YouTube recently announced that it’s changing how it counts views on the platform, ending the 30-second engaged-view threshold in favor of a simpler start-of-play count. For Alessandra De Benedetti, VP of Marketing at Recurrent Ventures, the change reveals that brands were already optimizing creator campaigns on the wrong number.

“Visibility is not influence,” she says.

At New York-based Recurrent Ventures, Alessandra leads teams across brand partnerships, audience development, communications, and branded content, requiring her to think simultaneously about communities that came of age reading print and audiences that congregate on Reddit. 

Before joining Recurrent nearly five years ago, Alessandra co-founded Wallplay, a platform that turned vacant NYC storefronts into cultural spaces, producing activations for brands including TribecaX and Complex. At Recurrent, that grounding in engagement-focused work shapes how she approaches properties like Donut Media, whose audience spans YouTube, Reddit, merchandise, and live events, and Outdoor Life, whose editorial franchises serve readers who define themselves by bow hunting, turkey hunting, or fishing. 

The company has narrowed its portfolio in recent years; its remaining brands are highly community-driven, Alessandra says, while engagement is moving upward industry-wide, reinforcing the framework she argues brands should adopt.

Clicks Were Always a Proxy, Not a Signal

The click, Alessandra argues, was a legacy artifact of the dominant model for digital publishing: drive traffic back to the website, collect the ad impression. That logic is losing its explanatory power on both sides of the ledger.

“Most email newsletters used to be a digest,” she says. “The purpose of that was to send a click back to the website.” At Recurrent, newsletters that deliver full content in-read, rather than prompting a redirect, have produced higher engagement.

The YouTube dynamic runs the same way. Recurrent tracks engaged views, average view duration, and the share of Donut Media’s audience watching on a television screen, a signal for lean-back, intentional viewing rather than incidental scrolling. The view count change inflates raw numbers across the platform and makes the case for switching to these alternatives more urgent. “Bringing the wrong success metric to the wrong format,” Alessandra says, is one of the most expensive mistakes a brand can make. 

She notes that a 45-minute serialized episode will produce a low click-through rate by design; judging it on that basis means concluding it failed when it may have been a clear success.

Community Means Something Different Depending on the Brand

Community at Recurrent takes two distinct forms, each with its own operational logic, depending on whether a brand was built on YouTube or grew out of print.

Donut Media is YouTube-native. Its community is a fandom: an active Reddit presence, a YouTube community page, merchandise sold through major retailers, and live events that draw its most committed audience members. “All of those things make up Donut’s addressable community,” Alessandra says.

Outdoor Life operates differently. “For a brand like Outdoor Life, the community might be served through something that looks like an editorial product that spans across email and podcast and editorial,” Alessandra says. Each franchise targets a distinct slice, such as bow hunting, turkey hunting, and fishing. The smallest newsletter in Recurrent’s portfolio, she notes, is the most engaged one across the entire company.

Three Ways Brands Buy Wrong in Creator Marketing

Brand marketers entering creator campaigns consistently make the same three mistakes, Alessandra says.

The first is over-controlling creative. “It’s a very common and very expensive mistake when you’re paying for a voice and then briefing the voice out of it,” she says. “At that point, why don’t you just hire an actor for the POV?” Creative freedom is not a concession. It is the mechanism.

The second is treating creator partnerships as one-time media buys. “The audience research has noticed that fans reward longevity, long-term partnerships,” Alessandra says, adding that a single placement cannot replicate what sustained presence builds with an audience.

The third is chasing recognizability over fit. The YouTube view count change makes this worse by inflating top-line numbers across the platform. “It really goes back to that idea that you should be chasing fitness rather than visibility or recognizability,” she says. 

Alessandra notes that brands that anchor decisions on the largest follower count or the highest raw view number are buying the same wrong proxy in a different form.

Personality Is the Structural Defense Against AI

The category of content most vulnerable to AI displacement, according to Alessandra, is also the one publishers relied on most heavily for years: evergreen, service-oriented material that answers a repeatable question in a standard way.

“Publishers are already moving away from content that Gen AI can replicate,” Alessandra says. What remains defensible, she continues, is original reporting, contextual analysis, and content built around a specific human voice that an audience has formed a relationship with. “You can’t synthesize a person that your audience has a relationship with,” she says. “Personality is really the defense against AI in a sense.”

Every publisher, she notes, is effectively entering a talent business, developing or acquiring personalities that audiences recognize and return to. Donut Media’s series developed for Tubi is one expression of that strategy: a YouTube-native brand taking its voice into a streaming context. The conversations Alessandra found most substantive at Cannes Lions this year were with Tubi’s team, in part because the network is leaning into a creator mindset at the programming level.

Publishers and Creators Are Converging Toward the Same Model

The boundary between a publisher and a creator, Alessandra argues, is becoming a legal formality rather than a meaningful category distinction.

“Publishers are acting more like talent managers,” she says. “Creators are starting to learn how to build an operational infrastructure that publishers have. And within a few years the distinction might only be a legal one. Who owns the IP, you know.”

A talent war is already underway, she says, with legacy media brands moving to sign or acquire creators as the industry’s center of gravity shifts. For brands evaluating the market, Alessandra notes that formats or platforms matter less than whether the underlying audience relationship is real. “You’re going to be seeing more creators getting snatched up by legacy media brands,” she says.

The Formats Brands Are Systematically Underpricing

Long-form video on a television screen, a podcast consumed over an hour, a live event attended in person: Alessandra finds all of them “difficult to attribute” and undervalued in media planning as a result.

For brands willing to shift budget from one-off placements into longer, narrower partnerships, that imbalance represents a market correction that has not yet happened.

Events occupy a specific position in her thinking. Recurrent has seen strong demand for in-person audience experiences, and Alessandra describes event attendees as the most engaged segment the company serves. “Getting people together in a space,” she says, “those are your most engaged audience. And those are people you definitely want to be serving.”

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