This article first appeared in the July/August issue of GOLF Magazine.
In mid-March, the world’s leading golfing content creator — or is it content-creating golfer? — gazed through the windows of the media center at Steyn City, host of that week’s LIV Golf South Africa event in Johannesburg, where a horde of fans were leaning over each other, waiting for his autograph. Bryson DeChambeau had just shot 63, but his eyes said something more. As he waited for his turn at the press conference podium, we chatted for a few minutes — just long enough for him to dream aloud about reuniting professional golf.
The plan he’d devised — constructed, in part, via ChatGPT and Google Gemini — featured tournaments with a field of 104 players: 13 four-man PGA Tour teams competing alongside 13 four-man LIV Golf teams. Half the individual field would be cut after 36 holes — to appease Tiger Woods, DeChambeau said. The new league would be jointly owned by the PGA Tour, LIV and the players. And though it all seems like folly now that LIV may cease to exist in 2027, DeChambeau believed in it so resolutely because of the person he’d convinced of its legitimacy: YouTube CEO Neil Mohan.
RELATED: How Fat Perez and online creators are cashing in on golf’s digital boom
DeChambeau is one of the most prominent athletes on Mohan’s global platform, and, as a result, he chats with the executive from time to time. In this case, their conversation centered on how the NFL created extra media inventory and strengthened its relationship with YouTube by giving the platform one regular season game to stream free worldwide. Maximizing international eyeballs was the idea—not unlike the late-stage goals of LIV Golf. More importantly, according to DeChambeau, Mohan estimated that the proposed PGA/LIV team-golf enterprise could command a $400 million broadcasting deal.
DeChambeau’s hybrid league fantasy is just that: a fantasy. But the conversation was proof of something quite real. Even if DeChambeau’s pro-golf future is currently as murky as mud, one thing consistently comes up when he’s asked about it: YouTube, YouTube, YouTube.
Even through LIV’s darkest days, DeChambeau has said he’d rather grow his YouTube channel threefold than wade through the barriers of a PGA Tour return. For more than a year now, he’s talked about a future schedule that might consist solely of content creation and the major championships. It makes headlines coming from one of the most famous golfers in the world — a player with a team of more than 10 creatives working exclusively on his content. But the truth is, among pro golfers, DeChambeau isn’t alone in thinking this way; he’s just the leader.
“What Bryson’s done with his channel — I’m not going to say it has turned his whole image around, but people have really embraced [it],” Ian Poulter told me last summer. “They’ve seen a whole new side of him.”
Poulter was approached by a production company to do something similar and soon launched The Postman, a channel built around bimonthly competitions that routinely rack up hundreds of thousands of views. In one video, Poulter plays a wristwatch influencer for one of his Ryder Cup Rolexes. In another, he and his son take on tennis legend Andy Murray and his brother. In yet another, Poulter squares off against the Bryan Bros—with one of his Ferraris on the line if they beat him.
It’s no surprise some of the most popular pro golf creators have come via LIV, which launched in 2022 with less restrictive content regulations than its rival, the PGA Tour. Phil Mickelson, who infamously criticized those Tour restrictions, quickly struck a content partnership with Grant Horvat, one of the biggest figures on the platform. And while the pair racked up millions of views together, Mickelson’s interest extended beyond content; he saw YouTube as a way to build the visibility and value of his LIV franchise. The account isn’t named Phil Mickelson. It’s Phil Mickelson and the HyFlyers.
It made sense then that Jon Rahm, not long into his own LIV Golf journey, would become interested too. He had his LIV franchise to promote and was an avid gamer and YouTube watcher. But after seeking counsel from Lefty, a longtime mentor, and BDC, his peer, Rahm came to understand what separated him from them. Mickelson is done raising kids. DeChambeau isn’t there yet. Rahm has his fourth on the way and decided that birthing a YouTube channel — at least right now — would to be too much.
Currently, the hunger for content is bottomless, but pro golfers are confined by time — no matter the tour. How eager are fathers of three (or more!) to devote hours of their week to feeding a YouTube channel? Best to ask a father of five.
“It is a lot of work,” Jason Day says in a video published … on YouTube. “Because you have to be consistent about it. If you’re planning to release a video every week, that means you’re doing a video every week.”
Day and a handful of Aussie golfers launched The Lads channel at the end of 2024, promising two things: “High-Quality Golf. Higher-Quality Banter.” In the 18 months since, they’ve amassed a solid, if somewhat modest, 215,000 subscribers. That pushes them ahead of Poulter, just behind Mickelson and, importantly, across a threshold where they can actually profit from the endeavor—not only through YouTube’s generous revenue sharing deal, but also via sponsorships and merchandise.
Day has said this isn’t just for kicks. They’re trying to build a real business, and YouTube is just the top of the funnel. Which is why the golfer everyone knows (and loves?) sits at the center of each video. He schools his fellow Lads on a putting approach they’ve never seen, encourages viewers to share their thoughts in the comments section and organizes 1v1 challenges with other PGA Tour stars—wearing a mic and guiding the conversation like a correspondent for 60 Minutes.
Perhaps it helps that many of Day’s kids are of content-consuming age. But the bigger advantage now is his first-mover status. He’s the premier Tour player exploring an increasingly large sandbox in which pros can play. The PGA Tour has been slowly rolling back its restrictions on creating content at tournaments. For years, players who wanted to produce content from a Tour site could only do so in tightly controlled ways and only after multiple approvals. But to maintain its footing in the evolving digital space, the Tour ratified changes in spring of 2026, doubling the archival footage its members could use, increasing the number of highlights they could post and daring them to lean into their own marketing platforms.
The Tour now happily collaborates with its members on YouTube, cross-pollinating audiences with content they might not otherwise see. It’s a savvy move, even if it arrived a bit later than in other pro sports, and a clear sign the Tour desperately wants a stronger presence on YouTube. Look no further than the content produced in March, during the same week as my conversation with DeChambeau.
At its flagship event, the Players Championship, the Tour hired producers from NFL Films to race around Sawgrass and capture every shot and reaction of four players in the field: Akshay Bhatia, Rickie Fowler, Si Woo Kim and Chris Gotterup. It was published exclusively on YouTube under the title Chasing Sunday and racked up a million views in a month—far more than any other Tour-produced video this year. The top comment said it all: This is objectively awesome. Best thing the PGAT has put out in years.
And clearly, just the start of what’s to come.
