past 590,000 views, the host tells the story of her own first holiday season.

“The mistake that I made our first holiday season... we just waited too long”

Kallmekris, in a sponsored Shopify read

A retailer's Black Friday runs on a later calendar. Raycon, the earbuds brand, kept the line out of its reads until the turn of November in 2025, then put it in more than four in five of its read videos from November 3 to December 1. Shopify sells to the stores that have to be open before that rush, so it took the weeks before it. It didn't need new shows to do it: 47 of the 52 channels had carried Shopify before June, and 25 of them have come back for a separate campaign at least 70 days after an earlier one, with several videos bought together counted once. The new script is a month old, too fresh to judge on results. The steal is the calendar: when your customer has a busy season, your read belongs in the month before it, on the shows that already know your name.

Guide brands worth studying

Honeylove. The shapewear brand gives each show its own web address, like honeylove.com/hsp on Heart Starts Pounding. Over the past two years it came back to 58 of the 147 channels it had time to return to, about two in five, at least 70 days later.

True Classic. The men's basics brand runs a trueclassic.com path for each show, like trueclassic.com/doctormike on Doctor Mike. It came back to 65 of the 213 channels it had time to return to, about three in ten, at least 70 days later.

Trending on YouTube

What's going viral right now

A Mod Put the Whole Planet in BeamNG

90x

his usual day-7 views since Aug 24

Gaming with Griff Griffin, a UK channel with about 111,000 subscribers, posted its look at BeamNG.Earth, a new fan-made mod that puts a 1:1 scale Earth into the driving simulator BeamNG.drive, on Monday, October 19. It has passed 1.4 million views. Watch the video.

Car Audio, Twenty Years Later

1.1M

views since last Thursday

Breakers Stereo & Performance, a car audio and accessories store with its own YouTube channel, made a video for anyone who left the car audio scene in the 2000s and wonders what it looks like now. It went up last Thursday and has passed 1.1 million views, on a channel with about 104,000 subscribers. Watch the video.

An Orthodontist's Long Video Takes Off

71x

his usual long-form day-7 views since Aug 24

The Bentist has 9.8 million subscribers, but his long videos usually reach about 18,000 views in their first week. His explainer on receding gums, posted on Monday, October 19, has passed 1.4 million views. Watch the video.

Richard Hammond on Life After Top Gear

43x

the channel's usual day-3 views since Aug 24

The former Top Gear and Grand Tour host sat down with Jake Humphrey's interview podcast High Performance to talk about life after Top Gear, including turning down the BBC's offer to take over the show after Jeremy Clarkson was dropped. The episode, which carries sponsor reads for AG1 and XTB, has passed 2.5 million views since last Thursday. Watch the episode.

Cyberpunk 2077's Update 2.5 Sends Players to the Guides

44x

LunarGaming's usual day-3 views since Aug 24

Cyberpunk 2077's Update 2.5 has players looking for guides. LunarGaming's rundown of the more than 50 new console mods has passed 720,000 views, and Sam Bram's everything-you-need-to-know video has passed 760,000, about 19 times what his videos since August's view-count change usually do at the same age. Watch the mods video.