As audiences spend more time with creator-led video on YouTube and TikTok, the traditional publisher video stack looks out of touch. Those generic 30-second ad spots and low-effort reworks of existing creative to fit social feeds aren’t going to cut it with a social-native audience.
Meanwhile, creator-led media companies are building ad businesses that resemble what many publishers aspire to become. These operations sit at the center of passionate fandoms and sell deeply integrated, cross-platform video campaigns that buyers can’t get anywhere else.
Take Donut Media, a subsidiary of Recurrent Ventures that started out posting car-focused content on social media and has evolved into a hybrid creator collective and media company. Donut sells custom-branded segments, 360-degree sponsorships, social extensions and even its own pre-roll inventory on YouTube, often outperforming traditional brand assets.
The creator-led video stack
Donut’s content spans every corner of the automotive fandom, from how-to repair guides and deep-dive car reviews to stories about racing culture and viral car challenges. The company has more than nine million YouTube subscribers and millions more fans across social platforms, including TikTok and Instagram.
Contrary to the current obsession with short-form video, the foundation of Donut’s digital ad business is its long-form YouTube content, said Amanda Klein, head of brand partnerships at Donut Media.
The long-form format allows Donut to not only tell more engaging stories, Klein said, but also to embed custom, host-read ad spots into episodes. These 45- to 60-second ads, which typically run during the first third of a YouTube video, are a jumping-off point for different video ad formats that are placed across platforms.
For example, the same brand concept that anchors a YouTube episode can be used for behind-the-scenes footage and shorter riffs more suited to TikTok and Instagram, Klein said. Donut usually has videographers on set shooting both long-form content and short-form material specifically for social.
Brands can also extend their reach to audio channels through podcast host-read ads, as well as real-world activations and merch drops. So what starts as a creator sponsorship can end up resembling a 360-degree media plan, Klein said.
Of course, this omnichannel strategy affects how Donut packages and sells its inventory. Depending on the buyer and objective, Klein said, Donut can appear on a media plan as an influencer, a video campaign or a broader buy spanning YouTube, social, podcasts, events and merchandise.
Pre-roll as a premium placement
In addition to custom creator-led spots, Donut also earns programmatic revenue from standard YouTube ads.
But, unlike most YouTube creators, Donut has the technical and operational ability to sell its pre-roll ad inventory across its channel. Through its partner program, YouTube offers such technologically savvy publishers that reach certain audience benchmarks the opportunity to sell some of their own YouTube ads via Google AdSense.
Klein’s team has turned its pre-roll YouTube inventory into an efficiency lever for larger direct deals. Typically, the company will create cutdowns of the brand’s custom content to fit YouTube’s 15- and 30-second prebaked ad slots.
Advertisers can also license these video assets for broader distribution as paid media on YouTube or on social media, Klein said. That way, a single creative investment by a brand can yield an in-show integration across Donut’s network, a set of platform-specific YouTube assets and a batch of talent-led video ads that can scale across platforms.
And, according to Donut’s research, these host-led pre-roll ads outperform brand-supplied video assets in driving engagement and outcomes. That performance story helps convince buyers who might otherwise default to standard video line items controlled by a separate media team, Klein said.
This strategy also reframes the value of pre-roll video itself, Klein said. Instead of being an undifferentiated commodity sold at whatever CPM the market will bear, pre-roll becomes a premium extension of a creator’s on-channel presence – and an extension of the brand’s presence as well.
Turning brands and hosts into recurring characters
But where Donut diverges most sharply from the legacy publisher playbook is in its influencer-marketing-inspired approach.
Donut positions advertisers as recurring characters within wider car culture, much like the hosts themselves.
For endemic and auto-adjacent advertisers – such as car manufacturers, insurance companies and energy drinks – Donut has developed “official partnership” opportunities that feel closer to sports sponsorships than standard ad buys.
For example, Allstate is Donut’s official insurance partner. Hankook fills the official tire partner slot. Those sponsorship categories are intentionally constrained so just a handful of close partner brands can build a consistent, recognizable presence in Donut’s content over time, Klein said.
In addition to clearly defined deliverables, such as an agreed number of paid social posts, Donut provides these official partners a layer of organic visibility that traditional publishers find harder to operationalize at scale, Klein said.
For example, the Donut Garage set features physical signage displaying the branding of long-term partners, which can rack up millions of organic impressions as fans binge episodes. Donut also places stickers with brand logos on cars that often reappear in videos. And limited-run merch capsules and in-person events give brands yet another way to live inside the Donut universe.
For legacy publishers, the lesson is less about copying Donut’s exact playbook and more about rethinking the relationship between “custom” and “scalable,” Klein said. If a publisher is already investing in bespoke video franchises or talent-led segments, those assets can be designed from the outset to spin off into performance-focused spots, whether on owned channels or in broader media buys.
In that sense, the gap between creator businesses and traditional publishers is no longer about who is the best at tailoring video to different platforms. It’s about who can design ad products that match not just how audiences actually watch content but who they trust.
“A lot of brands come to us asking for Donut to help make them cool and relevant,” Klein said. “That’s what creators do so well.”
