This week’s Future of TV Briefing looks at the rare practice of YouTube channels offering TV-style make-goods to sponsors as TV-style shows become more commonplace.
Recently I was talking with Donut Media’s head of brand partnerships Amanda Klein. The Recurrent-owned media company’s YouTube videos are receiving about 45% of their viewership on TV screens. Coinciding with that increased TV viewership, Donut Media is making a big push this year to sell sponsorships for TV-style episodic series, she said.
I’m guessing it was the combination of “show,” “sponsorships” and “TV” that led me to ask, “Are you offering minimum viewership guarantees?”
Yes, said Klein. “To have a brand be comfortable putting budget toward this, we might guarantee video views, social impressions, pre-roll impressions.”
Interesting, I thought. And what if a show’s viewership falls short of the guarantees, are you offering make-goods like traditional TV networks do and have done for decades to make up for any audience shortfalls?
Yes, said Klein.
Interesting, I thought again. Not just because the idea of making up inventory in a medium of infinite supply is curiously complex, but because I don’t really hear of YouTube-centric media companies or creators offering viewership guarantees and make-goods (this is separate from inventory and sponsorships sold by YouTube/Google directly). In fact, I reached out to several executives at YouTube-oriented media companies after talking with Klein. None said they offer viewership guarantees or make-goods.
“It is a struggle. Is the view against the organic content? Is it views against targeted paid content? Or is the view against actually consuming the show or a meaningful amount of that?” said one executive at a YouTube-centric media company.
That’s not to claim that Donut Media is actually the only company in the YouTube ecosystem offering TV-style deals. But it’s rare for a company to do so. Which is surprising. Not because YouTube channels are likely to fall short of viewership expectations, but because offering an insurance policy like make-goods would seem like a helpful sales pitch to persuade traditional TV advertisers to move money not just to YouTube but to YouTube channels’ made-for-TV(-screen) programming like episodic series.
“We’re always going to try and get make-goods,” said Hermelinda Fernandez, svp, digital investment at Canvas Worldwide.
The tricky part, though, is what those make-goods should be. Advertisers typically want the make-up inventory to be as similar as possible to the original inventory they paid for. That means an advertiser owed inventory for an under-watched NFL game is unlikely to accept make-goods in the form of a morning news show but may take another live event, such as a game from a different league or an awards show.
The calculus for YouTube make-goods is a bit more complicated. In an ideal scenario, the make-up inventory would be in another episode of the show a brand has sponsored. But YouTube channels can have a wider range of inventory, from other episodes in the series to one-off videos to YouTube Shorts to videos on other platforms.
”The client success team is constantly analyzing on performance and offering proactive optimizations, like to optimize in-campaign. So we’re always proactively making those suggestions. We might do replays on channel, might do increased pre-roll. We want to make sure we’re hitting the brand’s specific objective,” said Klein.
To the extent a brand may accept that other inventory as make-good is up to the individual brand. Which means Donut Media has to have that conversation upfront when laying out the deal and discussing any viewership guarantees. But YouTube is starting to give YouTube channels a new option for handling make-goods.
This year YouTube is rolling out dynamic brand insertions, which enables channels to swap out otherwise baked-in sponsor segments in existing videos. That creates an opportunity for a channel to use the sponsor segment placements in older videos as make-good inventory.
“Any YouTube channel that has real scale is going to have a catalog that that same audience and that same demo is consuming. And I think there’s a lot of inventory that opens up to these type of opportunities,” said Nick Jacklin, president of Shorthand Studios.
What we’ve heard
“Facebook is absolutely slept on in terms of a platform for creators.”
Numbers to know
2.97 million: How many people streamed Netflix’s MLB Opening Day broadcast in the U.S.
What we’ve covered
TikTok’s Khartoon Weiss to exit the platform as its head of global business:
- TikTok’s vp, gm of global business solutions Khartoon Weiss is leaving the company on Friday, April 9, according to an internal memo that was shared with Digiday.
- While TikTok continues to look for her replacement, the ad business leads for the U.S. and Canada, remain as Joshua Bloom and Nik Djukic, respectively.
Read more about TikTok here.
Disney and Mediaocean sound the death knell for the I/O:
- Advertisers can use Mediaocean’s Prisma Direct to buy Disney’s inventory without manual insertion orders or disparate execution tools.
- The technology is built on the same technology that underpins Disney’s self-service ad platform, and the integration also lets buyers access premium inventory, including sponsorships and high-impact placements.
Read more about the Disney-Mediaocean deal here.
OpenAI’s TBPN deal exposes the limits of branded entertainment:
- Last week the AI company acquired TBPN, a daily tech talk show that streams live on YouTube, X and other platforms, in a deal the Financial Times reported in the low hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Brands are building their own branded entertainment studios on the thesis that owned content builds the kinds of audience relationships paid media can’t.
Read more about OpenAI’s TBPN acquisition here.
CNN builds in-house agent infrastructure as it prepares for AI-driven media trading:
- CNN is developing an agentic infrastructure as part of a broader roadmap that will see it begin transacting media by the first quarter of 2027.
- In Q3, it plans to test one or two properties to see how they’re interpreted by LLMs, before turning in Q4 to buyer behavior and whether budgets are being allocated toward agent-to-agent trading experiments.
Read more about CNN’s agentic ad sales here.
How a ‘TikTok doctorate’ made 26-year-old Griffin Johnson a venture capitalist:
- In February 2019, Griffin Johnson was a junior in college, studying nursing and working in a steel factory.
- Since then, Johnson has become a creator and investor, getting in early on the social-first Poppi soda brand, which was acquired by PepsiCo in May 2025 for nearly $2 billion.
Read more about Griffin Johnson’s creator-to-VC journey here.
Meta’s bid to woo creators to Facebook just might work, despite its recent legal woes:
- Earlier this month, Meta announced its Facebook Creator Fast Track, a program aimed at attracting more creators to the platform by offering guaranteed payouts depending on their follower size on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube.
- Digiday spoke with five leaders in the influencer marketing and creator agency space to see if Facebook is a viable option for creators, how it can retain talent, and if Meta’s recent legal woes will change things.
Read more about Meta’s creator push on Facebook here.
What we’re reading
Netflix has introduced VOID, an AI tool for filmmakers to remove or edit the objects in a scene, according to The Register.
Hollywood assistants’ AI anxiety:
Hollywood assistants are using AI for administrative tasks but running up against the technology’s limitations for bespoke work and the risk of automating themselves out of jobs, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
ChatGPT’s parent purchased the tech-centric video podcast in a bid to improve OpenAI’s — and to some extent, generative AI’s — marketing and PR, according to The New York Times.