PubMatic launched Creator Marketplace in June 2026, a programmatic connected television auction built for independent creator publishers, with MeatEater, the outdoor lifestyle media brand founded by author and TV host Steven Rinella, as its inaugural partner. For Nicole Scaglione, PubMatic’s Global VP of CTV/OTT and Online Video, the launch reflects less a correction to something broken than a recognition of what’s possible. “I see it as an awakening within the Creator Economy,” she says. “We could actually be doing more, connecting with more audiences.” 

The Creator Economy is estimated to exceed $250 billion globally, yet independent creator publishers have largely been excluded from the programmatic infrastructure that routes most digital ad spend. Creator Marketplace is designed to change that, connecting independent creator content to programmatic and agentic buyers for the first time at scale. Holmes Media’s “Boost” product connects creator publishers to the marketplace, while FreeWheel serves as its ad server.

PubMatic, founded in 2006 and based in Redwood City, California, serves publishers, buyers, and data partners across the open internet. Nicole joined the company in 2021 to build its CTV practice from scratch, drawing on a career that ran from digital media planning at Starcom MediaVest to supply-side platform work at Telaria, a CTV-focused SSP, then Hulu and Disney. An IAB Video Board member and regular speaker at Advertising Week New York and the Future of TV Advertising London, she brings a view shaped by both sides of the transactions Creator Marketplace is designed to facilitate.

From Social Platform to Connected Television

The argument behind Creator Marketplace is that creators have built audiences whose loyalty rivals traditional premium publishers, but without the monetization infrastructure those publishers use as a matter of course. Direct sponsorships and platform revenue-sharing have been the primary paths, while access to the broader advertising marketplace has remained limited.

Creator Marketplace opens that access. Nicole describes what it means plainly: a creator who built an audience on YouTube can now have content available across the CTV devices their viewers already use, including Samsung, LG, and Vizio smart televisions, free ad-supported platforms like Pluto and Tubi, and access points like the Sony PlayStation 5. “It’s giving a viewer the opportunity to find that creator that they identify with, that they listen to,” she says, “and find them through the device or the platform that they choose. Doesn’t have to be the walled gardens.”

Creators aren’t being asked to leave YouTube. “It’s an expansion of more outlets, more touch points with an audience,” Nicole notes.

What Gets Creator Inventory Valued on an Open Auction

PubMatic has applied no genre requirements to the marketplace. What matters to buyers is more fundamental. “It has to be what viewers want,” Nicole says. “Start with the viewer.” From there, the criteria that drive valuation are brand safety, audience quality, and data signals that automated systems can read and bid against.

Creator inventory is priced through the same auction dynamics as any other publisher supply. Every piece of supply is vetted by PubMatic’s inventory quality team before entering the platform. On the demand side, two tools connect buyers to that inventory: “AgenticOS,” which enables AI-driven campaign planning and activation, and “Activate,” a direct connection layer to curated creator supply.

MeatEater and the Model Creator Publisher

The choice of MeatEater as the inaugural partner reflects what PubMatic is looking to attract: creator-led organizations that have made the leap from social channel to full independent media company. Rinella’s company employs 12 full-time content creators with in-house video and audio production capabilities. Its audience spans more than 7 million social followers and over 2 million YouTube subscribers. According to PubMatic, 32% of that audience reports making a purchase based on a MeatEater creator recommendation.

Brands in automotive, outdoor and sporting goods, consumer packaged goods, and travel categories are already purchasing MeatEater’s CTV inventory through the marketplace, which Nicole sees as a signal of early advertiser demand across categories with strong outdoor lifestyle alignment.

She credits MeatEater’s media sophistication as the deciding factor. “The more I got to know MeatEater, I realized just how much passion is behind their content, how much love for what they do,” she says. “If the viewer sees how much you love what you’re doing, that is so contagious.” Their willingness to embrace automated advertising reflects the kind of readiness she expects to define the marketplace’s early adopters. “They were savvy enough to be working with partners who said, ‘Let’s get you plugged into programmatic.’ They were sort of ready for it.”

‘I Am Now TV’: The Funnel Shift Creators Have to Internalize

The most important education Creator Marketplace needs to deliver, in Nicole’s view, is not technical. YouTube operates like a website (ads are clickable, conversion signals are fast, and attribution is direct), but CTV is different. Audiences are watching from living room screens. Purchase influence may build across a campaign and convert later, on a different device or in a different context.

“I am now TV,” Nicole says, describing the identity shift creators need to make when they bring content to these platforms. “That means I need to be thinking differently, pricing differently, and my expectations need to be different about how my content is being consumed and how my content will deliver an outcome to a buyer.”

The failure mode she wants to prevent is creators measuring CTV performance against YouTube benchmarks and concluding the channel is not working. That correction, she argues, is as much PubMatic’s responsibility to deliver as the infrastructure itself.

Agentic Demand and What Year One Realistically Looks Like

PubMatic’s launch timing aligns with a shift in buyer behavior. According to IAB research, two in three digital video buyers are actively using or planning agentic AI campaigns in 2026. Nicole, who draws on earlier agency-side experience, sees agentic advertising as solving real operational problems rather than cycling through another buzzword phase. The clearest value is workflow compression. “You eliminate that workflow constraint on the front side,” she says. “You’re starting to deliver a lot more value to publishers.”

For Creator Marketplace, the first year, according to Nicole, is a period of learning: finding new viewers on CTV devices, understanding how a different class of buyer evaluates supply, and building the signal density that allows the auction to price inventory accurately. “Content creators can expect to learn a lot and make sure they are listening to the market,” she says.

Additional creator publishers across verticals are expected to join the marketplace in the coming months. The longer vision is a marketplace where creator supply competes for programmatic demand on equal footing with traditional digital publishers, and where loyal audiences built inside walled gardens become accessible at scale across the open internet. 

“We’re helping bring new customers to creators and bringing new supply to engaged audiences and to buyers,” Nicole says. “That is literally a new marketplace, delivering more access for buyers, more access for viewers, and new opportunities for monetization.”

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