Self-Funded Creator Advances Emerge in Sport, Spurring Seven-Figure Revenue Increases

Self-Funded Creator Advances Emerge in Sport, Spurring Seven-Figure Revenue Increases

Viewture recently closed a Series A funding round led by David Blitzer’s Bolt Ventures. 

The U.K.-based business offers creators looking to grow their YouTube reach, engagement, and revenues advances against future earnings derived from their content. The capital enables these IP owners to fund creative projects and grow their channels without giving up any equity or taking on debt.

“It’s a self-financed strategy,” David Page (founder and CEO, Viewture) said. “We provide production financing and revenue optimization strategy upfront and take a share of the revenue earned by their ambitious plans.”

But Viewture’s business –and the upside it’s pursuing– isn’t limited to the Mr. Beast’s and IShowSpeed’s of the world. Teams, leagues, and sports rights holders create plenty of their own non-live video content, and the savviest ones are coming to realize there is an opportunity for them to optimize distribution of it.

A manageable lift in YouTube revenues, powered by an enhanced data and analytical approach, some basic IP protection, and improved media sales (think: direct into content campaigns), can be material.

“It can be a $5mm increase in terms of additional income annually,” Page said.

YouTube has become one of the most popular media platforms in the world. It had 2.7bn monthly active users as of June ’25.

That scale has prompted brands to move large portions of their marketing budgets to the Google-owned service. 

“Unilever has a ~$10bn annual marketing spend. Two years ago, 20% of it was in digital media assets,” Page said. “This year, maybe 85% of their spend will be, and 50% of their total budget will be spent on creator content.”

However, it’s not as if every YouTuber is swimming in cash. There are four million plus channels competing for viewership, subscribers, and their share of advertising dollars.

So, “like in any other industry, creators are coming to realize that they need capital in order to grow, to improve the quality of their products, their uploads, how they can compete and stay ahead of the competition in terms of the content they're producing,” Page said. 

The problem is that these businesses often fail to meet large national consumer banks’ financing standards.

Spotter stepped into the void in 2019. Viewture joined in late 2021 and built its business advancing funds to YouTube stars, like KSI and The Sidemen.

“It could be that these creators want to make a docuseries to sell to Netflix, build a merchandising warehouse to launch a new product, or rather than do two videos a month, increase their output to 10,” Page said. 

The company’s product suite (think: IP protection, media sales) and support capabilities (think: content strategy and monetization optimization) have matured over time.

“We look at the latter from a data and analytics perspective,” Page said. “So, we’ll look at content and say, this works or you need to change your duration; extend it by another minute and you can insert more ads. Or you should market to a specific territory because that’s where the audience is, where you’re going to get greater reach, and command a higher advertising rate.”

Viewture’s creator partners have benefited as a result. For context, its copyright claims service has increased rights holder YouTube revenues by ~10%.

And its direct sales and insertion solution has the potential to grow content-related income by as much as 300% (dependent on audience demographics).

“Instead of earning $5 per thousand views, they can earn $30 per thousand views by incorporating premium global brand’s natively into their content,” Page said. “Multiply that up to millions of views a month and a creator can significantly increase the revenue generated.”

So, how does it work?

If a rights owner “has a back catalog of 1,000 videos, we would say for the next three years, the income tied to viewership of that content will flow to us and in exchange, we'll give you an upfront amount,” Page said. “Then we'll give the rights owner some more capital for its future plan and take 10% of those revenues over the next three years.”

Viewture is willing to advance as much as $10mm, depending on the project’s scope and potential achievements. It assumes all of the performance risk.

As sports fans have increasingly migrated to YouTube, rights owners have followed.

“They are all realizing that’s where the viewing base is and are looking to reach and engage with them there,” Page said. 

And ultimately, to monetize those eyeballs. YouTube has paid out more than $100bn to content creators over the last four years.

But to date, few sports rights holders have consistently uploaded content leveraging meta data optimization, content ID cleanup, or structured distribution. As a result, many have under-monetized deep archives despite their strong fan engagement.

Viewture is working to change that. The content creator financier has a debt facility with Lingotto that will enable it to put hundreds of millions of dollars into the market over the next two years.

The company already has several high-profile soccer properties as clients.

It’s logical to wonder why sports properties at the top of the value chain would need help financing content strategies. While many don’t, others will find it advantageous to have the project funded so they don’t have to incur additional overhead or pull resources from another budget.

Viewture’s value proposition extends beyond the capital it brings to the table too.

Rights owners “want to align with someone who's going to enable them to grow faster and increase their chances of success on the platform,” Page said. Remember, YouTube “has become a massive growth area in terms of generating significant sums of new income.”

Teams and leagues want to be best positioned to capture those dollars. Viewture is trying to help them to do that.

One major European rights-holder used financing alongside the company’s data, claiming, and optimization tools to lift YouTube revenues by ~30%. It retained full creative control and expanded athlete-focused content formats in the process.