How Tubi is Winning with Creators, feat. GM & EVP Rich Bloom | Creator Upload

0:00Rich Bloom:Josh, can you believe we have been doing this podcast for almost six years? Lauren, seriously, it only feels like, what, 20, 30? More like 50, am I right? Definitely 50, definitely 50. Well, in anticipation of our sixth anniversary happening this February, we actually want to hear from you, our audience. That is right. We're officially plugging and pushing the Creator Upload Survey. It's here. It's happening. For the first time ever, we are interested in something other than ourselves. in partnership with Deepwater Strategies who put this together for us. Thank you very much. We want to learn about you.

0:35It's truly historic. Please head to bit.ly slash creator upload survey. That's bit.ly slash creator upload survey and tell us all the things.

0:47Rich Bloom:What you want more of me, what you want less of Josh and everything in between. We'll be talking a lot about it. So just go to bit.ly slash creator upload survey and make our lives way easier. Exactly. Thanks for being with us all these years. Now go fill out the survey, bit.ly slash creator upload survey. That's bit.ly slash creator upload survey. Welcome to Creator Upload, your Creator Economy podcast. I'm Lauren Schnipper. And I'm Joshua Cohen. Lauren. Happy almost Thanksgiving. Happy almost Thanksgiving. What are you making this year? So here's the deal. I'm going to my parents' house in Florida and I am cooking everything.

1:22Rich Bloom:And I had wanted to get this turkey pre-made. I don't love making the turkey. But I've done it in LA the last few years. I couldn't get my LA. I technically could have. I was this close to ordering the turkey from LA. And I stopped myself because even I recognized how ridiculous that was. I was like, it probably started on the East Coast to go to the West Coast and come back. I was like, that is even a ridiculous carbon footprint for me. So I was like, fine, I'm going to make the turkey. So my mother goes out and she buys this 25-pound butterball. It's already in the thing. And I like to brine a turkey.

1:53Rich Bloom:And now she's texting me that you can't brine a butterball. because apparently a butterball is pre-brined. I mean, I'm brining the butterball. Please don't make this a Seinfeld episode. This is my life. I know you're trying to make this a Seinfeld episode. Please don't make this a Seinfeld episode. I mean, I'm brining. So I was looking and apparently you can use just, you should just use like half the amount of salt because it's already pre-salted. But like, ew. Like who has, I didn't know that a butterball was pre, I didn't know. Did you know this about a butterball? I'm not engaging with this conversation anymore.

2:21I'm going to tell you what I'm making for Thanksgiving. Wow. Which is cranberry applesauce, which is fantastic.

2:30Rich Bloom:Homemade cranberry sauce is so easy. It's so good. Yeah, but cranberry applesauce is a new twist on the traditional cranberry sauce. Are you putting chunks of apples in it and you're just kind of doing it? Totally. It's from BuzzFeed when Thanksgiving and Hanukkah were on the same time frame. No, my friend still makes the, what did they have? The kugel with like sweet potato kugel. It's so good. The Thanksgiving Yuka recipe list and menu from BuzzFeed might be their best reporting ever. No, I'm telling you, I have a friend that still makes that. Yeah, no, I get it. But why is that? Oh, because the apple.

3:02Rich Bloom:No, apples is Rosh Hashanah. Why is that? That's not really. Apples are kind of Jewish. Okay, they are. Okay. And then what's not kind of Jewish, I might be making some fried turkey wings as well. I've always wanted to do this. I've always wanted. I mean, a fried turkey is something that I'm interested in, but you got to get a whole contraption. You know what I mean? I know, but not for the wings. No, not the wings. You're just doing the wings. Okay. All right. Yeah. I mean, I'm making the whole thing. I mean, I have a whole menu, a whole spread. So I'm excited about it. Are you brining it or not?

3:28Rich Bloom:I'm going to brine. I'm going to brine. You ass. You fucking, you opened that door and I walked right in it. I'm going to, I'm doing, and you know what I think I'm going to do? This is controversial. I think I'm going to spatchcock it. Fascinating. We're excited to hear how that turns out. I am excited. out on the next installment post-Thanksgiving of Creator Upload. I'm going to spatchcock the turkey. You just wait and see. All right. Well, one thing I want to talk about really quickly is there was an article in the New York Times called The Screen That Ate Your Child's Education. And it's like indirectly but directly related to this, but I just found it so fascinating.

4:09Rich Bloom:Basically, it's by Gene M. Twang of the New York Twang, I'm not sure how you say it, in the New York Times. And the whole thing is just fascinating. Basically, it's talking about effectively ed tech companies have convinced educators that like screens are necessary for learning now and it came out of for covid obviously a lot of screens were implemented then and they saw an opportunity evidently if you're looking at this cynically but the the issue is is that um uh standardized test scores of american students had been rising for decades then they began to slide dropping to their lowest point in two decades in 23 and 24 basically it is categorically data proven that screens are not helping these kids at all and like my kids are still in elementary school but you have these screens in um high school and even college and people are not paying attention and schools are not necessarily blocking things like youtube because they want to show videos that are maybe educational youtube so they can't block the site and it's like people are not watching it and it's like i mean obviously everybody's talking about phones in schools and everybody i think kind of agrees that's not a good thing but it turns out like you're on this you're on your screens like i was talking to a friend of mine who is like an eighth grader and she was like yeah they can't have phones at school but they have chromebooks and they all have messaging on their chromebooks so they're messaging each other all day and so it's like and i just think to me the the urgency in this is so critical because of like ai if we don't get these kids to start writing by hand they were they 100 are going to be just like doing their essays off of chat gpt and like how are you going to be able to tell so i almost feel like because of AI, perhaps changes are going to be coming.

5:40Rich Bloom:There's countries like, I think it was Sweden or was it Finland? Don't, don't come at me. Maybe it was Sweden or was it Finland? One of, one of those countries which had gone super, super, super hardcore into tech has actually completely wiped it out and just been like, we've made a mistake. We're taking it all out of the classroom. I don't know. I feel like this is just a call to action and just kind of terrifying if you read the data. And so I just wanted to bring it up because - That's a super compelling argument. my kids take Chromebooks to school and then they bring them home they have to charge them at home or else they get in trouble if they don't charge them at home they'll have a few like uncharged days sure and then some some not great stuff happens but so when they are doing their work at home they'll do their homework on the Chromebook and they'll submit it and if left to their own devices I'm not saying all the time but some of the time they then wander into like a pirated version of Roblox that they can access through Google Chrome wouldn't you I mean, if you were a kid, of course you would do that.

6:37Rich Bloom:Totally, 100%. So I can definitely see how it's just a distraction mechanism. And regardless of the kind of speed bumps and roadblocks that administrators, parents, and more try to put up, these kids are going to find the littlest things that is going to intrigue them. My 10-year-old has one friend who has a phone and has no apps on the phone. It's just for calling and messaging. But it does have a clock on the phone. Okay. And the clock has a timer. Okay. And so he will look at this timer and they'll try to stop it at a specific time. Yeah. They will get creative with the timer game. They'll just gamify anything.

7:17Rich Bloom:Yeah. Totally. But they're more likely to gamify anything that's on the screen versus things that aren't on the screen. Dude, my kid got in, my third grader got in trouble because he was in math and he was bored. So he went into another app and he was reading. And he got into, he's like loves Bruno Mars. And he found a Bruno Mars biography and he was reading it. Now, this isn't the most egregious thing. he could have done. It's not super inappropriate, but he's not supposed to be doing that in math class. Totally. My same kid was in an English class and then he's really into Galileo. And so then I started reading just like Galileo mathematical computations and then got in trouble for that too.

7:49Rich Bloom:Yeah, totally. No, it's just, it's great. And I just feel like, I feel like we all, the thing about this is I just think the people, these school districts, and don't think she hasn't started writing, you know, I'm sending the emails now. Because it's like they need to they need to like reconfigure that the data is there but it's not helping so let's just like figure this out and i think with ai it is so urgent that this like be addressed yeah that makes sense these kids like these kids are never going to learn how to write a first draft and i think it is so critical and i am uh i don't know it's funny just like you know i just think being close to the world that you know being in the world that we're in i find myself just you know i'm educated about it and i went to a thing the other day and you know talking about you know mental health for kids and i was the only person in the room that had read the anxious generation by jonathan height which talks about how bad phones are a lot of people were on the page but now it's like you think i haven't started a group and we're all mean that's like a it's like of course now she's seen it as an opportunity so anyway i just thought this was very interesting um highly recommend reading this and uh that's all i got on that i don't want to get into a whole podcast episode about this we can take this offline lauren or maybe do a different episode i do think there are some issues with the anxious generation i think there hasn't been enough looked at like parental activities.

9:02So I think, yes, kids are on screens, kids are on phones, on social media, but also parents are on them a lot too when they should be interacting with their kids.

9:11Rich Bloom:A hundred percent. There was a great, I don't know, cartoon on some Instagram that I follow. I don't know what it was. And it was like a six-year-old giving his kid a phone being like, and the caption was like, it was nice interacting with you for the last six years. Well, give them the phone. A hundred percent. No, I think - During those first six years, I'm arguing that the parent was probably on the phone for a lot of that time, too. I'm not denying it. I'm not saying it. I mean, we know you're like addicted. So like it's a problem. I mean, I understand that you're speaking from personal experience.

9:40Rich Bloom:100%. I mean, we're trying. We do. We put the phones away. I try to do a digital Shabbat. I try to like really, really stay off it. And I'm not perfect by any stretch. I get it. But there's this lots of focus on like the kids are not OK. But I think the kids are not OK because lots of parents aren't paying attention. I get it, Joshua. So let's all do better now that we know. Okay, let's all do better. Let's all do better. Let's all do better. Okay, great. Okay, before we get to our big story, we've got Rich Bloom on the podcast today. We're doing an interview with him, who is the EVP and GM at Tubi for the Creator Program, and he works on business development overall, and they are making some moves at Tubi.

10:13Rich Bloom:And so they've worked incredibly fast, all things considered. I think he started in like April or something like that, and they have like a ton of Creator content coming out with all sorts of deals. So really excited for everybody to hear that interview. This wonderful installment of Creator Upload is brought to you by Viral Nation. Viral Nation is a leading global social media marketing and creator agency with a social-first approach, powered by its brand-safe technology. Viral Nation powers global growth for brands like Elf Cosmetics, Audible, A24, MGM Resorts International, Microsoft Meta, Tencent, Zillow, and Walmart, redefining how brands engage and thrive in an ever-evolving digital world.

10:52Take your content to new heights with Viral Nation.

11:22Rich Bloom:broader media industry and nearly half of ad spenders say that creators are now a must-buy channel ranking just behind social media and paid search. Josh, what do you think about this? Lauren, I love these reports because this just puts some numbers and some validation into what we all and everybody in this industry and everybody who's probably listening to this podcast is seeing, hearing, and feeling in this ecosystem. Some other big takeaways and notes here are in that$37 billion in 2025 US creator ad spend. That's composed of direct partnerships. So brands paying creators directly. Paid amplification, so then that's brands boosting creator content on platform.

11:58And intentional ad adjacencies to creator content. So putting ads in and around creator programming. Brands are investing across all four spend types, direct amplification, on and off social, and these adjacencies. In retail, they're spending $12.3 billion. In CPG brands, they're spending$5.5 billion. Those are the categories that led the most investments. And also creator marketing is now viewed as a quote, must buy and quote, channel by nearly half 48 % of brands just behind social media and paid search. This is what David Cohen, CEO of IAB said, along with the report, quote, leveraging the creator economy to connect with audiences is no longer experimental for marketers.

12:42It's essential. The significant growth we're seeing reflects a deepening commitment from brands to invest in creator driven strategies. However, with that maturity comes a need for clear standards, better measurement, and tools to navigate an incredibly fragmented ecosystem. I think just you and I have been in this for a while, seeing the evolution of this type of creator marketing go from this like cute experimental thing that happened very sporadically to now something that's always on for lots of brands is nothing short of amazing. And during previous ad downturns, you would see creator economy companies and specifically creator marketing companies kind of freak out because they were the first line item to get cut in the marketing budgets.

13:25Now in more recent ad downtrends or pullbacks, they're not anymore. And I think that just shows along with reports like this, the now cemented kind of state that creator marketing has in the general marketing ecosystem. And I mean, it only gets bigger, right? Nobody thinks this is going to decrease in the upcoming years. As other traditional marketing platforms lose the eyeballs that they once had and increase in costs, this becomes much more lucrative and palatable for all these brands that are in the space.

14:04Rich Bloom:Yeah, well, I think the question I have here that I don't think that this sort of report really sort of addresses is like, how many of these sort of brand deals are like bigger ongoing campaigns versus one-offs? because I still think that that's the big transition that we're hopefully going to see, you know, soon and happening is that like, it's not just like come and do one thing and then go to the next. It's like creating holistic relationships with these creators and like really like, you know, use, you know, and really like working with them for extended period of time, which will get you more bang for your buck, you know, as opposed to thinking about just like dollar for dollar, how does this, you know, spend translate into an ROI, whereas it's more holistic.

14:40Rich Bloom:And I think that these kinds of reports are really going to like help lead to that. Yeah. And I think you bring up some of the pain points that marketers are seeing in this ecosystem. So the IB report said that the top goals for brands and marketers was brand awareness of 43%, reach of 41%, brand reputation at 35%, and online sales at 32%. However, ROI, return on investment, is the leading KPI, key performance indicator for 40 % of the brands that were included in the survey. That shows this tension between the building brand awareness and the having to attribute all of these marketing dollars to actual sales.

15:27And I think when there's more technology that allows people to attribute creator marketing more directly to sales in a brand awareness capacity, it's easy if you're just doing performance marketing and you have a link. But there's also a lot that gets lost in the attribution, regardless of the type of marketing it is. So as influencer marketing agencies and people in this ecosystem can prove the ROI more and attribute, figure out different ways to attribute more of these sales to creators, I think that's going to unlock just insurmountable amounts of more budget.

16:10Rich Bloom:Yeah, no, I'm sure. And these findings are also not inconsistent with the report we put out of Gospel Stats for the YouTube 2025 Sponsorship Landscape Report, which you can download at reports.gospelstats.com, which showed a 54 % increase year over year in the first half of 2025 of the quantity of sponsored videos on YouTube. I mean, just more brands are getting interested in this space every day because they have to. And this is where the future is. Stoked to see reports like this that put some metrics behind it. Okay, great. All right. Let's get to our interview with Rich Bloom from Tubi. Rich Bloom, EVP and GM at Tubi Creator Programs and Business Development.

16:50Rich Bloom:Welcome to Creator Upload. Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of the podcast. I'm excited to be here. Good thing. We only have fans on. So, so excited to hear that. So, we want to dive right in. Tubi is doing so much with creators and fast. So, you launched your sort of creator initiatives, I think back in June, but now you've got over 10 ,000 different episodes from creators from over 100 creators. So talk to me about what the pitch is to creators today. Sure. Can I start by just giving a quick Tubi overview? I would love that. I would love that. Plays into our approach. So Tubi's been around for about 10 years.

17:25We are the second biggest AVOD platform after YouTube by most measures. Wow. We have over 100 million monthly active users. We stream over a billion hours a month. And we account for over 2 % of TV viewing in the US across streaming cable broadcasts. So we have really significant scale. And then our audience skews younger. Over half of our audience are millennial and Gen Z. That's the dream.

17:56Rich Bloom:Yeah. That is the dream. And then a big part of our secret sauce is the breadth and depth of our library. So we have a library of about 300 ,000 movies and TV shows, which is actually the biggest library of any streaming service. And then what we're really good at is taking that huge library that's really diverse and then surfacing the right content to the right viewer. And while a lot of services are hit driven, we really talk about creating rabbit holes of fandom. And we're taking this huge library we have that's high quality and diverse and using our technology to create all these different rabbit holes that are like really eclectic and drive a lot of enthusiasm.

18:41So when we and one last thing about us is we're 95 percent video on demand, only about five percent linear. And that's really by design. We started as an on demand platform. It creates an environment where it's really lean forward and intentional in what viewers are watching.

19:00Rich Bloom:Yeah. So all that makes the platform really appealing to advertisers. And it also creates a lot of interesting opportunities for creators. So we launched the creator program after seeing a lot of signals from our audience, which obviously being younger is more in tune with the creator economy. We had a couple of things pop last year. So we, the first thing was our most popular original of all time is this movie Sideline, which was an adaptation of a Wattpad novel starring Noah Beck, who you know, who's a big TikTok star. he's now like transition into acting with that movie that movie was the most successful original of all time by almost every measure for us you guys obviously sought out to create like cast a creator as i'm assuming some sort of experiment because you guys were seeing the signals on the platform you were seeing signals you know we were hearing from our audience that they wanted more original ip and that the number one place to get it was creators um and then with that movie we saw there was this built-in audience from the Wattpad fans and then this huge built-in audience that us and Noah did an amazing job of activating to drive to the platform.

20:12And then we had a program called Studios with Issa Rae last year also where we had 2 ,000 creators apply to get a show greenlit and be the showrunner for it. And we had four of those go forward that were through a combination of fan voting and to be selection. And so all of this led to us saying there there's a big opportunity here. And I joined in April and we launched this program in June. And the idea behind it is we want to we really want to take the approach that's worked for to be of having this creating rabbit holes and having breadth of library.

20:50Rich Bloom:so like when you say rabbit holes just to be clear i mean you're you're i mean we all know what like going out rabbit hole sort of means but like can you just what does that mean what does that mean to tubi like when you say that yeah so so it means where we're we're basically creating when we talk about rabbit holes of fandom so an example with creators could be let's say in horror and paranormal a viewer comes in to watch a video from watcher who is one of our launch partners then they watch a to be original and then they watched a licensed movie that we have and we're we're really good at just like presenting the right content that so it's like verticalized you're going deep on a vertical basically for depending on verticals sub verticals but it's also things with our technology that aren't necessarily obvious of that i guess i mean Just to be, I mean, just because I'm super interesting.

21:43Rich Bloom:I mean, I would argue most streaming platform, I mean, doesn't Netflix do this? I mean, not to bring up a competitor, you know what I mean? But like, I guess, what is the differentiator, if I may? I would say the differentiator for us is the scale and diversity of our library. So it is much bigger than other streaming platforms, libraries. and then our technology is really strong at surfacing the right content to the right viewer. Okay. And then quickly, I want to talk a little bit about, you mentioned Studios, to be for creators as effectively, as I understand it, licensing and distribution. And then you've got development deals.

22:19Rich Bloom:You did a deal with Heartbeat, Kevin Hart, some sort of company. So is that kind of the potential trajectory? I don't know if Studios is still going on. Could you start from a Studios creator and end up with a development deal? How are you sort of seeing the life cycle if there is one? Yeah, so I would say Studios basically was the predecessor to us launching Tubi for Creators. Got it. And I realize I never answered your original question of what's our value proposition for This is your show, Rich. I mean, don't... It's definitely not my show. Don't worry about it. So the initial value proposition and when we launched it was take your existing content that you're already creating and distributing to other places, a combination of your catalog content and new content you're already making and distributed to Tubi.

23:03And we're focused on long form content that's generally about 15 minutes or longer with high production value and good storytelling across a variety of verticals. And so the value proposition for creators out of the gate and really continuing for non-exclusive content is we have this low friction way for you to expand your audience. About 32 % of Tubi's audience is not on YouTube.

23:28Rich Bloom:and that's a critical i think people let's double click on that for a minute that's that's a that's a big that's 32 is a lot so that you're that's that's a big um sort of upsell if you will like um attractive sort of piece of putting your content on on tubi that makes a lot of sense considering the scale of youtube that that is really significant yes and then it's a way to make incremental revenue and that's really resonated with creators and we've been able to onboard a lot of creators with that value proposition. And then for us, the value proposition to our viewers was really, we want to get this content on the platform, see how it performs.

24:04And what we're seeing, and that's where I was talking about the watcher example, we're seeing again and again that viewers are watching this really interesting combination of creator content and traditional content. And viewers who start with creator content actually have better retention on Tubi than our typical viewers. They skew even younger than our already pretty young audience. And then the last thing that's been really interesting is they start watching a majority of creator content. And over time, they're watching a mix of creator content, Hollywood movies and Hollywood TV series, which is frankly exactly what we wanted to see.

24:42Rich Bloom:I mean, this is the big thing I'm saying to a lot of folks these days is like, guess what? It's not traditional media. It's all just media. And you've got to play in all of the buckets of media as you always did. You always needed to, but people have finally like woken up that like, this is a big piece of media to your point, which I think is really interesting. Yeah. And it's, I think to viewers, especially younger viewers, we're looking at that distinction because we're launching this program and it's what we're focused on for younger people. The distinction is becoming less and less meaningful.