🔴 5 ways creators are winning on YouTube right now

How are the most intentional creators using YouTube right now?

Today, I map out how five recent Spotlight guests have built their businesses on the platform.

— Natalia Pérez-González

Ashley Alexander has already found huge success on YouTube, but starting a matcha business was nothing like uploading viral content.

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By Natalia Pérez-González

Ask five creators what YouTube is, and you’ll get five different answers — all correct.

The platform is, by most measures, the most dominant media company in the world — generating $60 billion in total revenue in 2025 alone (a figure that has more than doubled over three years). It reaches nearly three billion monthly users, which is more than half of everyone on the internet, and has paid out over $100 billion to creators since 2021.

Over the past year, we've spoken to several creators who leverage YouTube in fundamentally distinct ways:

They're all using the same platform for completely different reasons, with different success criteria and different relationships to the algorithm.

Hayley Rose spent a decade at Google and YouTube, and the last three of those years on the Top Creator Acquisitions Team — recruiting large TikTokers and podcasters onto the platform and growing them from zero subscribers.

At the time we spoke in May 2025, her work had impacted somewhere between 100 and 150 billion views.

The Upload Club — her growth consultancy that helps YouTubers, podcasters, and brands sharpen their content strategies and grow their audiences and revenue — drives around 200 million views per month across her client portfolio.

She emphasized that editorial and production strategy must be audience-first rather than algorithm-driven.

The takeaway: You can’t reach new viewers without first satisfying existing ones, which means your upload strategy should be built around your most loyal subscribers first, the algorithm second, and new viewers a distant third. Everything in Hayley's five-step upload system is a downstream of this. The "algorithm changed again" discourse, in her view, is a distraction from the real work: understanding what humans actually want to watch.

Watch below or listen on your preferred podcast platform.

In our conversation, we covered:

Kevin Jon got his start analyzing supply chains and investment deals, and he brings those same instincts to YouTube: before building anything, he wants to know exactly how much demand exists for a topic and how little of it is being met. That gap is his entry point.

His agency, Channel Craft, builds YouTube channels for clients. He also builds and sells them for his own portfolio — including a motorcycle gang channel whose first video got half a million views and whose third got a million.

Kevin’s tell for a promising opportunity: a channel that's only three months old but whose last four videos averaged 100,000 views. "That tells us this channel is probably doing something extremely right and this niche is probably massively undersaturated,” he told us. He runs supply-demand analyses of the YouTube space, tracking the relationship between a channel's age, subscriber count, and view velocity.

Watch below or listen on your preferred podcast platform.

In our conversation, we covered:

Sydney Graham makes a living selling sewing patterns to her audience of over 600,000 social media followers, and YouTube is her top-of-funnel.

She started with 16,000 subscribers and no particular strategy — just a product and an intuition for which videos would serve both her audience and her business. Over the course of a year, four videos drove her channel from 16,000 to 118,000 subscribers. Her pattern sales now account for 85% of her income.

The takeaway: Before optimizing for views or subscribers, ask whether your videos are earning their place in your business. For Sydney, a video with 10,000 views that reliably converts to pattern sales is worth more than one with 200,000 views that converts no one.

Watch below or listen on your preferred podcast platform.

In our conversation, we covered:

Jonathan Hunt runs HubSpot Media; at the time of our interview, they owned 10 YouTube channels, 4 to 5 newsletters, and 5 podcasts. They’ve acquired new properties since.

YouTube is their single biggest content and monetization investment.

For HubSpot, YouTube is valuable because it accumulates. A video published two years ago can still be surfaced today, still drive someone into a product funnel, still justify its production cost. They’re developing what Jonathan calls "high-quality, high-intent audiences" — professionals with a specific problem who find a video while searching, watch it, click through to a resource, and hand over contact information.

The video is the top of a B2B funnel where a single converted customer might be worth tens of thousands of dollars in lifetime value.

The takeaway: Platforms optimized for velocity reward the newest post. YouTube rewards the most useful one. If you're building something that should last, that's the more valuable property.

Watch below or listen on your preferred podcast platform.

In our conversation, we covered:

Macy Gilliam, our most recent Spotlight guest, makes short documentaries for Morning Brew: A day training as a United Airlines flight attendant; a magic show at a New York comedy venue after a month of practice; a drive through Bosnia with a Google Street View contractor.

Eight episodes a year, 3.85 million views in the show's first year.

The models she’s watching: Owen Riser’s Listers — a two-hour documentary on competitive birdwatching released free on YouTube after a year of lo-fi daily Instagram reels built the audience. And Nicholas Bruckman, who’s built a model where brands fund documentaries with zero editorial control; the filmmaker follows the story, the brand gets proximity to serious work, and the film lives on YouTube.

The takeaway: YouTube is the final publication platform for serious long-form work, not a promotional vehicle for content that lives elsewhere.

Watch below or listen on your preferred podcast platform.

In our conversation, we covered:

Creator Spotlight is nominated for two Webby awards — Best Writing and Entertainment & Culture Website. We're in the running but not winning yet, and the audience choice award is entirely down to whose audience shows up in support.

Will you help us win? It takes 10 seconds.

Thank you. We write for your readership; your support here means everything.

— Francis Zierer & Natalia Pérez-González