It’s Friday and OpenAI is facing one of the great challenges of parenting. According to the ChatGPT parent company, disciplining chatbots for lying only teaches them to be sneakier about it.

MAKING CONNECTIONS

YouTube is introducing influencer marketers to the new-and-improved BrandConnect

The hub: It’s been nearly a decade since YouTube acquired the influencer marketing hub BrandConnect (originally known as FameBit). In that time, the brand/creator matchmaking platform has endured a series of sweeping changes.

When BrandConnect adopted its current name in 2020, it offered both self-service and full-service suites. The latter option accounted for the bulk of BrandConnect sales, leading YouTube to sunset the self-service option. But shifting economic winds soon brought changes: in 2023, amid Google layoffs that affected YouTube’s influencer marketing team, full-service matchmaking began to look a bit resource-intensive. The favored BrandConnect strategy pivoted back toward self-service partnerships.

Two years later, YouTube is doubling down on that approach with the debut of tools designed to streamline influencer marketing partnerships for both creators and brands.

The updates: The Alphabet-owned platform announced those updates on its Ads & Commerce blog. According to that post, a new central BrandConnect hub lets advertisers manage all their creator partnerships, while existing assets can now be linked to Google Ads accounts. The new-and-improved BrandConnect can also be integrated into Google Ads to provide measurement and other analytics.

YouTube is supporting its ongoing BrandConnect push with a wave of new hires. Through job postings on LinkedIn, YouTube is hunting for Product Managers to add to the BrandConnect team. Positions related to influencer marketing are also opening up on the Shorts side of YouTube, where the Google-affiliated platform has introduced sponsored content by incorporating BrandConnect partnerships.

In fact, multiformat influencer campaigns seem to be a priority for YouTube. As of now, the official BrandConnect website redirects to a landing page that explains Shorts integration.

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• The co-founder of payments app Venmo is launching JellyJelly, a new platform that encourages users to upload unedited videos and supports them through a memecoin. (Tubefilter)
  

• After months of requests from its community, Threads is at last making it possible for users to set their “following” feed—or any other custom feed—as the default. (The Verge)
  
  

• According to Bluesky employee Emily Liu, the platform has begun funneling links through the platform’s “go” subdomain in order to “send referral / link click traffic accurately to publishers.” (Emily Liu via Bluesky)
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• TikTok says it will introduce Amber Alerts to U.S. users’ For You feeds in order to “raise awareness of missing children and leverage the power of the US TikTok community to help reunite them with their families.” (TikTok)

MONEY MOVES

Good Good just got $45 million to grow its YouTube golf empire

The company: Golf is having a moment on YouTube—and now, one of its most prominent channels has scored a $45 million funding round with over 50 investors.

That channel, Good Good, has nearly 2 million subscribers and gets around 10 million views a month. The hub’s creators started making videos in 2020, after founders Garrett Clark and Matt Kendrick met at a golf tournament. Over the past five years, Good Good Golf—aka the media/lifestyle brand behind the channel—has used its YouTube foundations to grow into a multipronged business.

By 2021, it had expanded to apparel and secured a retail partnership with Dick’s Sporting Goods. Since then, Good Good Golf has partnered with Topgolf Callaway Brands Corp. on an official line of golf balls, putters, and gloves and broken into live sports by collaborating with NBC Sports, the GOLF Channel, and other outlets on events like the 2024 Good Good Desert Open.

The funding: Good Good Golf’s latest triumph comes in the form of a major cash injection. The media/lifestyle brand raised $45 million in a new round led by Creator Sports Capital, which was co-founded by former YouTube exec Benjamin Grubbs. Top investors in that round include Peyton Manning‘s Omaha Productions, Manhattan West Private Equity, and Sunflower Bank.

According to Bloomberg, Good Good Golf plans to use its new funds to build a sales team that will bring its products to more stores and golf courses outside the U.S. It also wants to hire people to translate its YouTube content into other languages, and establish brand deals with non-U.S. creators. The brand might be eyeing podcast development, too—after all, it is a media company in the year 2025.

GAME ON

Roblox is cozying up to creators with promises that it’ll recommend their games

The context: In the creator economy, discoverability is key. YouTube and TikTok might attract a lot of flak for their recommendation algorithms, but without them, creators would struggle to reach non-followers—a problem that has consistently frustrated Twitch streamers.

Enter Roblox. The hub pays out hundreds of millions to game developers each year—but recently, it’s been accused of choking studios’ earnings by not introducing them to potential brands and sponsors. To reassure its community, Roblox has published a post confirming that its “focus for 2025 is to refine and expand our discovery systems” to better help devs reach its ~380 million monthly active users.

The next steps: Roblox’s plans can be separated into two categories: ongoing improvements and upcoming launches. In terms of improvements, the platforms intends to…

1. Update its Home page—where it says 90% of game traffic begins—by introducing new content shelves and expanding existing ones.
   
   

2. Fine-tune its recommendation algorithm by optimizing “for long-term user retention by prioritizing organic recommendations.” Roblox also plans to update devs’ backend analytics to show them how the algorithm functions and how to optimize for it.
   
   

3. Improve search and genre-specific discovery by “blending results” across categories like games, avatars, people, and forums and introducing a “Recently Visited” shelf where players can see their last-played games.
   
   

4. Reduce the visibility of low-quality content “such as experiences with misleading titles or thumbnails or content that violates community standards.”

On the launch side of things, Roblox will introduce a friend referral system, a feature that allows players to submit feedback to devs, and a “major upgrade” to devs’ ad manager system.

That last change is a big one. If Roblox can help devs increase revenue by providing “more engaging ads, objective-focused setup, smarter tools, and more intuitive reporting,” its efforts could go a long way towards appeasing its creator community.

WATCH THIS 📺

Promotion for A Minecraft Movie has been mostly missing creators—until now

The promo tour: As A Minecraft Movie approaches its April 4 premiere date, distributor Warner Bros. has enacted a wide-reaching marketing campaign ranging from a limited-time McDonald’s menu to a partnership with cosmetics brand Nyx. But despite that flurry of activity, creators have been largely absent from the film’s promo tour. In fact, one of the only influencer partnerships Warner Bros. has publicized is a cameo from streamer Valkyrae. That is, until now.

The creator collab: With just two weeks to go until A Minecraft Movie‘s premiere, actor Jack Black teamed up with Twitch star Quackity (whose Minecraft gameplay has earned him 6.4 million followers) for a collab that went live on March 19. Black (who leads Warner Bros.’ upcoming film) prepared for the team-up by playing more than 100 hours of Minecraft on set.

Check out the full video here to see if all that practice paid off.

Creator economy marketing starts here. Get in touch to advertise with Tubefilter.

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Today's newsletter is from: James Hale, Emily Burton, Sam Gutelle, and Josh Cohen. Drew Baldwin helped edit, too. It's a team effort.