Last month, Bryson DeChambeau briefly stated the quiet part out loud.<\/p>\n
As part of an interview with the social media account Flushing It,<\/a> DeChambeau addressed his uncertain contract status with LIV Golf with a roundhouse kick.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s where I want to be, but ultimately, it\u2019s got to make sense for everybody,\u201d DeChambeau said<\/a>. \u201cBecause I could just do YouTube golf and be totally fine as well.\u201d<\/p>\n Bryson\u2019s comments came in the aftermath of the most significant piece of LIV Golf news of the 2025 offseason: Brooks Koepka\u2019s announcement that he would be leaving the league<\/a> to spend more time with his family, and perhaps to return to golf on the PGA Tour. The cause of Koepka\u2019s departure from the league is not believed to be related to a contract dispute \u2014 according to several reports, the five-time major champ still had time remaining on his initial LIV deal \u2014 but it sparked a series of discussions about the contract status of the other LIV stars, DeChambeau chief among them.<\/p>\n The two-time U.S. Open winner is perhaps LIV\u2019s biggest success story, a star player whose defection has coincided with a meteoric rise in his own popularity and public image. Of course, much of that growth is due to DeChambeau\u2019s prolific exploits on YouTube, where he has gained 2.5 million subscribers (as of this writing) and has become the face of golf in new media \u2014 but LIV has also played a role, too, greasing the skids for the enigmatic pro to build his own platform and audience while still competing professionally.<\/p>\n \u201cLIV gave me the economic viability to do these things \u2014 to be able to keep doing YouTube and growing YouTube,\u201d DeChambeau said in early 2025.<\/p>\n But now, as the calendar flips to 2026, it might be said that DeChambeau has at least as much value to LIV as the other way around. From LIV\u2019s perspective, DeChambeau\u2019s superstardom and megaphone make him indispensable: He is a star player who moves the needle for a league that needs to move it. But from DeChambeau\u2019s view, LIV might not be as necessary: The league\u2019s money is valuable, but thanks to his exploits on YouTube, DeChambeau can have a platform, a voice and an income without LIV.<\/p>\n In other words, as DeChambeau put it to Flushing It<\/a>, the price must be right.<\/p>\n But what is the price? Well, long before his next LIV contract was a source of palace intrigue, DeChambeau gave us a glimpse into the economics of his YouTube account via an early 2025 interview with the Joe Pompliano Show.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s funny is, and I can say this, I\u2019ve invested over $1 million in YouTube,\u201d DeChambeau said. \u201cCreating a company, and being able to effectively distribute the AdSense revenue and all this extra stuff, and it\u2019s what I want to do, it\u2019s what I care about.\u201d<\/p>\n DeChambeau went on to say that he has hired \u201cdouble-digit\u201d employees to join his content creation apparatus, Regecy, which helps to ideate, produce and execute the social media ideas that wind up on his channel. <\/p>\n \u201cAm I making money off it right now? I\u2019m not,\u201d DeChambeau said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s the cool part about it. I hope people can see that I\u2019m doing this because there\u2019s a genuine interest in growing the game of golf. I genuinely care, man. I genuinely care about growing the game.\u201d<\/p>\n Does that mean DeChambeau\u2019s YouTube exploits are losing him money? Well, not exactly. YouTube\u2019s economics are based on a grand bargain: an ad revenue share between the platform and the creator. This means that for every dollar a YouTube video earns, YouTube takes roughly 45 cents and the creator roughly 55 cents. Revenue is paid out based on video performance, usually around $1-5 per thousand views<\/a>. If we take the middle of those rates for DeChambeau\u2019s videos, or $3 per thousand views, we can extrapolate that a one-off viral hit like Bryson\u2019s Break 50 video with Stephen Curry has earned him more than $20,500 (and counting).<\/p>\n But the good thing about YouTube content? It compounds over time. Well-executed viral videos continue to accumulate views, which means they continue to make money. So if Bryson\u2019s account continued to generate in the neighborhood of 20 million views per month across all of his videos, as it did in 2024, and if those videos each earned a rate of $3 per thousand views, then Bryson\u2019s account would have earned a hefty chunk of change at the end of the year \u2014 perhaps as much as $800,000.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s before any of the other moneymaking levers pulled by famous YouTube stars every day \u2014 strategies like brand partnerships and targeted ads and in-video promotions that can amount to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, for stars of DeChambeau\u2019s 2.5 million-subscriber ilk. (And yes, that\u2019s not counting the role DeChambeau\u2019s fame as a tournament golfer plays in sponsor discussions \u2014 though it can be assumed that it helps DeChambeau\u2019s bottom line.) In other words, it isn\u2019t hard to see a world where DeChambeau\u2019s status as a YouTube megacelebrity (and golfing superstar) helps launch a content business worth close to the $45 million valuation<\/a> raised by Good Good Golf in March 2025.<\/p>\n What that all means for LIV\u2019s negotiations with DeChambeau isn\u2019t yet clear. Perhaps DeChambeau was merely exercising his god-given right to leverage when he threatened to leave LIV for YouTube, at which point his threats read more like an effort to add a handful of extra zeroes to his next Crushers contract. But perhaps DeChambeau wasn\u2019t kidding about becoming a full-time YouTube golfer \u2014 and a part-time tournament player \u2014 should LIV\u2019s final offer not meet his needs. That would read as one of the most astonishing developments in this strange period in pro golf, even by DeChambeau\u2019s own maverick standards.<\/p>\n Could a player of DeChambeau\u2019s stardom plausibly leave professional golf for YouTube? It\u2019s too soon to say. But it seems clear the next Bryson DeChambeau LIV negotiation will center around a first-of-its-kind binary in the golf world: either a very big Golden Ticket \u2026 or the whole damn chocolate factory. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last month, Bryson DeChambeau briefly stated the quiet part out loud. As part of an interview with the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399232,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-399231","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-golf","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}