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It's Monday and Google CEO Sundar Pichai is cleaning up with a pay package reportedly worth $692 million. |
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Today's News |
🎬 Spotter promotes Creator TV 📱 DoorDash hires Duolingo's secret weapon 🛑 Netflix cracks down on YouTube clips 👀 X makes threads more exclusive 🎙️ This week on the podcast…
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CREATOR COMMOTION |
 | Creators who make "Creator TV'" on stage at the Spotter Showcase event last week in NYC. (Photo credit: Spotter) |
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Spotter wants to sell "Creator TV" to big brands |
The showcase: For the second year running, the company that brands itself as a driver of "premium creator entertainment" held a Spotter Showcase in NYC to promote the concept of "Creator TV." |
According to Spotter, the selling point of Creator TV is that top creators can cut through the clutter of social media with high-quality, long-form content and tight bonds with fans. Those stars operate like traditional studios, producing programming that rivals the buzziest releases on TV and streaming. |
"While billions of videos are uploaded each year, only a fraction truly command attention. Creator TV is that fraction: a concentrated layer of culture built to support meaningful, large-scale brand investment, and focused enough to cut through everything else." | | | | - Spotter |
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Spotter offered compelling evidence for the pros of Creator TV, noting that the top five video platforms generate 200 trillion annual views—but only 242,000 creators (less than 1% of the total community) make long-form content that runs for at least 60 seconds and pulls in at least 100,000 views. |
When you look at "TV-length" episodic programming (i.e. the traditional 22-minute format), that number shrinks to 7,000 creators. The kicker: those 7,000 stars earned a combined 148 billion views in the U.S. in 2025. |
The audience: To explain how those long-form high-achievers do so well, Spotter invited long-form innovators like Airrack, Dude Perfect, Jordan Matter, and Kinigra Deon to take the stage at the Spotter Showcase. |
Those stars presented to a live audience of brands and agencies—some of which have already started mining value from the potent mix of attention, influence, and creativity driving Creator TV. Adobe, a Spotter partner, has more than doubled its investment in the creator economy over the past two years. |
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HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰 |
 | A stil from one of DoorDash's new pieces of viral fodder. |
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DoorDash wants to go viral once a month. Its first step towards success: hiring former Duolingo social media head Zaria Parvez. (Tubefilter)
OpenAI exec Caitlin Kalinowski has resigned in response to the company's Pentagon deal, citing concerns over "surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization." (TechCrunch)
X is reportedly experimenting with a new ad format that places product recommendations directly beneath posts that reference the associated brand or item. (TechCrunch)
A lawsuit filed by retail investors in Alphabet and Meta seeks to overturn the Trump Administration's approval of the deal that transferred control of TikTok to a U.S.-owned joint venture. (Reuters)
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POD PEOPLE |
 | In Netflix's calculus, they're putting more weight on Exclusivity than Promotion. |
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Netflix is cracking down on how often its podcast partners post on YouTube |
The clause: Netflix has many YouTube channels—and it puts them to good use. The streamer's main English-language channel alone has 32 million subscribers and drives around ~150 million monthly views by posting behind-the-scenes clips and sneak peeks at its paywalled programming. |
But the podcasters Netflix is scooping up for exclusive deals aren't allowed to follow this playbook. |
According to Ashley Carman's latest Soundbite newsletter on Bloomberg, Netflix's exclusive podcast deals with Barstool Sports and The Ringer contain a clause that limits the number of show clips creators can post on outside platforms like YouTube. |
That might sound like a serious growth inhibitor, but Carman said most folks she interviewed who were familiar with the deals "seemed relatively unperturbed" by the clause. According to Carman, that's because "most podcasters don't have the manpower to publish tons of clips from each episode" anyway. |
The context: In recent times, however, clipping has become a big enough business that professional for-hire clippers are no longer a rare commodity. MrBeast even recently launched a company in the sector. Vyro is a marketplace that pays viewers to clip creators' content for them. That business-side development means these days, podcasters can have the manpower to generate more clips; they just have to pay for it. |
With clipping rapidly becoming more accessible (and more essential to growth), will Netflix's restrictions on posting impede its podcasting partners' earning potential? |
Carman dug into the YouTube numbers for Netflix-signed shows like Spittin' Chiclets and 3 & Out With John Middlekauff, and found they've experienced a significant dropoff in new subscribers since moving all of their new full-length episodes to Netflix. That's to be expected; why would new people subscribe if there's no new content? |
The question now is whether that sacrifice is worth it. We'd love to see how creators' earnings compare on Netflix versus YouTube—but the probability of that data coming to light is minuscule at best. |
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X FACTOR |
 | You can now paywall your long-form posts on X. |
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The feature: X is giving creators a new way to unlock monetization. Exclusive Threads—a product that lets users put portions of their tweetstorms behind paywalls—is part of what the platform calls "Creator Subscriptions 2.0." |
That initiative is essentially a revamped version of the program X launched in 2023, and is intended to provide "powerful new tools to grow your subscribers and earn more" (per the X Creators account). |
The context: Since coming under the ownership of Elon Musk, the platform formerly known as Twitter has struggled to provide consistent monetization opportunities for creators. Advertiser revolts prompted former X CEO Linda Yaccarino to employ strongarm tactics against brands, and creator titans like MrBeast have not been impressed with X's financial ecosystem. |
Transparency efforts and shifting political winds have helped X improve its revenue streams, but creators are still going off-platform to make money. Direct connections are so hot right now, and text-heavy platforms like Substack and Patreon are using paywalls to monetize those interactions. |
X is at last taking steps to capitalize on that trend by giving creators a real incentive to up their Twitter rant game. On a hub that once limited posts to 140 characters, users are composing sprawling, multi-post essays. Previously, creators had to make all that work available for free; now, they can more effectively generate earnings from their threaded content. |
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LISTEN UP 🎙️ |
 | The latest report from The Influencer Marketing Factory breaks down the curves and barbells of the creator economy. |
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This week on the podcast… |
The episode: On the latest installment of Creator Upload, hosts Joshua Cohen and Lauren Schnipper dive into a new report from The Influencer Marketing Factory to unravel the harsh realities of the creator middle class. |
Also on the agenda: Tubefilter's own Sam Gutelle joins the show to explain the wild world of "kidslop" content and the rise of Brazilian phonk music. |
It's all right here on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. |
The survey: Creator Upload wants your opinion! Take this survey to help us understand who's tuning in and what you want more (or less) of from the show. |
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Today's newsletter is from: Emily Burton, Drew Baldwin, Sam Gutelle, James Hale, and Josh Cohen. |
