Facing A.I. Slop and Shifting Algorithms, Brands Bet on Streamers to Stay Real

Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, attends the premiere of Amazon Prime Video's "Beast Games" season 2 at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on January 06, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. " width="970" height="647" data-caption='Brands are rethinking creator partnerships as livestreaming delivers something traditional digital advertising can’t: real-time authenticity and measurable engagement. <span class="media-credit">Photo by Victoria Sirakova/Getty Images</span>'>

Jimmy Donaldson, a North Carolina native known to most of the world as “MrBeast,” represents peak success in the creator economy, having turned his YouTube following into a global media empire. Even with an Amazon Prime series, a thriving CPG brand and a theme park in Saudi Arabia, the mega-creator is still investing deeply in the formats that brought him to fame: YouTube videos and livestreams. 

His latest gambit, a competition among 50 popular livestreamers, culminated in a live finale where viewers influenced the rules of the game. The stream achieved a whopping 1.1 million concurrent viewers, and yet was still only a fraction of the record 9.3 million concurrent viewers held by Spanish streamer Ibai. 

While digital livestreaming has been around for a while, the format is reaching new heights of popularity, driven by a mix of powerful cultural forces—perhaps the biggest one being A.I. When deepfakes and synthetic content are all over the web and in our feeds, the organic, spontaneous nature of livestream content feels true. It feels like something worth being a part of. 

The shift to live is accelerating. Our internal data at Streamlabs shows streaming is growing rapidly on TikTok, a platform popularized by static looping videos, and holding strong on YouTube and Twitch. Recent job openings at YouTube hint at the buildout of its live programming options toward immersive, interactive experiences. 

Brands and creators alike are taking note. Influencers are going live to create real-time event viewing for their audiences. Sports organizations and entertainment companies are tapping streamers like iShowSpeed to host “watch parties” to increase fan engagement. Meanwhile, athletes themselves are breaking into streaming as a new way to build their brand. The space is ripe with opportunity for cultural impact, which translates to tangible marketing returns. 

As more brands incorporate streaming into their creator strategies, they have to look beyond the features and conventions of the platforms themselves and recalibrate their approach to what they’re actually buying: not advertisements, but credibility. 

The authenticity factor 

Not everything on social media is fake. Consumers know what real content looks like, and amid a flood of synthetic content, they’re desperate for it. Per recent research from Clutch, 97 percent say authenticity influences their purchasing decisions.  

“Authenticity” may be a buzzword, but that’s because it’s the antidote. Where brands struggle is finding their own definition of it. As Harvard researchers have observed, authenticity isn’t fixed; it shifts across demographics, content genres and consumer niches, and social algorithms don’t always encourage it. Our social feeds, once designed for sharing our lives among friends, are now populated by hyper-polished influencer content and ads, mixed in with A.I.-generated content that can be mindless at best and malicious at worst. 

For streamers, authenticity is structural. The unifying draw of all live events—be they in-person, on television or streamed to your laptop or mobile phone—is the promise of raw, authentic content. Live content offers moments that can’t be faked, with genuine reactions and interactive chats that build community in real time. 

The flood of A.I.-generated content makes this more urgent. As it gets harder to discern what’s synthetic, and platforms themselves encourage the production of this content, creators with established authenticity become disproportionately valuable. Streaming takes that to the next level, as audiences spend extended time with creators, seeing new sides of them as they react to the unexpected. 

Even so, some companies remain skittish around the format. How do they maintain brand safety and manage their reputation within a format that thrives on spontaneity?

The answer may be to lean in. Skittles, for example, recently collaborated with Twitch streamer PointCrow to introduce the Skittles Gaming Flute, a real instrument-turned-game-controller making for a creative branded gimmick. It captured Skittles’ whimsical branding, but also felt authentic to the streamer, who is known for creative, over-the-top challenges. 

There are also more “controlled” avenues for live content, like livestream shopping, which may be attractive to brands less inclined to take a big swing with a streamer. According to new data from Adobe, 41 percent of content creators have hosted or participated in a live shopping event to sell products. While the rise of live shopping in the West hasn’t been an exact mirror to the cultural phenomenon in China, it’s another way that brands are leveraging creator power and the value of the live format to grow their revenue. 

The streaming advantage amplifies the overall creator advantage: proximity, authenticity and repeat engagement. Harnessing these three elements has become core to how brands are reevaluating their creator strategy. 

A new approach for brands: creators as infrastructure 

Evolving audience demands and a shift in cultural power towards creators have thrown the traditional “spon con” arrangement out the window. Today, partnering with a creator is like having an artist-in-residence for your brand. Long-term commitments and high creative involvement are becoming the standard: where creators once clamored for brands’ attention, they’re now the ones with creative leverage. 

Consider OpenAI’s recent purchase of TBPN. As the leading A.I. company faces controversy and growing consumer skepticism around its flagship technology, it’s leaning on creators to build credibility where it counts. Bringing on TBPN is a strategic choice to connect with audiences through voices they already trust. It’s also a testament to the growth of strategic relationships between brands and creators, where long-term partnerships overtake limited transactions. 

This only works if brands build creators’ needs into their marketing infrastructure. The IAB found that creator ad spend is growing four times faster than other media buys, but budget is only one piece of the puzzle. To let creators truly take the lead, brands need to minimize the administrative red tape and provide a space that’s conducive to creativity and experimentation. It’s time to go beyond the influencer brief and move toward collaborative storytelling. 

Deeper investments in creators can also protect brands against the current instability of digital advertising. Increasing privacy regulations across the globe make it challenging for marketers to rely on traditional consumer behavior tracking methods. Similarly, age restrictions on platforms and information access create challenges for brands targeting under-17 audiences. 

App-tracking transparency (ATT) opt-out further limits the first-party data pool. Consumers have more control over their data, but audience targeting becomes less precise. 

And of course, digital is not untouched by A.I. As Vevo’s VP of Data Science notes, the flood of A.I.-generated content is not only frustrating consumers but damaging the integrity of digital audience data. Backlash to A.I.-generated ads is also pushing brands to verify their authenticity, often by crediting the talent on board. That’s good news for creators, and more evidence of personality as a driver of credibility. 

Given all these complications, brands need avenues with more visible impact, stronger engagement and performance and greater longevity. Creators deliver that by giving brands a direct line to their community, and streamers up the ante. Live viewership stats are concrete and easily benchmarkable, and as brands move away from follower-based metrics, streamers offer a wealth of metrics beyond the broadcast that show engagement, including community clips, bonus social content like Reels and X posts and chat interactions on closed social platforms like Discord. The result is a holistic, less advertorial approach to digital marketing that actually meets consumers where they are. 

Fighting the algorithm

Creators and brands alike face friction from social platforms, which impact discoverability with ever-shifting algorithms and destabilize revenue with inconsistent monetization rules. Add generative A.I. to the mix, and it gets even more complicated. Beyond flooding the algorithm, A.I.-generated content is making it harder for creators to protect their intellectual property. A group of YouTubers recently sued Apple for training their models on unlicensed content, while other creators have had their likenesses stolen to promote products they aren’t being paid to sponsor. 

These limitations haven’t slowed brands’ investments in social content, but they are shifting the role of the platform in the brand-platform-creator relationship. Virality doesn’t hit the way it used to—one breakout post or stream doesn’t guarantee consistent engagement. Users’ feeds are hyper-personalized into homogeneity, which can be great for niche creators, but only if they’re lucky. A new report found it also takes longer for content to go viral, forcing brands to look more at long-term strategies as opposed to simply jumping on the latest trends to be part of a moment. Long-form and serialized content is becoming more attractive, making streamers another increasingly lucrative bet. 

Today’s brands and creators have to be everywhere online, and everywhere looks the same. Platforms have converged on feature sets to the point where exclusivity is nearly irrelevant. This may make it easy to share and multistream across platforms—someone who multi-streams on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram won’t have to navigate a technological learning curve. But platforms aren’t competing for creator exclusivity like they used to, even if their copycat feature innovation suggests otherwise. Big-name creators are less concerned with audience reach than with who helps creators make more money and run a sustainable business.

Brands have to take the same competitive approach. Collaboration is about generating value for both parties, which means making creators real stakeholders and not pay-for-play transactions. It also means honoring their audiences. Creators, especially streamers, have built deep trust within their communities; there is an emotional layer that brands can transform into major ROI, so long as they do it right. When traditional digital channels don’t foster trust the way they used to, creators with real voices and real audiences will cut through the noise.