The Business of YouTube

A weekly strategic lens for senior leaders into how YouTube is reshaping the business of technology, sports, music, entertainment, and culture.

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To your favourite newsletter, The Business of YouTube, brought to you by Paola Marinone and Bengü Atamer, founders of BuzzMyVideos and previously at YouTube and Google. We are bringing our exclusive insights from 20 years of experience leading strategy at YouTube and Google.

YouTube Is TV. Data Is the Foundation. The Hype Cycle Is Over.

SportsPro London 2026 — Five sessions, three perspectives, one signal.

By Bengu Atamer, Paola Marinone & Carlo De Marchis

SportsPro London 2026 was the first industry event in a while where the room sounded honest.

Five sessions made the case that the sports business has matured past the point where slogans carry weight. The through-line: stop performing. Start proving ROI on one use case at a time. The industry's hype cycle is exhausting itself, and what is left is harder, slower, and more useful than what came before.

For those of us who work at the intersection of sport and YouTube, the signal was unmistakable.

The platform isn't a social media side-channel anymore.

It's television.

And most rights holders haven't switched on the lights yet.

Nick Meacham, CEO of SportsPro, opened with a keynote called "Does sport need a reality check?" His answer was yes, and he did not hold back.

The most uncomfortable truth was about media rights. Revenue is hyper-concentrated at the very top. The Premier League's per-game value has dropped. France and Belgium were left without buyers when DAZN walked away. If you are not a tier-one property, the pot of gold is not coming.

Note: the top 5 sports capture 80% of all media rights revenue globally.

On engagement, the numbers are staggering but the conversion is broken.

71% of fans want to watch sport on social platforms. 93% of Gen Z fans use a second screen during a match. Yet official channels consistently underperform. The Sidemen Charity Match sold out Wembley in hours, driven entirely by creator reach, not rights-holder distribution.

The question Meacham left in the room: what happens when you don't own the audience driving your visibility?

We, BuzzMyVideos, made the case that most of the industry is treating YouTube as a social media channel when it has become something categorically different: TV.

The fastest growing demographic on YouTube TV is over 65. That is the audience with the most purchasing power, sitting in lean-back mode, watching long-form content on a big screen.

The core argument for rights holders was about asset stack, not just live rights.

The YouTube opportunity breaks into four layers: the next 1M USD lies with these assets:

1. Always-on athlete content : searched for daily, drives consistent traffic

2. Searchable highlights : micro-moments for younger fans who no longer watch the 90-minute match

3. Archive : a 24/7 goldmine sitting unused in most organisations

4. Exclusivity content : behind-the-scenes and access tier

Each layer is a sponsorship product in its own right.

The FIFA–YouTube World Cup deal was the clearest articulation of what this looks like in practice. Three layers in a single deal:

• Ten minutes of live rights given to creators,

• The archive vault opened to drive emotional connection

• Co-livestreams during matches. 

One rights holder.

Three monetisable layers.

One creator ecosystem doing the distribution work.

The brand sponsorship model is shifting too. Logo sponsorship is yesterday's model. MLB launched a kids' YouTube channel with Crayola and ABC Mouse as sponsors,building twenty years of fans from scratch. Co-ownership of media, not logo placement.

YouTube growth playbook — what this means for your organisation:

Michael Payne sat down with Samuel Agini of the Financial Times to discuss his new book, Fast Tracks and Dark Deals. Fifty years in the industry. The KGB broke into his Lausanne office and stole his hard drive. A year later he found himself skiing behind President Medvedev's chief of staff at Sochi and asked, politely, if he could have it back.

On the IOC, Payne was direct. Paris was incredibly successful. The TV product is in good shape. The organisation running the show is the issue. New IOC president Coventry has launched Fit for the Future. Payne believes serious cultural change is needed, lawyers are running the agenda, and bureaucracy is blocking obvious value.

His example was specific. Athletes are the greatest ambassadors the Olympic movement has. Ten years after their event, they still cannot access their own visual images. OTAB, which Payne created at the IOC, holds visual archives going back to 1900. Put a 24-hour delay on broadcaster exclusivity and you unlock 100,000 ambassadors overnight. The block is not technology. It is bureaucracy.

Douglas Gremmen, Chief Growth Officer of HYROX, presented a case study that should make every traditional sports federation uncomfortable.

HYROX launched in 2017. They have never invested in influencer marketing. Every piece of visibility they generate is organic, athletes posting their own competition experiences.

The content flywheel is the athlete base itself. HYROX did not build an audience. It built a community that built the audience for them.

Carlo De Marchis moderated a panel on monetising fragmented audiences with Bobby Nightingale, Head of Fan Growth and Content at Bath Rugby, and Stefan Lavén, CEO of Data Talks. It produced the most honest conversation of the event.

Bobby opened with a sentence that deserved applause. Bath Rugby has stadium access systems, ticketing, merchandise, retail, CRM, CDP, email platforms, e-wallets, and push notifications. Most of those systems do not talk to each other. Only 10% of the club's following is identified as fans.

Bath does not have a data growth problem. It has a data identification problem.

Stefan made the case for plumbing first — you cannot get to outcomes without connecting the silos. Bobby pushed back: plumbing matters once you have a clear value exchange in place. They landed in agreement: start with one tangible use case and go deep before going wide.

Stefan's finding that surprised the room: across every project Data Talks runs, the ROI on the first investment comes from reactivating idle fans already in the database — not from acquiring new ones.

Bobby proved it. Bath ran a campaign targeting people who had opted out of marketing. One signed shirt. One email. One piece of creative. 42% came back in. The assumption that opted-out contacts are dead was wrong. Most had opted out because a single email annoyed them, not because they stopped caring.

On AI, Bobby was clear: he is tired of people pitching him generative AI for content creation. The value is in workflows, processes, the boring stuff nobody wants to do: match reports, automated insights, tools that surface revenue impact alongside productivity gains.

Carlo De Marchis’ Newsletter → linkedin.com/in/carlodemarchis/recent-activity/newsletter/

The Business of YouTube - Job Board 📈

We have curated what is open and available in the market, and who is hiring!

Happy job hunting!

Europe

Head of Marketing EMEA - SailGP (London)

Audience & Platform Growth Digital Studio - Sony Pictures (London)

Head of Partnership Innovation - Chelsea Football Club (London)

Head of Social Media - Chelsea Football Club (London)

Head of Social Media - Spotlight Sports Group (London - Hybrid)

Social Media Lead - Syntesia (London)

Shooting Producer/ Editor - Aurora Media Worldwide

Creative Director at Jungle Creations (Maternity Cover - London)

NORTH AMERICA

Deals Manager, Global Media Partnerships - YouTube (New York)

Director of Socials, Manager, Social Media & Content Strategy and other positions - Do Good Crew (Los Angeles)

Social Media Lead - Syntesia (New York)

Manager, Channel Strategy - Kids & Family - The Orchard (Los Angeles)

Digital Director, Digital Manager, Digital Coordinator at TKO (WWE HQ, Stamford, CT)

Global Social Media at The IronMan Group (Louisville, CO or Tampa, FL)

If you have a senior YouTube/Video/Social Media/Content opening, and you want us to add it to our Job Board, please write to us at [email protected] or [email protected].

The Premier League Clubs’ YouTube Stats for APRIL 2026

You can download it here: https://buzzmyvideos.com/2026/05/06/april-2026-premier-league-youtube-performance-report/

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