Welcome to Think Like A Creator!

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💭 I Need to Talk About This

Instagram has just made its biggest move into long-form video since IGTV.

On Monday, Adam Mosseri and Tessa Lyons announced that Instagram is testing something called Features. They’re horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long, aimed squarely at podcasters, comedians and anyone else making full-length shows, and they’re being tested with a small group of creators in the US and Brazil. They’ll show up in the main feed and on Explore, creators will be able to link a Reel straight to the full-length version, and there’s a dedicated Series section for episodic Reels on the way too.

And just a few days before that, Instagram launched its TV app on Apple TV, joining Fire TV, Google TV and Samsung smart TVs, with a “watch together with friends and family” angle built in.

Put those two things together and the message is pretty clear.

Instagram wants to be on your telly.

Why now?

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Welcome to Think Like A Creator!

From now on, twice a week, I’ll be in your inbox with:

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In case you missed it, the government is reportedly considering stretching the TV licence fee (which is heading up to £180 a year) across streaming services.

So if you’re watching YouTube, Netflix, Amazon or Disney+ on your TV, you could soon be paying the BBC for the privilege, whether you’ve watched a single minute of the BBC or not.

The reasoning, apparently, is that loads of people are now watching TV through these platforms and swerving the licence fee as a result.

To which my honest response is... huh?!

Read more

And what a one to come back with, because I’ve been buzzing about this all week, so forgive me in advance if I get a bit carried away 😅

Back in 2016, Jamie Pollitt was on a year out before uni with no money, no plan and a very honest assessment of his own footballing ability (*”I always say I was a centre back in a good team. I’ll play holding midfield in a sh**t team” 😂).

He knew he wanted to work in football though, so he did what any of us would do and asked his mum.

She told him: “Work out what everyone in football wants, and then they’ll come to you.”

And what does everyone in football want? To know who the next Pogba is going to be before anyone else does! So she told him to start a blog about it, and off he went.

Ten years later, that blog is Rising Ballers, a football media business with around 15 million followers across its brands, 40-odd full-time staff, a big office in London, a brand new one in New York, and campaigns for Nike and Adidas under its belt.

Oh, and this month a kid who used to play for their Sunday team in West London signed for Manchester City for a reported £65 million. Casual 🤯

Jamie came on Think Like A Creator this week, and I could have listened to him tell stories for another three hours. Pretty much every chapter of this journey has a lesson in it for anyone out here building with passion, so I want to break it down for you.

Grab a tea/coffee and get comfy 👇

CHAPTER ONE: Solve one problem better than anyone else

Jamie started out writing articles on a WordPress site about young players nobody else was covering, basically sat at home playing PlayStation in between deep-diving academy footballers (which, let’s be honest, sounds like the dream).

He quickly realised nobody was reading his written content though, so he started an Instagram page called Football Prospects and began making compilation videos of these players to drive people back to the blog.

Every other football page at the time was sticking cheesy Euro EDM music under their highlight reels, and Jamie just thought... nah, that’s not really my vibe. So he put Drake on his instead!

Such a tiny decision, but it made his stuff feel completely different to everything else out there, and within two or three months he’d hit 10,000 followers, which on 2016 Instagram was a seriously big number.

When I asked him why it worked so quickly, he put it perfectly:

“Everyone was broad. We were niche. We focused on one sector of football and just went for it.”

He wasn’t covering football, or even young footballers really. He was covering academy players at the exact moment Premier League managers refused to give them a game, and he was the only one championing them. So of course the audience found him!

CHAPTER TWO: The DM is a cheat code (and always has been)

Pretty soon the DMs started rolling in. An under-15 from QPR messaged asking if Jamie would make a video of him, and Jamie instantly clocked it as a growth hack, because if you make the kid a video and he tags you, that’s 50 to 100 new followers right there.

So in 2017, just before the England under-17s headed off to the Euros, he DM’d every single player in the squad.

And who was in that squad? Only Phil Foden, Jadon Sancho, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Conor Gallagher, Emile Smith Rowe... the golden generation!

The first one to reply was either Foden or Hudson-Odoi (Jamie still can’t remember which, which I find hilarious), and the message was simply: “Love your videos, man. Make a video. I’ll post it. Tag me.”

Then it went round the changing room, and all of a sudden a uni student on a student loan was making videos for the next decade of English football from his laptop. Wild!!

I said this on the pod and I’ll say it again here because I really do believe it: people are far too proud to DM these days. Think about how many messages and emails went into this story, it must be thousands, and most of us are too scared to send even one.

CHAPTER THREE: Your biggest rival might be your future co-founder

A mate at uni shows Jamie a page called Rising Ballers, which is posting about exactly the same players and has around 50,000 followers to his 15,000. Jamie’s reaction? “Oh my god, these guys are ahead of me. What the hell?” 😂

He sulks for a day or two, then gets his confidence back (“Actually, my videos are better than them. They just had first mover advantage. Let me chase them”), and the two pages spend a couple of months basically racing each other to discover players first.

Then in October 2017 a random DM arrives from a guy Jamie’s never heard of, and all it says is “yo.”

It’s the founder of Rising Ballers, and he wants to meet. Jamie tries to play it cool, so the guy absolutely checkmates him:

“How long did it take you to get to 20,000 followers? I’m already at 50 or 60. If I want, I can just breeze past you. So if I were you, I’d have the conversation.”

So Jamie gets a bus back from Bristol to a coffee shop near Oxford Circus, and in walk two brothers, one who looks about his age and one who looks about fourteen. It’s frosty to start with, as you’d expect from two rival pages, but then they start talking players (do you know him at Reading? do you know him at Chelsea?) and four hours later they’ve become best friends and agreed to go into business together.

One brother had the business head from working in the city, the younger one was an academy player who knew the scene from the inside, and Jamie was the video guy. The perfect team really! They kept the Rising Ballers name too, because, in the brothers’ words, “Football Prospects, your name’s a bit rubbish, mate.”

The lesson here is a big one for me. The person you think is your competition could easily be the missing piece of your business, and sometimes all it takes to find out is one coffee.

CHAPTER FOUR: It only takes one

Around the same time, Jamie was desperate to start a YouTube channel, and being completely obsessed with the Nike Academy, he hunted down the head coach online and asked for an interview, and somehow the guy said yes!

He had zero budget though, so he found a golf club in Essex willing to rent him a meeting room for £20, set up a school table, stuck his iPhone 6 on a tripod from Amazon and got ready to film.

And then, right before they started recording, the coach casually drops this:

“I’m not sure you really want to do this, because they’re closing the Nike Academy.”

Nobody had broken that news anywhere, and Jamie had just stumbled straight into a scoop in a £20 room in Essex 😂

He uploaded it with a title along the lines of “Why is Nike Academy closing?” and then completely forgot about it for a month. When he finally logged back in he had 60,000 views, over 1,000 subscribers and a spot on the YouTube Partner Programme... off his very first video!

Like we said on the pod, it really only takes one. But that one only happens when you’re actually in the room, and Jamie was in that room because he’d spent months turning up for things nobody had asked him to turn up for.

CHAPTER FIVE: From the screen to the pitch

By 2018 the page was sitting at around 100,000 followers, and Nike’s football brand director had invited them in for their very first deal: about £3,000 and some product to post about the new Phantom boot. (“For us at the time it was crazy money.” Honestly, I remember that feeling so well!)

But Jamie was noticing something bigger. The academy kids already had a whole system around them, and the players who really needed help were the ones who’d been released, a lot of whom were his mates. So he asked the brilliant question:

“Why can’t we help them in a tangible way, actually on the pitch, rather than just on social?”

They announced the Rising Ballers Academy with open trials at Westway, funded by Jamie’s student loan, a bit of city salary and whatever a 15-year-old footballer had in his pocket at the time.

Jamie was so nervous that he posted the announcement, switched his phone off and went to the gym. When he came out he had ten missed calls and 3,000 applications, and within a week it was 6,000! One of them was even playing for Real Madrid’s under-15s (“I’m replying like, mate, I think you should stay at Madrid” 😂).

On trial day it snowed, his mum (bless her) set up a desk with printed consent forms because she was terrified about the lack of insurance, and standing quietly in the corner in a tracksuit was a Manchester City scout.

“I saw your stuff on Rising Ballers. Came down to see if there was anything.”

That was the moment Jamie realised this thing could get players signed, which is huge when you think about where it was headed.

CHAPTER SIX: Know your worth (or find someone who does!)

This chapter features Jamal Edwards, rest in peace, a true legend. SBTV did for UK music what Rising Ballers was trying to do for football, and Jamal became a mentor to Jamie.

One day Jamal posted a story asking for somewhere to film with quad bikes, and Jamie instantly offered up his parents’ field in Essex without fully explaining the situation to his mum. Cue a lorry and five production cars pulling onto the drive while she stood there wondering what on earth her son had done 😂

It turned out to be a Huawei shoot, and by the end of the day Huawei wanted Jamie in the campaign as well, offering him £8,000. He rang Jamal absolutely buzzing, and here’s how that went:

“He’s just like, ‘Jamie, shut up.’ He shouts at me down the phone. ‘You’re going to email back. You’re going to turn it down. You’re going to ask for 10.’”

So he did, and they got £10,000 for one Instagram post. That was the exact moment it stopped being a hobby:

“Mate, we’ve just got 10 grand in our bank account. I’m going to drop out of uni.”

And his co-founder’s reply might be the best line of the whole episode: “Well, if you’re dropping out of uni, I’m going to quit my job.”

By the end of January 2019 Nike had come back with a game-changing deal, and the business was officially off and running 🚀

There are two lessons tucked in here for me. The deal came from being useful to someone without asking for anything in return, and the extra two grand came from having a mentor who knew what the work was worth. Most first-time founders massively undercharge (I definitely did), and Jamie would have too.

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Iliman story 🔥

Okay, this is the one everyone wants to hear about, and it’s even better than I expected.

Rising Ballers had posted a clip of some kid doing a ridiculous run past a goalkeeper without even knowing his name. Then their top scorer, a striker called Gim, sent a voice note into the group chat saying he’d just played five-a-side at Westway with an 18-year-old French kid they had to sign.

Jamie said no, because they had players coming out of their ears at that point. So Gim came back with this:

“Jamie, I will sit on the bench for this kid. He’s got more talent in his little finger than I’ve got in my whole body.”

When a striker offers to give up his own place for someone, you listen, and that’s the moment Jamie said yes.

That kid was Iliman Ndiaye. He barely spoke English, he’d been at Marseille as a child before moving to Senegal and then Tottenham, and clubs had already rejected him. Because he’d been in Marseille’s academy, any club that signed him had to pay them compensation, which is exactly why so many clubs wouldn’t take the risk.

He played fewer than ten games for Rising Ballers, but they filmed him doing skills in a cage in Ladbroke Grove and posted him constantly, to the point where Sheffield United’s recruitment guy kept ringing Jamie begging him to stop (“I’m like, mate, I’m going to post about it. He’s a baller. What are you going to do?” 😂).

Then Jamie’s phone completely blew up with Chelsea, Tottenham, Fulham and Arsenal all getting in touch, so he organised a game at Market Road where every club could come and watch, and whoever won, won.

Then at midnight on the Friday, a WhatsApp:

“Hi Jamie. I can’t play tomorrow.”

Iliman’s dad had shaken hands with Sheffield United. No contract, just a handshake, and as a man of his word he wasn’t going back on it.

So the next morning every Premier League club turned up at Market Road asking where the French kid was, and Jamie had to stand there and say “Yeah, he couldn’t make it today. But Malachi’s quite good, isn’t he, though, mate?” 😂 (They were not impressed, apparently.)

Iliman’s dad saw that at Chelsea or Arsenal his son would just be a number, while at Sheffield United he’d have a far faster path to the first team, and they’d been the club willing to pay Marseille when nobody else would.

Iliman went on loan to non-league up north, learned to fight for every ball... and this month he signed for Manchester City. I’ve got goosebumps just writing that!

“We’ve all lived our dreams through him.”

SO WHAT CAN WE TAKE FROM ALL THIS?

1. Work out what everyone wants, and become the person who gives it to them. Jamie’s mum absolutely nailed this back in 2016. At its core, Rising Ballers was never really a media business, it was the answer to one question the entire football world was asking. That’s what the best businesses do, they solve a problem! So ask yourself: what does everyone in your industry want to know before anyone else, and are you the one telling them?

2. Go niche before you go big. Jamie didn’t cover football, he covered academy players at a time when managers wouldn’t trust them. Today Rising Ballers has 15 million followers across a whole family of brands, including She’s A Baller in women’s football and an Arabic-language page, but it earned the right to go broad by owning one tiny corner first.

3. Do the reps when nobody’s watching. This was Jamie’s advice for anyone starting out, and I think it’s beautiful:

“When you’re posting on social for the first time, it feels like you’re in a cave shouting about something and no one’s listening. It can feel incredibly lonely. But if you power through that, it might be one year, two years, three years, they’re the reps that you need to do.”

4. Ego kills potential. Released academy players turn down non-league because they “used to be at Man City”, then sit on the bench at a level that sounds impressive until they turn 20 and time runs out. Iliman took the less glamorous move for game time, and that’s exactly why it worked.

5. Relentlessness IS the strategy. Getting the bus from Bristol to Cobham because he couldn’t afford the train, sneaking into training grounds, thousands of DMs and emails between three lads all fitting it around uni, a city job and school. Jamie called it the oldest entrepreneurial cliché in the book, and he’s right, but from the outside it looked like they moved crazy fast when really they just never stopped.

Never underestimate what one person, in a brilliant niche and enough relentlessness, can change 🫡

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

Jordan

👉 Watch the full episode here

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

Jordan

I couldn’t have been more excited to have had Jun Yuh on the show.

He is, honestly, the reason the phrase “study creator” stopped being a niche corner of YouTube and started being a business model.

He walked away from a biomedical engineering degree and a career already lined up at some of the biggest pharma companies in the world.

Now he’s got 8 million+ followers, a company called Career College that’s done $11.3 million in under 15 months, and he just sold out a 1,300-person live event in London.

He’s sharp, thoughtful, and open about the mechanics of how he achieved all of the above.

This episode covers:

• how he turned a $49 PDF guide into six figures

• why he builds every product in public with his audience before it’s finished

• his three-part storytelling framework

• why he thinks becoming the niche (not being in one) is the method

Jun also opens up about his family’s immigration from Korea, his parents’ divorce, and how faith - what he calls “embracing the cross” - now shapes how he runs his business and shows up on camera.

Link below to give it a watch if you haven’t already 👇

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

Jordan

Was it:

A: a crime doc

B: a returning drama?

C: a new netflix original film?

D: was it an ad?

Have a guess.

…

If you guessed D, you’d be spot on.

The GTA VI Extended Look, Rockstar’s trailer for the long-awaited game that comes out on November 19th, pulled 31.1 million views in four days on Netflix.

Number one in 87 of the 93 countries Netflix tracks.

Rockstar had the biggest piece of upcoming entertainment IP on the planet in the GTA VI trailer.

Netflix, which is now in the ad business as well as the subscription business, cut them a distribution deal.

Six hours of exclusivity on the platform.

Then the video moved to YouTube and picked up another 17 million views for free.

Both sides walked away with a headline win.

Don’t get it twisted though. Rockstar did not need Netflix.

Rockstar’s own YouTube pulled 17 million views in the days after the exclusivity window closed.

Their game is projected to sell tens of millions of copies at reportedly over $80 a pop.

They could have skipped Netflix entirely and hit those numbers on their own channels, easily.

They chose Netflix because it was strategically useful.

A legitimising cultural signal, a piece of packaging, a headline. Which means, if you follow the logic through, that the power dynamic in this deal was completely inverted from how you’d have previously described a “trailer on Netflix” deal.

In this deal? Rockstar was the gatekeeper and Netflix was the platform hoping to rent the moment.

Now the bigger point is the category boundary this deal just crushed.

Let’s line it up.

The most-watched thing that week, on Netflix, was an advert.

An ad, sitting at the top of the same charts that Squid Game 2 and Adolescence and The Crown sat on.

I can’t help but feel like that is the definition of “content” being publicly, formally, unambiguously redrawn in front of us.

Because if an ad can be the most-watched thing on Netflix, then the words we’ve been using for decades (show, film, ad, trailer, content, promo) don’t really mean what they used to.

They’re all just entertainment now.

And entertainment is entertainment, wherever it comes from, whoever paid for it, whatever it’s ostensibly selling.

I have been writing versions of “the lines are blurring” in this newsletter for years. This is not “the lines are blurring.” This is more like the lines being erased.

So what does this mean?

1. If you’re a brand, you’re now in the entertainment business whether you like it or not.

You must embody a fundamental belief that your ad has to earn its viewer.

2. If you’re a platform, your job is no longer to be the sole gatekeeper. It’s to be the strategically useful one.

Rockstar already had plenty of distribution. Netflix’s power here was legitimisation.

A trailer on Netflix carries a different cultural weight than a trailer on YouTube (for now).

3. If you’re a creator, or a business trying to be one, the primetime slot is conceptually up for grabs.

The idea that “primetime” is an inherited privilege of legacy broadcast is done.

Primetime is now whoever can command attention on that scale, in that concentrated way, against that competition.

That means the door is open for anyone with a big enough idea, packaged well enough, distributed cleverly enough, to do the same.

To sum up:

1. Ads are content

2. Content is ads

3. Entertainment is entertainment

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

Jordan

• Max Fosh

• John Nellis

• Fallow Chefs

• Generation Football

• Friends From Work

• Faith Kelly

All joining alongside The Sidemen.

I explain everything in this Deadline Hollywood piece- why we're doing this, why now, and what we think the future of creator media is actually going to look like.

But the headline: the top 1% of creators can now operate as full media companies. They just need the right infrastructure behind them, and that’s what Arcade is now built to be.

We're also hosting Europe's first ever creator Upfront next Thursday - 150 advertisers, brands, and partners in one room getting a sneak peek at what's coming next, and how they might get involved.

TV has always had Upfronts. It's about time creators got one too.

The next few months are going to be something else.

LET’S GO!!

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

Jordan

Mia went from a £30,000 fashion showroom salary and a childhood bedroom in Lewisham to one of the most recognisable names in UK personal finance… in just two years.

• She has over a million followers

• Has generated £400,000+ in revenue

• HMRC and the FCA on her client list

• A multitude of speaking opportunities

Plus: A book publishing in January with Harriman House (the publisher behind The Psychology of Money)

With all that in mind, you can imagine how excited I was that she agreed to be on the Think Like A Creator podcast!

We talked all about things like: how much she lost on dividend stocks, a Charlie Munger line she took so literally it became her whole brand, the £█████+ in brand deals she’s turned down, and Frugal Chic’s full P&L.

Mia also broke down her:

• Sole trader revenue: £██k

• Ltd company revenue: £███k

• Monthly cost base: £██k a month walking out the door

• VAT bill: £██k

• Corporation tax bill: nearly touching £██k

You only get the numbers if you watch it 😉

But maybe my favourite thing we talked about was why staying in her original fashion job would have been the riskier move than becoming a content creator.

That reframe alone is worth the watch imo.

Ep is out now! You’ll thank me later 🫡

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

Jordan

Brands often STINK at content.

That’s not a controversial statement in this newsletter.

I’ve written that in some form ~200 times over the last two years.

Most of the time when I say that though, I think people assume I mean the visuals.

Yeah that’s part of it, for sure.

But when I say brands stink at content, I’m also talking about…

cue: drumroll 🥁

…sound.

The reason this is at the top of my mind today is because I read an interesting piece of research from Ipsos on it.

They went through more than two thousand video ads. And when they looked at which held attention, the ads that used sonic branding well got eight-and-a-half times more attention than the ones that didn’t.

Wild.

Every best-in-class creator I’ve worked with has their sound dialed in.

• You know a Chicken Shop Date from the intro

• You know an Inside episode before anyone’s spoken

It is the sonic equivalent of a brand identity: a recognisable, ownable, repeatable audio signature that tells your audience what they’re about to experience before the first frame of visuals has done any of the work.

Now the other side, I’ve also run campaigns for brands where sound was the very last decision anyone made.

By the time the video reached editing, there was no sonic direction from the brand or brief on what the brand should feel like sonically.

You’d end up with an editor scrolling through a stock library at 11pm the night before delivery, picking something that vaguely fit the mood.

You can guess how those campaigns performed!

A lifetime ago now, if you were a brand, you made maybe twelve substantial assets a year.

One person (usually the creative director, sometimes the founder) picked the music.

There was a coherence to the sound because there was a small enough volume of work for one taste-maker to keep their hand on it.

That world is long gone.

The average brand now produces hundreds of pieces of video content per month across multiple markets.

Working on those assets are a stack of agencies, in-house teams, freelance editors, creators, ambassadors, and TikTok house partnerships.

In nearly all of those brands, there is zero sonic consistency across any of it.

Which is baffling my friends!! Sound is doing more work per second than visuals are.

Sound bypasses the rational part of the brain and lands emotionally, immediately, before the viewer has decided whether to engage. It tells the audience what kind of experience they’re about to have and it creates recognition (the single most valuable thing any brand asset can create at this stage of the attention economy).

And most brands are just… leaving that work undone.

Or worse, redoing it inconsistently across every single campaign.

If I could persuade every brand and every operator reading this to do one thing, it would be this:

Treat sound as a pillar of your brand identity.

And because people love to put things off, I’ve been taking the initiative and sending brand-side teams I talk to over to Epidemic Sound lately.

If you’re running a business that’s producing more video than you can currently keep sonically consistent, they’re the place I’d start.

Eight-and-a-half times more attention sitting on the table people!!

Get on it.

Want to hear me yap about this instead?

Here you go 👇

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

Jordan

It’s called Farr, Cragun & Berube.

They cover family law, personal injury, adoption, estate planning… that sort of thing.

Their Instagram account, fcbattorneys, has 21.8K followers

Which for a small local law firm is already a bit unusual, but that isn’t really the story.

The story is that their best-performing video has 46.8 million views and 3.2 million likes!

🤯

How on earth??

The short answer, as far as I can piece together: they hired someone who’s native to Instagram and just let them make the account fun.

Out with the muted-blue quote graphic saying “we fight for you.”

In with the native, loose and easy to consume content made by someone who thinks in the language of Instagram from the inside, rather than someone who’s translating a corporate brand into it.

If you take a min to think about what industries are most structurally allergic to doing this… law is right at the top of the list.

Law firms are almost architecturally built to be self-serious.

Which is why 99% of law firm Instagram accounts probably look identical.

FCB has obviously escaped that. And their reward for escaping is what looks like more organic top-of-funnel awareness in a single viral week than most local law firms generate in a decade.

I’m not saying every small business should chase 46 million views on Instagram.

That’s a lightning strike, and shouldn’t be treated as replicable.

What you should learn from this is: the reason your industry is under-represented on social is that your industry keeps letting the wrong people run its social.

Every professional-services business I’ve ever spoken to about content usually says “We tried Instagram, it didn’t work.” Or “we post occasionally but the engagement is dead.”

In these situations, the person making the content for them usually isn’t platform-native. It’s either the youngest associate who “gets social” in the sense that they use it personally, or an agency who “does law firms” in the sense that they’ve built a template and rolled it out to 100s of firms.

Neither of those people is likely going to make you a video that gets 46 million views.

It’s really only someone who thinks in the language of the platform that will.

FCB’s genius was hiring outside their pattern. Bringing in someone whose whole competency was Instagram itself, not the practice of law. And then, presumably, having the discipline to not approve every draft, not sand off every joke, and not force the content into the shape of what a law firm “should” look like.

That last bit is the same self-sabotage pattern I wrote about with the NFL piece a couple of weeks ago. Legacy institutions understand that creators matter, they just can’t stomach handing over the wheel.

Two takeaways for anyone reading this who runs a small or mid-sized business 👇

If you decide to try this kind of platform takeover, hire someone whose specialism is the platform and then get out of their way.

Every business that runs the opposite of that (over-approving, over-sanitising, over-thinking, endlessly focus-grouping) will see little to no results.

FCB has 46 million views and 19,500 followers from one video because they didn’t do that.

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

Jordan

P.S.

If you enjoyed this, you’ll love Community Service, my co-written newsletter with Grace Andrews. Check it out using the link below.

Community Service

Your weekly briefing on creators, brands & media. By Grace Andrews & Jordan Schwarzenberger.

It pulled a peak of 175,500 concurrent viewers and generated 1.75 million hours watched.

By the metrics of most creator events, that’s a success.

By the metrics of “did this make money”, it wasn’t.

Turns out the first Streamer Games lost cash.

Fast forward two summers and the 2026 edition, held at USC’s Allyson Felix Track & Field, hit a peak of 512,984 concurrent viewers, generated 6.45 million hours watched across 15 hours of airtime, sold ~2,100 in-person tickets across the weekend, and produced an estimated $4.6 million in media value (Esports Charts’ advertising-equivalent estimate). Sponsored by Red Bull, Alienware and AT&T. Eight teams from six countries. Broadcasts in English, French and Portuguese, delivered by 90+ co-streaming channels.

It’s undeniable that this is a pretty sharp three-year growth curve, and I want to break down how it happened.

Let’s start with the numbers 👇

YEAR ONE

The whole thing was a hunch.

Ludwig had this idea… creators watching creators do sports on a high-school field. There were no sponsors of any real size and no commercial spine. He had his own cash, a rented pitch, and 24 co-streaming channels helping distribute it.

The event concluded with 175,500 concurrent viewers at it’s peak, and 1.75 million hours watched. But it was a loss on the books.

I feel like most creators/business owners of ANY kind would have either quit (“well, we tried, numbers don’t work”) or worse: scale up in Year 2. “The audience is there, let’s make it bigger, more expensive, more ambitious.” And lose more money at more scale.

Ludwig intelligently and patiently treated Year 1 as market research.

He knew for a fact that the audience had an appetite for this, he just needed to put his head down and make the economics work in his favour.

Almost nobody thinks that way when their first attempt loses money.

But the losing IS the data.

YEAR TWO

The whole game in Year 2 was fixing the $$$.

So he went and got Red Bull on board, as you do.

They came in as an ANCHOR with full naming rights.

Red Bull Streamer Games, their name on the whole show. And with that anchor in place, the commercial spine of the event existed.

On top of that, Ludwig took the co-streaming partners from 24 to more than 90 (nearly a 4x).

Peak viewers more than doubled to 374,674, hours watched more than doubled to 3.74 million and the event didn’t make a loss.

More importantly, the model was proven once again.

YEAR THREE

Ludwig restructured the whole thing around 8 international teams.

USA. UK. France. Mexico. Canada. Plus All-Stars, Worldwide and Alumni. Dedicated French and Portuguese broadcasts run by local creators in those markets. 2,100 in-person tickets. Alienware and AT&T alongside Red Bull. Merch on site at USC.

• Peak: 512,984 concurrent viewers

• Hours watched: 6.45 million

• Media value: $4.6M

Year 3 is clearly the sexy year.

It’s got big flashy numbers, a great story behind it, ample headlines, press write-ups, the lot.

It may be redundant to say, but Year 3 only exists because of trials of Year 1 and 2.

Keep that in mind as you read on.

I think it’s important to make sure I share my own musings alongside the facts of the story.

So all I really have to say is…

YOU CANNOT SKIP YEAR ONE!

So many people try, almost nobody manages it.

I get it…

Year 1 is boring, it costs you money, it probably doesn’t have a nice press release at the end of it.

Year 2 is boring too.

Your year 3 might even be boring too.

Nobody wants those years.

Everyone wants to start their day 1 already in the glamorous years, where everything has neatly fallen into place without having to deal with any of the mundane that came before it.

But you don’t get to that point without the boring ones first.

There isn’t a version of this business, of ANY business, where you skip them and it works out.

Those years are a tax.

Pay it.

And try to remember what a blessing it is to be able to experience those years in the first place.

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

Jordan

The YOUNG ONE in the room. The resident barometer of ‘gen z relevance’. It was an elite selling point. My entire packaging. “I understand Gen Z. Listen to me. I AM YOUNG and GET IT”.

But the other day, I realised something. No longer was I the youngest in the room. W

hen did that happen? Far from it in fact. Meeting after meeting, hire after hire, interview after interview. I was, in 90% of them, the oldest one. Quietly, like an invading TikTok and Matcha drinking militia, the latest legion of ‘youths’ with relevance had come through. Now you’re the old man in the Gen Z common room.

Because well, I am Unc now.

How quickly things change. Now I can’t rely on ‘age’. Not that I’m old, but ‘futureproofing’ is no longer the selling point of my value. My value has to be deeper than that now. Becoming about taste, cultural insight, supporting that next crop, talent spotting the next generation. Putting wisdom to good use. In a word - my value is in being Unc.

This got me thinking about, what I would say to the 18 year old feeling fresh in the game, who is now the Unc with 5 kids and a wife.

Here are 7 small thoughts for him, a decade on from the beginning:

1. Work is not WHO you are - do not conflate your identity with something as fickle as productivity, emails and Slack. Find a deeper reason to do what you do.

2. Goodness passes forward - the better you are to others, the further you will progress and the happier you will be. Pass goodness on, and never take the selfish way.

3. Great work compounds - daily tasks done well, build into great things over time. Don’t worry about a year ahead, the next move, the promotion - focus on simply doing the best that you can today.

4. Great people are the point - although you’re there for the work, it’s the people you work with that make it. Surround yourself with the best, kindest, A+ team types and you’ll never truly work a day in your life.

5. Attitude and energy is more important than you think - you are judged far more on attitude/energy/vibe/aura (or lack thereof) than you probably realise. Ask yourself: How do you present yourself? Are you RELIABLE and show up again and again? Are you kind and easy to be around? Small things - but don’t think they go unnoticed, or worse, are unimportant.

6. Stay ahead of your game - learning what’s next, trend watching, writing, reading about your industry, these are fundamental to progressing. Without knowing what’s coming next, your value is limited to now, and ‘now’ will be replaced by ‘next’. Love your industry. Nerd out on it. Become an expert about it. Or find a new one.

7. Order yourself, and there will be peace - As St. Augustine beautifully put it, “peace is the tranquility of order”. No ‘order’, no peace. All things in their rightful place and do not let work become your ‘god’.

But above all remember.

YOU WILL NOT BE YOUNG FOREVER.

Time will go faster than you’d ever imagine.

But what a blessing it is.

That one day, you get to become Unc too.

Every trending topic on X. Clips galore. Goal after goal. Instagram story after Instagram story of United’s demise.

And it has got me thinking. What else is truly left?

Music, meh. Film and TV, very hit or miss. Art, forget it.

What. Is. Left. Except. Football?

We have talked a lot here about the monoculture fading since TikTok and social media replaced the media town square. Decentralised feeds, TikTok personalising your experience to the extreme, we have no shared reference points. It’s quite sad, really.

The numbers back that up. Ofcom’s Media Nations report in July found 70% of people watched anything from a traditional broadcaster for 15 minutes in an average week last year, down from 78% in 2022. Netflix is now the first place 26% of viewers look when they want something to watch. The BBC is on 25%. YouTube viewing on TV sets has doubled since 2022, from nine minutes a day to nineteen.

Cinema is in the same place. UK admissions were 123.5 million in 2025, 30% below 2019, and 17 of the top 20 films were sequels, remakes, franchise entries or video game IP. Music is more transient than it has ever been. Film is transient apart from the odd exception. TV does not have the pull. Even the biggest one, the Celebrity Traitors finale, did 14.8 million and that was a once a year event.

Football, however, is the big exception that proves the rule, and it is in a league of its own.

Sky’s total Premier League viewing was up 25% year on year last season, its most watched Premier League campaign ever. Average match slot audiences were up 9%, and that is with games running concurrently on Sunday afternoons. They showed 225 matches exclusively live and will do at least 215 again this season, part of over 1,500 live matches across the Prem, EFL, WSL and Scottish Premiership.

The growth is not just here either. In America, matches across NBC and USA Network averaged 535,000 per match window, up 5%. NBC’s own network broadcasts averaged 1.2 million, their most watched Premier League season ever, with 18 matches topping a million, up 50% on the year before. Americans consumed 18.33 billion minutes of it.

And it actually MOVES people out of the house where so little else does. 70% of pub going sports viewers said the increase in available matches gave them more reason to go to a venue. 63% watched more Prem in pubs than the season before. Nothing else in media and culture is driving physical trial like that.

It’s the GOAT. Simple.

Yes, the World Cup is the World Cup and people are warmed up. That will always be the ultimate monocultural experience. But that comes round every four years. The Prem does it every weekend for nine months consistently. World Cup or not.

Three reasons I think it holds like nothing else.

One. It is one of the only remaining safe spaces for overt (predominantly male) emotion. Highs, lows, venting, tribalism. TV does not do that anymore. Film barely does. Football is a physical and virtual space that lets it out, and emotion is what drives consumption. If you do not care, you do not consume.

Two. In a world that is getting harder for most people, it is a returnable haven. Joy and pain in a contained space. A quasi religious substitute with something naturalistically ‘above’ you to attach your sentiments, and it refreshes every year, so there is no permanence and no real ramifications come May next year.

Three. In a world of bingeable short form, AI slop and format fatigue, it is the one thing you had to be there for. Ofcom found 85% of sports viewing last year was watched live. Across all TV, live is 45%. Sport is watched live at nearly twice the rate of everything else.

And that is why live sports rights have gone astronomically high. It is why, if I were a betting man, I would keep putting chips down on live. I do not think it has an expiry date, and that is exactly why it is worth what it is worth.

But what does it mean if you are building in culture today? What can we learn from this?

Well today, live entertainment is the countercultural play. Live is where AI fatigue goes to rest. Anything you can operate that puts a real thing in a real room at a real time is worth more today than it was a year ago.

And that is worth your full attention. Double down, because the draw of “you had to be there” is not going anywhere.

Sources (for the nerds):

• Ofcom, Media Nations 2026 (July 2026) — broadcaster weekly reach down to 70% from 78% in 2022; Netflix 26% and BBC 25% as first choice; YouTube TV-set viewing doubled from 9 to 19 minutes a day; 85% of sports viewing watched live; Celebrity Traitors finale at 14.8m.

• Barb, What People Watched in 2025 (February 2026) — live viewing at 45% of total TV-set viewing.

• Sky Sports season figures (May and July 2026) — Premier League viewing up 25%, match slot audiences up 9%, 225 matches exclusively live, 215 and 1,500+ live matches in 2026/27, pub-going data via Ipsos.

• NBC Sports 2025/26 season wrap (May 2026) — 535,000 average per match window, NBC network average of 1.2m, 18 matches over a million, 18.33 billion minutes consumed.

• BFI annual statistics (February 2026) — UK cinema admissions of 123.5m in 2025, down 30% on 2019, with 17 of the top 20 films sequels, remakes, franchise or game IP.

The offer comes, they report, in two parts. YouTube financing programmes directly, and giving creators a share of the proceeds from certain brand campaigns that the platform sells centrally. In return, videos go up on YouTube first and stay there for a set window. Basically, becoming a commissioner. No deals have been signed yet. Several are said to be close. There is a warning attached as well. Creators who publish on Netflix at the same time have been told they could lose marketing support, event opportunities and access to some of that brand revenue.

What YouTube are effectively doing is commissioning creators. Let’s call a play button shaped spade, a spade.

I find this interesting for a few reasons. The first is that I know both parties well. They’re both the best at what they do. The Sidemen, for reference, have a Netflix deal alongside a number of other creators like Salish Matter, Mark Rober and Ms Rachel. On the flip side, I work with YouTube very closely. So I have sat on both sides of this media table.

My view though, is that this is a game of perception and shareholder value more than it is about the users.

Here’s what I mean. I look at YouTube and I see the biggest video search engine in the world. I look at Netflix and I see the biggest editorial video entertainment company in the world. Those are two very different businesses.

For consumers the difference is obvious. YouTube represents decentralisation. Anyone can post, there are no limits, and it is a total meritocracy of content surfaced by an algorithm. That algorithm is not free from editorial decision making, but the meritocracy is real and it is the whole reason the platform works. Netflix is the other end of the scale. Totally editorial, highly curated, built around having the most premium content in the world.

Netflix have (one could argue - although I disagree) ‘encroached’ on YouTube. They have taken a lot of creators and given them a new platform. I understand why that may sting.

But I do not believe these two are actually competitive. They serve totally different purposes, they exist in their own lanes, and they should not be put side by side. One is a search engine. The other is an editorial business. It is like comparing Google to the New York Times and saying one is competitive with the other, when that is simply not the case.

For creators, both provide an incredible amount of value, uniquely. I always say those are the two places a creator should be. I see them as completely complementary. I do not see them as needing to squabble, or go one for one to stop creators moving around.

Because ultimately, YouTube creators need YouTube. It is the lifeblood of their connection with their audience. Netflix will not replace that. And on the other hand, Netflix need creators to bring fresh content to the platform, and they provide creators with a new audience. It works perfectly, both ways.

The idea that the two are mutually exclusive is wrong, and it goes against the reality of the deals actually being done.

So everyone needs a break from the competitive streaming charts. Maybe have a Netflix and chill. Take a breath. Go on a date night. Because there isn’t in reality, much to fight about.

But for those with memories of a hamster, what is DiVine and its predecessor, Vine.

What is it: It’s a six second looping video app, built by former Twitter employee Evan Henshaw-Plath and funded by the Twitter founder and internet OG Jack Dorsey. Interestingly, he holds no equity in it, maybe he doesn’t really believe in it either? The archive isn’t his gift either. More than two million original Vine clips were saved by volunteers who backed the whole thing up before the lights went out, then rebuilt by Henshaw-Plath into something usable. Vine really had a great run at its peak. Seamlessly integrated with Twitter. Launched a Lele Pons and Logan Paul, a King Bach. DEEZ NUTS. Who could forget?

But now, it’s going for the resistance route. It’s open source and built on Nostr, a decentralised protocol, so in theory no corporation can switch it off the way Twitter switched off Vine in 2017. And it bans AI outright. You either record inside the app or your file carries a C2PA trail proving a camera made it. AI slop bros, remove yourself from the chat. If it smells synthetic, you’re blocked.

I think that’s a genuinely interesting move. But I still don’t think it has a place today.

NOW I MAY BE WRONG. Do not shoot me, but I think it will likely flop and not work.

Vine worked because it was first of its kind. When it launched in January 2013, nobody had short form on their phone. Instagram had no video. It added it five months later. Facebook had video that nobody binged as it was still quite the clunker. Six seconds was a constraint that felt like a truly FRESH and fit format. But then Musical.ly nabbed the idea. ByteDance bought Musical.ly, folded it into TikTok, and took the market, and the constraint became a mere novelty of the Zillenial age. DiVine is bringing back the constraint without the scarcity that made the constraint interesting.

However, the redeeming factor for DiVine is the anti AI positioning. Clankers are done for in 2026. We’re over it. So banning AI is a bold move Cotton. But is it enough to move people? I’m not so sure.

Will it make you rich? Well, maybe. But I’m not convinced. CMO Alice Chan says they’re still working it out, that running apps costs money, and that they’ll likely need to raise. Ads aren’t ruled out, but she doesn’t want brands dumping cut-down versions of creative that ran elsewhere, and wants to avoid the trap of what she calls the “monoculture of a single ad algorithm”. I understand the instinct and intent here BUT I also think it’s the problem. Six seconds is thin inventory. Bespoke six second inventory on a platform with no scale is thinner still. Taco Bell has come on board with a 2016 throwback menu campaign, which is the perfect launch partner and tells you exactly what’s being sold here, it’s living in the past.

Will it get you an audience?? Chan’s honest line is that, well, they don’t have a big audience to offer yet, but creators are looking for new places to grow so they might want to play in the DiVine playground. Perhaps, and if you’re building, DiVine is a cheap place to test format ideas and tease longer content, maybe. But it is not a place to build a business or a long term career. For now however, it may be a good sandbox.

Now to repeat. Maybe I’m WRONG, so please remember that. And maybe I’ll give DiVine a go myself. But six seconds was of its time, and its time has been over for nine long years.

Crikey.

Doom and gloom across the British Isles job market. The UK’s jobs data for July this week shows an ever weakening private sector. Payrolls fell by 13,000. Vacancies dropped to 707,000, a five year low! Earnings growth slowed to 2.8%, the lowest rate in six years. Gah. Stress. Horror show.

Sadly, this shows the dismal state of the money making engine of UK at the moment, that is gradually decaying into a second hand hand Toyota Rav4.

It’s worth us sitting with those numbers rather than scrolling past them. They are going one way, and it isn’t up. Fat Joe’s song was not, in fact, about the UK job market. Who knew.

Is there a silver lining?

Well yes. if this climate does anything, it is to push ordinary people who are more prone to the safe path, to question that path entirely. To maybe get the more risk averse among us to say ‘screw it’ and go all in on the pipe dream, that may be more in reach than previously assumed.

Because one way to defend yourself against this contraction is, I believe, a word that starts with c and ends with t. Don’t get any ideas.

Content.

Here’s my honest assessment as to why.

1. Audience is leverage

If you can build your own audience, you have something a CV can’t give you. Landing a job today takes more than a list of previous employers. It takes evidence of agency, and evidence that you’re willing to step outside your comfort zone into the new world rather than wait for the old one to come back.

Employers are also looking harder than ever at how they grow. Turning up with an audience and a personal brand attached to you goes a very long way in that conversation.

2. Content proves things a CV simply can’t

Consistency. Delivery. Creativity. The ability to communicate an idea so someone else understands it.

Every business on earth needs those skills and most people struggle to demonstrate them on paper. Building an audience demonstrates all of them at once, in public, with a timestamp.

3. You can make your own moneeeey

In a country where employment is at the level we’re seeing right now, being able to generate your own money in a growing sector is worth more than it has ever been. That’s agency. That’s not waiting for permission.

And please remember. There is room for you.

Don’t let anybody tell you there’s too much competition. There isn’t. There never has been. There’s always room for new stories and new voices, and the thing that makes you unique is YOU. The room exists you just have to be willing to take it.

In short: think like a creator (duh)

Because when I look at these job numbers my mind goes straight to these 4 words. Now is the time to lean into it. If you run a business, it’s how you grow it. If you have ideas, writing, thoughts, something you want to express, products you want to make, coffee you want to sell, learning how to make content is how you get it out and save yourself rom the doom loop of the UK job market.

It’s how you take control.

A daily short dive into the topic I’ve been most interested in seeing today. Raw, from the notes app, no deep edits. Just the view from my pov. Take it or leave it, don’t shoot me for it.

Today is all about the news that YouTube has changed what a ‘view’ means, from being ‘engaged views’ (typically 30+ seconds so they say) to now the moment the video starts. This is a big change, one that will become an ego boost above all else for creators who have felt deflated of late with the disparity between the YouTube Shorts view frenzy, and the long form view drought.

So is this a good thing? Bad thing? Irrelevant thing?

HEADLINE: I believe this is a GOOD thing. Standardisation is key for predicting and measuring advertising and the cleaner the metrics, the better for everyone. The ego pump will help creators sell more videos, as brands get excited about the big shiny numbers. Bigger numbers help sell content and keep every boomer in the marketing team happy. This is a win.

HOWEVER: do not get fooled into thinking this means more money, it doesn’t. Advertising is sold on video impressions, and AVD (watch time) remains the key metric in relation to Adsense. Therefore more views does not mean more cash but rather, a stroked ego. Still worth something.

SO: this is a way of making metrics consistent, and helping creators on the platform know the true views they’re getting, vs creating a disparity between long form and YouTube Shorts.

So yes, it’s good thing - and nothing to worry about dears.

Get your egos well and truly ready.

Back tomorrow!

A hundred-year-old American institution, arguably one of the most culturally American products ever built, is running a particularly impressive international expansion strategy.

They’ve spent twenty years building in London. Now they’re expanding into Germany and Brazil.

And they’re doing it, almost entirely, through local creators.

If you had to pick the brand least likely to travel - most impenetrable rulebook, most baked-in national identity, most “you had to grow up with it” gatekeeping - the NFL would be near the top of the list. And yet here it is, cracking markets that far more culturally malleable brands have spent decades failing in.

So how? And more importantly, what does it teach anyone else trying to break into a new market?

If you need a reminder of what the old model looks like:

• pay the media

• translate the campaign

• open a local office

• throw a fortune at buying awareness

• job done

The problem is that this model buys awareness but almost never buys trust.

It doesn’t make them care and it really doesn’t make them believe you understand them.

Because how do you make people in another country (with their own humour, their own reference points, their own long memory of being marketed to badly by foreign brands) believe you get them? You almost can’t.

Which is why most international expansion still, in 2026, achieves exactly what it achieved in 2005… high recall, low relevance.

But the NFL have worked out that local creators are the most (maybe only) reliable way to buy trust, cultural fluency and the sense your brand belongs somewhere.

Two things to take from all this if you’re thinking about expanding into a new market, in whatever form that market takes for you.

One: trust is your most vital metric right now. The way you buy trust in a new market is by borrowing it from someone who’s already earned it, then working hard enough to prove they were right to lend it.

Two: if you can’t give up control, save your money. The reason creator strategies fail more often than they should is that the brand behind them couldn’t help but restrict creative freedom.

To sum it up:

If a century-old American football league can convince Germans and Brazilians that it belongs in their culture, whatever expansion challenge you’re facing is almost certainly primed to learn from this.

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

Jordan

P.S.

When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help out 👇️

1. Subscribe to the Think Like A Creator podcast

2. Book here if you want to chat to me on Intro

3. Join our free WhatsApp group (over 500 strong)

P.P.S

If you enjoyed this, you’ll love Community Service, my co-written newsletter with Grace Andrews. Check it out using the link below.

Community Service

Your weekly briefing on creators, brands & media. By Grace Andrews & Jordan Schwarzenberger.

(my source was an Inc article by Victoria Salves, you can read it here)

The deal, in short:

Disney is opening up its IP catalogue (Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, FX, the whole vault) for TikTok creators to make short-form content with.

Creators opt in, get access to an official library of Disney assets, and the work they produce will live both on TikTok itself and inside Disney+’s new Verts tab (their YouTube Shorts-style vertical video feed that launched earlier this year).

Pilots in the US first, other markets to follow.

For context on how unusual this is: other streamers have flirted with vertical video inside their apps. But this is the first time native TikTok content is going to be displayed on an outside platform. TikTok’s content is being licensed into one of the biggest streamers in the world.

And on paper, this is what everyone in the creator space has been asking for.

Access to major IP, sanctioned collaboration with a top-tier studio, distribution on a platform hundreds of millions of people already open every day.

If you’d have described this deal to a Disney fan-creator in 2019, they’d have thought you were describing a fever dream.

But… read the deal carefully and there’s a very obvious thing missing.

The press release talks about a “bigger stage.” Disney’s CMO uses phrases like “a new bridge between the stories we tell and the creativity they inspire.” Both true. What neither he nor the deal itself talks about is compensation. Creator economy expert Lia Haberman wrote in the Inc article: “they are essentially an unpaid labour force.”

Disney has a obscenely large audience that already loves its IP. TikTok has an obscenely large population of creators who will make content about Disney IP whether Disney lets them or not - this has been happening organically for a decade. What this deal does is take that already-existing organic behaviour, wrap a light layer of official sanctioning around it (better assets, official templates, maybe a Disney+ placement if you’re good), and use it to feed both TikTok’s engagement metrics and Disney+’s content library.

Neither of which, notably, comes with a cheque attached to the person making the video.

This is Disney figuring out how to industrialise fan content at scale (content that used to happen for free anyway) and TikTok building the operational pipes to do it efficiently. The clever part, from the two corporations’ point of view, is that both sides get exactly what they want.

Disney gets what Haberman calls “an almost unlimited supply of content” for their new Verts tab, without commissioning any of it. TikTok gets more engagement, more time spent, and crucially a much stickier reason for creators to keep producing on-platform.

Now, I want to be fair here, because it’s easy to slide into cynicism.

There is value being offered to creators in this deal.

• Access to sanctioned Disney assets is not nothing

• Getting placed on Disney+ is not nothing

• Being an early participant in a first-of-its-kind program is not nothing

Some creators will absolutely convert this exposure into careers. If you’re a small fan-creator, this is a legitimate opportunity and I’d probably tell you to take it.

But that individual case doesn’t undo what’s happening at the systems level.

For a while, the direction of travel felt encouraging. Creators were getting more leverage, they were getting paid better, owning more of their audience, more of their IP, more of their upside.

Deals like this Disney × TikTok feel like attempts to move the pendulum back the other way.

Not for the top-tier creators, who will negotiate directly and get paid. But for the vast middle-tier of the creator economy (fan editors, hobbyists, the enthusiast community that makes 90% of the content people consume) the pitch is starting to look uncomfortably familiar.

Make content for us for free. In return we’ll give you exposure and access to our stuff.

Where have we heard that one before?

The Starbucks / TikTok “Green Apron” partnership Haberman also references in the article is all about TikTok formalising the pipeline for content that Starbucks employees were making anyway, monetising it upward, and offering the employees enough of a taste that the flow keeps going.

Haberman’s phrase for it is “operationalising the supply chain of employees.”

That’s a very sharp bit of language.

But… is this Disney deal is doing exactly the same thing?

What do I think about it?

First: if you’re a creator with an existing Disney fandom and this program looks like it could in fact accelerate you, take the opportunity. Just go in with clear eyes about what you’re trading.

You’re contributing to a content pipeline that has enormous commercial value for two of the biggest companies in the world, and your compensation is exposure and access.

Second: the fact that a deal like this can be announced in 2026, with no meaningful compensation model attached, and still get treated as unambiguously good news for creators, tells you how much work the creator economy still has to do on itself. The infrastructure for compensating creators fairly on brand-and-platform partnerships remains underdeveloped.

Lia Haberman’s forecast in the article is that this becomes an issue for creators “once fans have worked their way through all the assets and there’s no clout or exclusive nature to the content they’re able to produce. But that’s probably a couple of years down the line.”

I think she’s right, and I think the couple-of-years window is exactly the window in which someone should be building the infrastructure to fix it. Because when the clout fades (and it always fades) the creators are gonna notice they got a bit of a raw deal.

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

Jordan

P.S.

When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help out 👇️

1. Subscribe to the Think Like A Creator podcast

2. Book here if you want to chat to me on Intro

3. Join our free WhatsApp group (over 500 strong)

P.P.S

If you enjoyed this, you’ll love Community Service, my co-written newsletter with Grace Andrews. Check it out using the link below.

Community Service

Your weekly briefing on creators, brands & media. By Grace Andrews & Jordan Schwarzenberger.

Around 780,000 people tuned in live, that’s it.

780,000 for what used to be one of the biggest cultural moments of a British summer. Yes, over 60% of the audience streams it later on catch-up, which pulls the total up to about 1.1 million - but the live number is still down 40% year-on-year, and it’s the lowest live viewership since season one.

For a bit of context on how far this has fallen: season five pulled 3.7 million live. That level of engagement now looks like a fever dream. You’d genuinely struggle to convince someone under 22 that Love Island was ever a live-viewing cultural event, and yet six years ago it was arguably the live-viewing cultural event.

So what happened? I think it comes down to two things.

Reason one: they’ve stopped listening to the audience

Everyone watching this season has been saying the same things. Not enough dates, not enough voting. the format’s grown stale and the pacing’s off.

And they’ve just… ploughed on regardless.

Love Island episodes are shot roughly 24 hours before they air. That is one of the shortest feedback loops in the entire television industry. You’d struggle to design a show more perfectly set up to correct in flight than this one. If viewers are telling you on Monday that there haven’t been enough dates, you can literally shoot more dates on Tuesday and air them on Wednesday. That’s a superpower most broadcasters would kill for.

This is the exact institutional muscle memory I keep writing about. It’s the muscle memory of an industry that spent decades operating in a one-way broadcast model, where you commissioned a series, filmed it, aired it, and the feedback arrived six months later in the form of ratings and commissioning meetings. The idea that the audience could and should be co-authoring the show as it airs - via the real-time signal they are absolutely offering you every single day - is a fundamentally creator-native mindset.

Reason two: they cast the wrong people

This is where it gets more interesting, because it cuts against what a lot of people expect me to say.

The complaint from viewers this season has been pretty consistent: contestants felt like they were speaking in TikTok soundbites. “Standing on business” every five minutes, weirdly rehearsed lines, faces held very deliberately at the right angle for the confessional cam. The whole thing felt less like watching people meet each other and more like watching a group of aspiring influencers audition, live, for post-Love Island brand deals.

Which - surprise - is because that’s basically what it was.

Love Island used to cast regular people who fancied a summer in Mallorca and would, if they were lucky, come out with 100k followers and a Boohoo deal. The show was an engine that turned unknowns into influencers. That was the deal, and it’s why the early seasons felt real - nobody in the villa had a personal brand yet, because the villa was the thing that was going to give them one.

Now the show casts people who already are influencers. And the incentive structure that produced those magic early seasons has completely inverted. If you show up at the villa with 200k Instagram followers already, you’re not there to find a partner - you’re there to protect and grow your brand. Every interaction becomes a piece of content and every line comes out sounding pre-rehearsed because it sort of has been, in the training ground of your own TikTok drafts folder.

The audience can smell this from a mile away.

And I want to be careful here, because I get accused of hating on traditional media enough as it is - I am genuinely, wholeheartedly for creators moving into broadcast. I’ve written entire pieces on why it’s the right direction of travel. But there’s a huge difference between creators who show up as themselves and creators who show up as a curated version of themselves engineered for maximum brand growth. In an ideal world, the creators are not performing on-camera; they’re just being on-camera. That distinction is subtle, but audiences pick up on it instantly.

So where does this leave the format?

I don’t think Love Island is dead, it can be revived if the people running them are willing to take on two hard admissions.

One: the audience is telling you exactly what’s broken on channels you already monitor, and you have a 24-hour production loop to act on it. Use it.

Two: stop casting already established influencers.

Because right now, ITV is running the show on the wrong incentive on both ends.

Love Island used to create influencers, now it casts them.

That pretty much sums it up!

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

Jordan

P.S.

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P.P.S

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Community Service

Your weekly briefing on creators, brands & media. By Grace Andrews & Jordan Schwarzenberger.