Archive | The Creator Rep

Your VidCon 2026 Survival Guide 🎪

Every year I write a version of this, but this year I wanted to dive deeper. Are you going? Do you know what you're going to do? Is everyone giving you bad advice? I won't. This is it. This is the whole game:

How Reps Actually Know What Brands Pay 🤫

There's FYPM, and it's essential, but what happens when deals aren't 'flat fee' anymore. There's no Glassdoor for brand deals. No Kelley Blue Book, no Zillow estimate telling you what a 1M-subscriber gaming creator's mid-roll is "worth." The entire pricing layer of this industry runs on backchannel texts and "hey, what'd they offer you?" DMs. And this week, a report dropped that's about to make that whisper network a lot harder to read.

Creators Go Hollywood, Hollywood Goes Internet 🔄

Stephen Colbert's CBS show ended and he immediately set up @colbert on YouTube and TikTok. Meanwhile, the last few weeks involved Jay Shetty getting $100m to go to Netflix and Spotify, Guy Fieri and Travis Kelce announced YouTube shows, The Sidemen got an Amazon Prime cooking show, Netflix announce real-time syndication of The Breakfast Club, and Spy Ninjas is betting $25m that they can go Hollywood. What does this cross-pollination mean for creators and creatives?

StreamElements Shutdown Looms 📵

How often has the creator economy heard this story: company gains traction, raises nine-figures from huge investors, announces shutdown a few years later. There are a few companies in the market today that lay somewhere on this path! But StreamElements had 23 million users, a really useful tech stack for streamers (especially earlier in their growth), and a consistent flow of brand deals. This wasn't some fly-by-night operation. So what can we learn from this?

FaZe RiZes Again 👷🏽‍♂️

The FaZe Clan is dead. Long live the FaZe Clan. Er...I guess I mean CORE, the new name with the same game. After a disastrous negotiation where FaZe's ownership attempted to get the team to sign contracts taking 20% of their whole books of business, the team had an epic group quitting, only to reform last week as CORE. Are all talent-led lifestyle brands doomed to suffer the same fate?

What Happened at a VIP Dhar Mann Event? 🤷🏻‍♂️

Attending the Brand Innovators Creator Economy Summit at Dhar Mann Studios wasn't just an honor, but I felt like I was invited into a space where people like me generally aren't allowed. This was elite creators like Adam W, Nic Cannon, Jordan Matter, our client Devan Key, and Dhar himself, along with brand leaders who control massive influencer marketing budgets. But what happened on stage wasn't the story. We've seen those panels. What happened in the hallway convos is where the magic happened.

Coachella is the Internet Now 🎇

Didn't get tickets to Coachella this year? Don't worry. You could watch every second of every stage for free on YouTube, with concert-film-quality streams. Or if you're in it for the vibes, you could tune in to the hundreds of influencers streaming, story-ing, and good old-fashioned vlogging the two weekend concerts. And this year the shows felt even more 'internety'. Coachella is driving youth culture, so let's dive into what creators, brands, and publishers can learn from it.

R.I.P. Link-in-Bio? 💀

Meta's Head of Global Business, Nicola Mendelsohn, said something at Shoptalk Spring that we've all been feeling: link-in-bio tools were useful solutions to platform problems. Now, Mendelsohn actually said the words "the era of link in bio is finally over." Reminder: Linktree has raised $166m for their link-in-bio solution, and there are a slew of similar companies with respectable funding and traction. Let's look into the status of link-in-bios, where platforms are honing in on their business, and what the future may be for these companies.

Meta and Google Lose Lawsuits ⚖️

Losing a $6 million lawsuit for companies like Meta and Google is a rounding error of a rounding error, like when the guys in the movie Office Space stole fractions of a penny per transaction. But, also like the guys from Office Space, this could have disastrous impacts as a bellwether ruling. If one 20-year old can sue them and win for their product causing depression, and there have been strong academic studies linking social media time to increased depression and even suicide, this could be the first domino to fall. Does this mean Congress will finally leave their lobbyist-sponsored lobster dinners and do something?