This week, Netflix will do two things back to back. Thursday, it gets on its Q2 earnings call as Wall Street keeps asking whether engagement is slowing. Saturday, it premieres Stokes Twins!, a non-exclusive collection of the duo’s biggest YouTube videos, which are still available for free on YouTube.

I’ve been covering creators since a Netflix deal meant you’d made it. Today, it feels like the relationship has flipped.

Recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal has raised questions about engagement, viewing share, and audience retention, with subscribers spending less time on the platform and bailing on shows mid-season. Nielsen puts Netflix's share of US TV viewing at 7.8% in April, a multi-year low. Bloomberg found its biggest hits lose more than half their audience after one season. Executives are reportedly floating live channels and bundling Peacock into the app, which, if you squint, is just cable.

Meanwhile, Netflix keeps writing checks to YouTubers. Ms. Rachel. Mark Rober. The Sidemen. Salish and Jordan Matter got its most expansive creator deal ever in February. Jay Shetty's podcast landed a roughly $100 million deal in May. And now the Stokes Twins, 140 million subscribers deep, arrive July 18. Netflix is also developing an original series with them for 2027. That’s the part I’m actually excited about.

Read the fine print, though. This first release is non-exclusive. The videos stay on YouTube, free, where they’ve always been. That’s what makes it feel less like original programming and more like YouTube’s rerun channel.

To be fair, I get the strategy. Maybe someone opens Netflix for Wednesday or Squid Game and ends up watching the Stokes Twins instead of switching over to YouTube. Maybe it helps retention. Maybe it introduces creators to audiences who’d never think to open YouTube. Those are all smart bets.

Ted Sarandos famously called YouTube "a little bit of a farm league," a place creators cut their teeth before graduating to the big show. Cute. But when your engagement is sliding and your answer is licensing content from the farm league, who's developing talent for whom?

I've watched this movie before, and so have you if you've been in digital media long enough. Facebook Watch. Quibi. Snap Originals, IGTV, Spotify's podcast shopping spree. Every one was a platform trying to buy its way into a culture it didn't build.

Creators cashed the checks. Audiences didn’t always follow. Many of those bets quietly faded away. When growth gets harder, platforms often turn to creators. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

There’s another way to read this, too. It’s a milestone for creators. Ten years ago, a Netflix deal meant you’d “made it.” Today, Netflix is increasingly partnering with creators who already have the audience, the influence, and the leverage. That’s a remarkable shift in the balance of power.

But that’s also why this release feels so strange. If creators are the future of entertainment, don’t just rebroadcast what already exists. Help creators build something only Netflix can.

House of Cards. Stranger Things. Squid Game. More recently, KPop Demon Hunters. Netflix didn’t become Netflix by importing what people were already watching somewhere else. It became Netflix by giving audiences something they couldn’t get anywhere else.

The creator deals that work follow the same logic. MrBeast on Amazon worked because Beast Games was a next level, native, ridiculous swing, not a dump of his old uploads. Ms. Rachel works because exhausted parents need a lean-back version of her, a different product than her channel. In both cases, the platform transformed the creator into something new. That’s why I’m much more interested in the original Stokes Twins series Netflix is reportedly developing than I am in licensing existing uploads.

Licensing a back catalog does none of that. It's a cover band. And I say this as someone who loves watching creators get real money and real leverage; they should absolutely take these deals.

Embrace creators. Fund them, transform them, give them budgets YouTube never could. Build original formats around them. But simply repackaging videos people can already watch elsewhere isn’t a strategy, it’s a stopgap.

Netflix absolutely has something to offer creators: financing, prestige, and the ability to reach audiences who may never open YouTube. That’s real value. But viewers still need a reason to open Netflix instead of YouTube.

The creator economy has earned its place on Netflix. Now I want to see Netflix help creators make the next cultural phenomenon, not just repackage the last one.

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