YouTube is reportedly offering creators millions if they don’t sign deals with Netflix

After more than a year of Netflix treating YouTube like its own personal “farm league” and poaching top creators, the biggest video platform in the world is fighting back.

Per Bloomberg, YouTube is offering millions of dollars to top creators if they agree to upload their videos exclusively to its site–a move it hopes will convince high-view-volume creators to turn their noses up if and when Netflix comes calling.

In some cases, YouTube is promising creators guaranteed portions of revenue from major platform-wide brand deals it brokers. In other cases, it’s offered to personally finance their productions–a very interesting proposal indeed, considering YouTube bowed out of original, house-funded programming years ago as Netflix and other streaming services outpaced it in the premium TV category.

Sources familiar with the matter said YouTube’s solution here isn’t all carrot. It’s also retaliating against creators who have signed deals with Netflix by excluding them from marketing campaigns and events, and denying them a share of proceeds from the aforementioned platform brand deals.

YouTube has reportedly told creators that taking Netflix deals and cross-posting their content “conveys the idea that channels are deprioritizing [YouTube] as their primary outlet,” writes Bloomberg.

Apparently some creators have already elected not to work with Netflix, at least in part because of the streaming service’s requirements. Unlike YouTube, where creators are in control of their own publication schedules and can hit Upload the second they finish a video, Netflix wants creators to deliver finished videos in advance, and asks them to remove some brand sponsorships.

There’s also the fact that some of its podcast deals, like those Netflix made with Barstool Sports and The Ringer (and probably its $100 million deal with Jay Shetty), contain a clause that limits the number of show clips creators can post on YouTube.

But despite these drawbacks, we can see why some YouTubers have been drawn in by the evolving size and scope of Netflix’s offers.

Its earliest deals were primarily focused on catalog licensing, allowing it to copy over creators’ existing content libraries to its service. (Its intention there: attempting to gain ground on YouTube’s Nielsen-measured watch hour dominance, a longstanding point of contention for Netflix.)

Newer deals, though, have seen Netflix get involved on the production side of new content; it’s developing original series with Salish Matter and Alan Chikin Chow, for example.

Sources said YouTube has been reluctantly debating stepping in to stem the flow of these deals.

Its main points of hesitation: (1) that it doesn’t want to fully return to its YouTube Red days and function like a studio, and (2) it doesn’t want to appear to show favoritism by directly paying some creators more than others instead of everyone getting paid by the same AdSense system.

But Netflix has already taken top names and is likely courting more creators as we speak–so YouTube is repeating its Vessel playbook (plus its strat from the brief post-Ninja-exodus period where every platform was paying gaming streamers for exclusivity) and financially incentivizing them to stick around.