YouTube starting to play hardball to keep Netflix from poaching its posters

This is per recent reporting in Bloomberg, which says that YouTube is going both carrot and stick when it comes to trying to fend off Netflix’s interest in its stars. The carrot, unsurprisingly, is big barrels of That Google Money, as the company is reportedly pursuing new exclusivity deals worth “millions” with some of its most high-profile creators in order to keep them in the fold. No names have been released, or deals finalized, but YouTube is reportedly anxious to either throw direct funding or big-money advertising partnerships at creators willing to resist the siren song of Sarandos.

As for the stick: Per Quartz, YouTube has also been letting its creators know that while they are, of course, allowed to post videos in multiple places at once, doing so on behalf of Netflix will likely move them out of consideration for YouTube marketing pushes, events, and, of course, those same brand partnerships, potentially costing the video makers in question large quantities of cash. Which is a fun reminder that, for all that tech folks like to talk about being disrupters, breaking the old models of making entertainment, they’re just as happy to fall into a bunker-ready “us or them” mentality as any old-school studio boss.