Let’s make a deal: YouTube caters to brands and podcasters by making its ads more flexible

At its annual Made On presentation, YouTube revealed that it paid out $100 billion to creators, artists, and media companies between January 2021 and December 2024. With a slew of new products, the Google-owned hub is looking to push those payouts even higher.

YouTube’s Made On address included abundant details about the current and future states of its advertising and ecommerce businesses. On the ad side, YouTube is introducing dynamic ad insertion for branded segments of long-form videos. That means that creators will be able to swap out their ad reads once deals are fulfilled in order to resell the space. Testing for the dynamically-inserted spots will begin with a select group of creators early next year.

While creators across the platform will be able to find uses for the new feature, YouTube seems to be developing that product with podcasters in mind. Dynamic ad insertion has become a key ad format in the business of audiovisual shows, and YouTube is clearly looking to build on the progress it has already made among podcasters. According to data shared at Made On, YouTube users now consume more than 100 million hours of podcasts each day.

“Typically, when I do a brand deal, the sponsored segment is burned into the video, and it’s there forever. I can’t change it,” said makeup creator Christen Dominique at the Made On event. “Soon enough, I’ll be able to update and remonetize these segments or even sell sponsored segments in different countries to different brands.”

As YouTube builds out its ad suite, it’s also keeping direct purchases in mind. Updates to shoppable URLs will let creators link out to brand websites from their Shorts, and automated timestamps will ensure that product tags show up at the proper moment (i.e. when the linked item is being discussed on screen).

For the 500,000 creators enrolled in YouTube Shopping globally, those tools will provide flexibility and (theoretically) increase earnings. And for everyone else, an update to YouTube’s merch platform will let creators rope off exclusive merch for top viewers — allowing the video hub to operate similarly to third-party platforms like Patreon.

AI has been a major theme at YouTube’s recent Made On events, and that trend continued in 2025. YouTube is employing its Gemini model across multiple facets of its business, from content creation (an AI-powered tool that turns engaging podcast clips into Shorts) to analytics (an Ask Studio that will deliver AI-generated statistical insights) to security (a likeness detection tool that will help creators defend against deepfakes.

Between all those updates and the enhancements YouTube is bringing to its live-streaming empire, this year’s Made On event featured one of the busiest slates to date. Keep an eye on this space if you want to find coverage of YouTube’s newly announced products as they arrive over the coming days, weeks, and months. In the meantime, the official YouTube blog has the skinny on the features discussed at Made On.