YouTube Is The New Reddit
The creator economy just got a whole lot more lucrative.
According to GEO company BrightEdge, LLMs now rely on YouTube as a top source for citations – and that includes sponsored creator content.
LLMs favor YouTube because it’s “highly machine-readable,” with defined transcripts, metadata and chapters, Ómar Thor Ómarsson, CEO and co-founder of Optise, an AI platform that helps B2B companies improve search performance, tells Digiday.
Standard ad units on YouTube are labeled as such and, as a result, LLMs steer clear of them. But creators aren’t required to disclose their paid brand partnerships in video metadata, so AI considers them to be worthy sources.
BrightEdge’s research shows that YouTube is cited even more frequently than Reddit within Gemini and ChatGPT, and also shows up in 29.5% of Google AI Overviews. An audit conducted by media agency Brainlabs, meanwhile, suggests that YouTube shows up as a source in nearly 60% of AI Overviews.
Which is why Jessica Finch, head of SEO at Brainlabs, advises that brands should focus on incorporating natural language into their video scripts and metadata and also benchmark their content against competitors.
“Video scripts can be a means of altering [brands’] share of model,” says Finch, “and of analyzing rivals.”
Pod For Advertising
If you thought MFA was confined to low-quality, low-effort websites, guess again. Generative AI makes it easy for made-for-advertising publishers to expand their playbook to new media channels, like podcasts.
Take The Daily News Now! (DNN), a podcast network founded in 2025 that publishes 11,000 AI-generated short-form episodes a day. Its coverage across 400-plus shows ranges from national news to hyper-local topics, such as specific college sports teams. Each episode runs about two minutes and covers a single news story. Naturally, the network is ad-supported.
However, DNN appears to generate its podcasts by scraping existing content from local news affiliates and student newspapers, according to Indicator, a blog that investigates online scams.
For example, Indicator found that 30 episodes of DNN’s Durham News Today – a podcast covering North Carolina’s Research Triangle of Duke University, North Carolina State University and UNC Chapel Hill – “borrow heavily” from Duke’s college paper. Also, the podcasts went live just minutes after the original stories were posted.
Although DNN includes ad sales contact info in the description of each of its episodes, it’s mainly those covering national topics that feature ads (seemingly from a single DTC brand). More niche, local topics are a harder sell. Guess, in that sense, DNN is in the same boat as many local news pubs.
A Price To Pay
Running AI models is expensive.
Which is partly why both OpenAI and Anthropic missed their own gross margin forecasts in recent years, The Information reports.
OpenAI’s inference costs (as in, the ongoing costs of existing models) quadrupled in 2025, reaching $8.6 billion, due to increased demand that prompted the company to buy more servers. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the AI behemoth saw its margins decrease, even as its user base grew.
Anthropic, similarly, saw its inference costs triple in 2025, although for unclear reasons. It also dropped its anticipated gross margins for last year from 50% to 40% – not great, but still a massive improvement over 2024’s negative 94% margins. Oof.
Going back to OpenAI, another reason for its recent financial struggles is the cost of powering ChatGPT for nonpaying users, The Information notes.
Which means that OpenAI’s recent introduction of ads could make all the difference and is likely a factor in its increased revenue projections through 2030.
Anthropic, on the other hand, has no such plans to introduce ads – famously.
Both companies will need to prove their value to investors over the next few years or lose the support that keeps them afloat.
But Wait! There’s More!
Audience measurement firm Kantar Media rebrands to Fifty5Blue following its sale to a private equity group. [Adweek]
Mr. Clean’s bald, T-shirt clad mascot has announced his retirement. It’s another example of the marketing trend that has brands including Planters and Duolingo teasing changes to their iconic mascots. [NYT]
For the first time ever, podcasts topped AM/FM radio for audience time spent listening to spoken-word audio. [Edison Research]
Trump’s State Department ordered diplomats to oppose restrictions on US companies processing and storing foreign user data, in yet another escalation of US efforts to combat global regulation of American Big Tech. [Reuters]
Gucci’s AI-generated ads have hit a nerve with consumers. [Business Insider]
Financial services company Stripe is reportedly considering buying some or all of PayPal. [TechCrunch]
The FBI subpoenaed xAI for the Grok prompts a man used to generate 200 nonconsensual pornographic videos of a woman that he allegedly used to harass her and her husband. [404 Media]
What the data says about X’s shift toward amplifying right-wing politics under owner Elon Musk, which is part one of a planned three-part series. [Tech Policy Press]
You’re Hired!
Digital Turbine appoints former Microsoft AI exec and former AppNexus CTO Ben John as its chief technology officer. [release]
