Hudson Matter, a YouTuber with 2.2 million subscribers, built YouTube channels for mainstream celebrities under a revenue-share arrangement, fronted the production costs, and abandoned the model after finding that talent with no financial stake consistently disengaged when early results were slow. The experience, he says, clarified what YouTube actually requires from the people who build on it seriously.

“An authentic YouTube channel won’t get you more eyeballs than ads,” Hudson says. “But what ads won’t get you is connection. Customers want to buy from people who have a connection with their audience.” 

That argument is the foundation of NextWave Media, which Hudson launched in late 2024 from offices in Los Angeles and New York. The company advises enterprise brands and creators on YouTube strategy through two service lines: building and operating branded channels end to end, and designing creator partnership programs for brands better positioned to integrate into an existing audience than build one.

The brands that come to NextWave typically arrive with a reach-based case for YouTube and a measurement void. They know the platform reaches three billion viewers monthly, and Hudson says it is the top streaming service on television by a significant margin. What most lack is a working theory of what actually drives performance there. “They don’t understand what a retention graph is or how to optimize for it,” he says. “They don’t understand why that matters.”

YouTube’s Most Important Metrics Are the Ones Brands Aren’t Tracking

The platform metric Hudson prioritizes above all others is new viewers who return for more. A second is average views per viewer, available in YouTube Studio’s advanced analytics, which measures how many of a creator’s videos the typical viewer watches per month. 

Together, the two signal whether a channel is building a repeating audience or accumulating one-time clicks. Of the two, returning viewers is the more sensitive signal. It marks the moment a viewer liked something enough to voluntarily seek out more. “My favorite metrics to track are ones that can’t be artificially inflated,” Hudson says.

The distinction matters because optimizing for the wrong signal produces the wrong content strategy. Brands chasing views tend to treat YouTube like paid media: broad, short-cycle, built for impressions rather than repeat visits. Hudson’s frame prioritizes the opposite. The goal is a viewer who comes back, because that is the audience relationship YouTube makes possible, and paid advertising does not, according to Hudson.

Brands Are Still Treating YouTube Like Another Impressions Platform

The tactical failure Hudson consistently sees across brands is reusing content produced for Instagram and TikTok on YouTube Shorts. “The issue with branded content on YouTube as a whole is that they think about it in the same way of here’s how we make content for other social platforms,” he says. 

The problem is not new. Rereading a book by VidSummit founder Derral Eves, Hudson encountered a foreword written by MrBeast expressing puzzlement at why brands still didn’t have YouTube channels. “Which is just hilarious,” Hudson says. “I just thought that was super relevant to obviously what we’re doing.”

One dimension of that failure is in packaging. Hudson’s “70/30” framework holds that 70% of a YouTube video’s success comes from the idea, title, thumbnail, and intro, and only 30% from everything else. He notes that most brands invert that allocation, whereas MrBeast’s production team does not. His team finalizes title and thumbnail before recording begins, refusing to plan a video creatively until those decisions are locked. “They wouldn’t even start to plan a video, like, literally just plan it from a creative standpoint until they had a finished title and thumbnail working,” Hudson says.

The NBA was the subject of a channel breakdown NextWave published on its own YouTube page. Hudson says the analysis identified packaging and optimization changes he believes could multiply the league’s viewership on the platform. “There are a few different things that should be optimized and should be improved that could… 2, 3x their viewership,” he says.

The Celebrity Model Failed Because YouTube Rewards the Committed

Under the original model, NextWave funded celebrity YouTube channels, handled production, and took a percentage of the resulting AdSense revenue. The problem was structural. Celebrities who weren’t contributing capital had little incentive to stay engaged when early videos underperformed, and YouTube doesn’t produce results on a short timeline. 

“YouTube takes time. And so you’re not going to be printing money the first month or second month of uploading,” Hudson says. “But with the mainstream world, people kind of forget about that.”

Enterprise brands operate under different priorities, which is what makes them the cleaner fit. They aren’t measuring success through AdSense income. “The benefit that they would get from YouTube stretches beyond that,” Hudson says. “It’s about conversion, it’s about brand identity, it’s about building new audiences.” Those goals align with what the platform actually rewards over time. The company is self-funded. Hudson has not raised outside capital, a decision he frames as intentional: prove the model through revenue, then raise against that rather than against early-stage potential.

Owned Channel or Creator Partnership Comes Down to One Question

Every engagement at NextWave starts with the same diagnostic: can the brand produce content of its own that will build a repeating audience? For those that can, an owned channel builds the connection advantage Hudson argues YouTube holds over paid advertising. For those that can’t, creator partnerships let them participate in the platform by integrating into an audience that is already engaged. 

NextWave designs those strategies using what it calls the “Retention Scalability Methodology,” a proprietary framework that, according to the company, evaluates audience behavior, content structure, and packaging decisions to identify what drives sustainable growth. Its operating principle, which the company describes as “expand the lane, don’t change it,” holds that growth comes from gradually widening a channel’s existing content territory rather than replacing what originally built the audience.

A completed engagement with a basketball creator known as The Professor illustrates the approach. He came to NextWave with approximately 20 to 30 million followers across social platforms and declining YouTube viewership. NextWave defined his target demographic, analyzed what channels that audience was already watching, and modernized his video packaging accordingly. Viewership per upload roughly doubled or tripled across the first several videos produced under the new strategy, Hudson says.

The company also applied that principle with Jordan Matter, a YouTuber with more than 38 million subscribers and Hudson’s father. At the time, rather than repositioning the channel, NextWave widened its existing content territory incrementally, preserving the audience relationship the channel had already built. According to the company, the strategy generated 78.1 million views in the ten months following implementation, 77 million more than the comparable prior period. A single video, the “Jordan Matter Challenge,” reached 87 million views at 60% audience retention, NextWave reports. 

On a separate engagement with a travel creator, the same methodology produced a video that reached 10 million lifetime views at a 10% click-through rate, also according to the company.

Building for the Moment YouTube Becomes the Primary Screen

Hudson’s near-term goal for NextWave Media is to triple the business. Over a longer horizon, he sees YouTube’s trajectory reinforcing the case for treating the platform as a relationship asset rather than a reach channel. The Google-owned platform already competes with Netflix, HBO, and Hulu for streaming time on television, and Hudson expects the convergence between YouTube and mainstream entertainment to continue. “I think we’ll continue to see more, maybe like shows developed on YouTube,” he says.

Hudson’s longer-range ambition follows the same arc. He wants NextWave to become what he describes as the largest Creator Economy business in the world, eventually expanding through acquisitions into creator management and short-form content. For brands still optimizing for reach, that ambition signals how high the stakes of the platform are about to get. 

“I want essentially every brand, if they want to build on YouTube, to work with us,” Hudson says.

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