2025 is, as I’ve been saying in my newsletters for decades, the year that the creator economy actually arrived.

And 2026 will also be the year the creator economy actually arrives.

Just wait until 2027! I think I hear the creator economy arriving!

Conjugations of the word ‘arrive’ aside, it has been a big one for our industry.

From Beast’s $5b company valuation to YouTube winning the OTT battle to AI ethics battles to (and this just in) FaZe Clan completely falling apart.

And personally huge! Last year this time, I was still in a role where I was refusing to bet on myself (as Larry Shapiro always told me), and I had no idea I was about to launch Stealth Talent and reach seven-figure topline revenue after only a few months! And I kept my kids reasonably well-fed and educated in the process! And my wife hasn’t left me yet!

And the newsletter! This thing has doubled its subscribers in the past year! Thank you all for that!

But 2026 is going to be far, far crazier. I’ll give you the predictions you need to start building systems so your company can make it through the year.

Also in this edition:

📆 2025 Predictions Recap and Grades

💪🏼 Jobs from times10, Netflix, and Amazon Games Studio.

🎭 …and a dank meme from yours truly!

Let’s get into it.

It looks like a new holdco made up of mostly US investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake, and an Emirate-backed firm, MGX, among others, will take over TikTok US and launch a new app. That officially locks down my once-controversial 2025 prediction that TikTok would survive the year as-is. But now they have teased that a new app US app will replace the old app and, after going deep into the investors, what they stand for, and how involved they are in the companies, I’m strongly feeling they will put the thumb on the scale of the algorithm to try to show fans what they want them to see, not the beloved niche-y current FYP. They will try to monetize the heck out of it.

In other words, this app will stink in ways customers don’t want it to stink.

Will it be bad enough to keep people from using it? Heck no! But they will continue losing market share to Meta, YouTube, Snap, and others who are starting to figure it out. Mark it: right now, TikTok has about 40% of the short-form market share in the US and will close out the year with less than 30%.

Follow me here: a rather large portion of online video fans hate AI. Want proof? Look at literally any viral AI video and check the comments. This is not going to change anytime soon.

And yet, YouTube and Meta have both signaled that AI will continue to be pushed hard on their platforms, even integrating it into their platform’s creative workflows and ad platforms.

Eventually nobody will be able to tell the difference between most AI and most ‘human-made’ content and the point will be moot, but not in 2026.

As creators start to lose market share to AI slop on these platforms and they will know their brand will suffer if they play the same AI-volume game, they, and their fans, will go to platforms they know to be AI-free, and that’s live. Be ready to see Twitch, Kick, TikTok Live, Instagram Live, and others get far more adoption, particularly from big celebrities and creators, who are preparing for the wave of VOD-killing AI volume of dopamine-optimized crap being pushed out by cackling get-rich-quick kids who don’t care that they’re making the world worse with their naive antics.

The creator-first Tubi strategy. The success of Beast Games. The growth of YouTube on TV. The boom in vertical shotform drama revenue. The algorithmic preference of ultra-longform YouTube videos. It all points one thing: top creators are going to start making ‘shows’ that can sell and distribute neatly to television.

Be ready to see more creators launching Dhar Mann-style studios, more satisfying-but-easy longform formats like the white cyc dating video boom, and podcasts, podcasts, podcasts.

Scanning the top 100 non-short-form YouTubers by subscribers, I see around 10 with TV-ready content. I expect that to double by the end of 2026.

Brands, especially with those that are focused purely on bottom-of-funnel success, are starting to realize the power of UGC. It’s cheap, creators will give up usage rights, and in this FYP world, most ‘organic’ views come from non-followers anyways.

So now that platforms are making it super, super easy and cheap to make AI avatars who can tell you how awesome a toothpaste is or how fun a brainrot tapper mobile game can be, they’ll try to save the next level of money: take out those super-cheap creators.

Expect social media marketing spend to go up, up, up while mid-tier and larger creators look around saying, “Where is all of the money going?!” UGC will grow, clipping will grow, and AI-UGC will astronimically grow as large creators that can define a brand will have revenue stagnate and those who are just fantastic at clickbait will start to suffer.

Why are so many creators so focused on newsletters, SMS lists, and superfan platforms these days? Because algorithms aren’t giving them the reach they need.

And nearly ever challenger platform is pitching ‘more info about your fans’ as a key value proposition.

Pressure from the success of these upstarts will force major platforms to start moving in that direction. Don’t get me wrong: they won’t start giving out e-mails in 2026. But they will launch more stuff that mirrors the way people use this data: sending their own newsletters in-platform, link-in-bios, broadcast channels, WhatsApp-style communication, paid communities, and more ways to target segments of their audience based on their demos (for example, just surfacing videos to their female audience in the US before it goes global).

This is one step towards the promise land of full data transparency, but Big Tech will fight that fight to keep that data just for them until their dying breath.

Yes, I’m totally saying, “If reps aren’t more like Stealth Talent they’re going to be screwed.”

But I mean it.

Most creators I’m talking to want to start companies, own equity in other companies, build merch lines, launch classes, and, frankly, are not super interested in someone who can negotiate their inbound brand deals (though many creators are still terrible at checking their e-mail and probably need someone to do that ASAP).

And, frankly, most managers and agents don’t know how to do these things.

And that’s not their fault! The game has changed!

I can’t tell you how many representatives in the past four months have asked me to help build companies around their creators. Because building companies the right way is hard. Fundraising is hard. Business plans are hard. Manufacturing and 3PLs are hard. Building teams is hard. And, quite frankly, brand deals are pretty easy once you get the hang of them.

You’ll continue to see creators bringing business acument in-house, signing with more boutique representatives that can help them build business infrastructure, and leave the reps that think that the way to success is ‘more brand deals’ and ‘more content optimization’. Ugh…

There was a time during early Instagram when groups like F- Jerry and The Fat Jewish reigned by clicking ‘save as’ on images from the front page of Reddit and putting them in their feed. Of course, as a professional comedian at the time, I couldn’t imagine a more immoral business than making millions ‘curating’ other people’s work.

But here we are again. In the age of AI, the memes have changed but the idea stays the same.

You can get a huge audience by getting a relatively inexpensive AI video program to make partisan political memes, cute puppy feeds, inspirational posts, and babies falling over. And these things will work forever.

This new brand of ‘meme account’ won’t need to steal other people’s work. The AI companies already did that. Now they just need to look at something that’s working, prompt their AI engine to make more of it, and flood the market.

And it will work, much to the detriment of consumers and creators trying to put something truly creative out to the world.

What happens to a generation of 23 year olds that graduate from college only to find that the concept of ‘entry level jobs’ has been wiped out?

They’ll start making internet money!

Get ready to see lots of trend-based IRL streamers, TikTok Shop-first creators, and the aforementioned meme page creators boom.

And, frankly, there’s now enough authoratative information out there that most will realize it actually is smarter than getting an entry level job.

Not to brag, but I don’t know a single human being of working age in the US that, with a few lessons from me and a cell phone, can’t be making at least $20 per hour in one, if not all, of these verticals. Even if they just start with clipping and grow into personality-forward brands.

Even AI fans don’t want to watch AI content feeds. They want to watch amazing feeds, and if a piece of content that’s made with AI is good enough, they’ll give it attention. OpenAI, Meta, and everyone else who thought an all-AI feed was a good idea will realize this quickly and go back to the strategy we all know to be true: use AI as a tool to feed content into already-popular shortform feeds.

As the battle for whether the US’s isolationist immigration policies wage, even the far-right Silicon Valley folks are starting to feel the pain from the H1B visa battle, where, historically, really smart people could come to the US to go to college or work.

That’s not certain anymore. The brand of the United States as it comes to international talent has been completely destroyed. Many will still want to come for the money, but now begrudgingly as they no longer know their position in the US is secure.

And, as a result, the smartest in the world are no longer taking a one-way flight to San Francisco. They’re going to countries begging for the best and the brightest: China, UAE, Saudi, India, etc.

China is already very competitive globally in the AI race. They’re still getting all of the US chips they need. DeepSeek is great. Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance are all doubling-down. Moonshot and MiniMax are showing promise. I see the US’s brand in the global AI market going down in 2026 and that market share being gobbled up by Chinese tech.

And I don’t see it being a good year for OpenAI. Even if you don’t believe there’s an AI bubble, it’s hard not to see the bubble in one specific company. Especially one in a highly competitive market, with dubious methods to train their models, a mixed brand with their CEO, and a revenue story that makes the valuation pretty hard to stomach.

BONUS: A few one liner hot takes—

Last year, I focused on my four spiciest predictions, which, frankly, feel less spicy now that many of them came true. But remember: in December 2024, these were all very, very controversial. I’m listing the four in order of accuracy with honest grades. You can see my reasoning by clicking on the headlines to see last year’s post.

💯 TikTok Survives

May seem obvious now, but I got into hours-long debates about this over beers last December. The original deadline to ‘sell or get shut down’ was January 19, 2025. I didn’t buy it. And lo and behold, after a brief shutdown, then a mass message thanking Dear Leader for their help getting it back up, North Korea-style, TikTok has been back ever since. But my reasoning was simple: Trump was doing well on TikTok, so despite a bipartisan vote to sell or shut down in the US, I knew corruption would win the day. It played out how I expected beat-by-beat. I was absolutely, 100% right. Seriously, look at the post. It wasn’t edited. I was accurate nearly to the hour.

GRADE: A+++++++++++

🤖 AI Content Fails

Remember, in the end of 2024, when Sora was brand spanking new, there were a lot of 2025 predictions that said ‘20% of all social video will be AI’. And, of course, we went the other direction. TikTok allows users to shut off AI content, and 52% of people who see that feature chose it. Most large creators won’t touch AI. Those who do get destroyed in the comment section. Some AI video is working, but as I said in my post last year: “End-to-end video AI will continue to be sufficient for very specific genres: pornography, faceless explainer videos over B-roll, rehashing human-made work, and brain rot.” The one meaningful format I didn’t expect was trolling how poor AI video is right now, which has found an excellent footing on short-form platforms. Or an AI video that was presented well, which was only destroyed once it was found to be AI. I consider this to be pretty spot-on.

GRADE: B+

🫰🏼 Snap Booms

First of all, don’t look at the stock price, which is down 28% in the last year. That wasn’t what I was talking about. I believed Snap would hit 500m daily active users in 2025. And the last data I have is Q2 2025, where it went from 453m to 469m in three months, so it very well could have hit that mark. Revenue is growing around 10% YoY, and anecdotally, creators are talking about Snap a lot more. Hard to prove, but I believe my projection was likely near the mark if it didn’t hit it.

GRADE: B-

💸 The Year of ‘Monetize Everything’

Okay, so we all make mistakes. I thought platforms would spend more time using AI for brand safety checks and ad placement and, therefore, the barriers to monetize would be far lower, so even entry-level creators would be able to monetize. And many platforms have made it easier, through cleaner Meta monetization, lower TikTok LIVE and Shop requirements, and YouTube allowing channels that were removed to get a second chance. But most platforms instead decided to focus on AI ad creative and editing instead of the far more useful task of getting better content and a cleaner path to professionalizing creators. I overestimated Big Tech to my detriment again. I’ll learn my lesson someday.

GRADE: D

Head of Video, times10

Ad agencies are deep into the content game now, and being a head of video for one like times10 will be amazing exposure to the world of advertising in an online-first world. And, unlike film or television, you’ll be thrown right into a series of challenging campaigns with vastly different creative, diverse teams, and tons of fun challenges.

Creator & Talent Partnerships, Social Marketing - Games Manager, Netflix

Netflix games has had a few big plays with various success. ‘Choose your own adventure’ video won them an Emmy. Putting Grand Theft Auto III on phones was kind of a bust. And now they’re going hard into casual games. This is a well-paid role with a cool company and tons of great IP. Get this job then call me so we can do something cool together!

Principal, Strategy & Operations, Creator Services, Amazon Game Studios

Very similar role to the Netflix one, which is why I thought it would be fun to put them side by side. But with one key difference: Amazon has commerce in its veins. They already have a large creator network of live sellers and affiliates. But is this a good thing? Throughout the last few decades working with Amazon, it seems their teams don’t communicate well with each other. If you can solve this and bring everyone to the table behind your goal, I think you can smash this out of the park. And, again, call me if you get this role!