An inflection point for the Creator Economy

PLUS: It’s time for publishers to give up their Google addiction.

Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

If you fit into the latter camp and want to subscribe, then you can click on this handy little button:

Let’s jump into it…

An inflection point for the Creator Economy

The Guardian reports that ad revenue from user-generated content is set to surpass traditional media revenue for the first time:

It comes alongside a sharp increase in the advertising income attracted by creator-generated content amid a huge global change in viewing habits and media consumption.

Content creators are expected to see their revenue through ads, brand deals and sponsorships increase by 20% this year, according to an assessment by WPP Media. It is expected to more than double to $376.6bn (£278.3bn) by 2030.

This does feel like an inflection point for the Creator Economy; my prediction is creator-produced media will become increasingly indistinguishable from traditional media as creators are able to invest larger budgets into their content production. At some point the term "Creator Economy" will start feeling anachronistic since it will all just seem like one big blended media.

Was Quibi just ahead of its time?

One of the fastest rising genres in scripted entertainment is called a "microdrama." It's basically a serialized story told in 60-second installments. ReelShort, the leading app for microdramas, has over 1,000 employees and north of $1 billion in revenue:

On the surface, microdramas are easy to dismiss as cheesy junk food: The acting can be broad, the stories over-index on billionaires, vampires and werewolves and the plot twists are sharp — all the better to keep you swiping to the next installment. These projects hire non-union actors and crew, and more than a few times the writing has been derisively accused of being AI-generated …

Microdramas may share DNA with Lifetime or Hallmark films and the oft-disparaged (yet tremendously lucrative) romance publishing industry, but the major players are also looking to venture beyond those genres, including adventure and fantasy.

Why do publishers keep stepping on AI rakes?

Semafor reports that an AI chatbot tool Politico launched for its paid subscribers keeps making up special interest groups and policies that don’t exist:

In several examples printed out and shared in Politico’s Rosslyn, Virginia, newsroom last week, staff pointed to instances where the tool appeared to garble the publication’s reporting, or generate reports filled with completely made-up information …

When the product was first rolled out several months ago, the company’s AI did not seem to know that Roe v. Wade had been overturned — an ironic twist, considering Politico broke the news of its reversal months before the decision was formally announced in 2022.

I guess I just don't understand why the media companies that keep rolling out these products haven't learned by this point that AI tools have no ability to discern fact from fiction. It's almost as if the holy grail of automated, infinitely scalable content production is so enticing that some media executives are willing to risk repeated humiliation just in the unlikely chance they'll achieve it.

Greasing the TikTok-to-YouTube pipeline

This is smart: a newly launched studio is partnering with up-and-coming shortform video creators to launch longform video shows on YouTube. The studio handles most of the production and in exchange gets 50% IP ownership of the channel:

The company is developing shows around its other creators and films at a studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn, where it has custom sets for each show.

Unicorn split profits and IP ownership 50/50 with the creators. Revenue comes from YouTube ads and brand sponsorships, along with direct-to-consumer businesses like merch, subscriptions and products.

Please don’t take my newsletter for granted

I rely on paid subscriptions for the vast majority of my revenue. Without enough paid subscribers, I can’t continue justifying spending 40+ hours a week on my newsletter and podcast, and I’ll need to shut them down so I can seek out other work.

Let me put this another way: if you’d be disappointed if I suddenly announced that I’m shutting down my newsletter — a very real possibility — then you should probably subscribe.

Seriously, it’s only $50 for a full year, and if you’re using insights from my content to improve your own business, then that $50 pays for itself. And if you use the link below, you get 20% off for the first year:

The SmartLess podcast’s strange product launch

Bloomberg reports that the popular comedic podcast SmartLess is launching a … telecom company?

[Will] Arnett, who had been a spokesperson for Canadian telecommunications giant Shaw Communications Inc., said he realized an opening in the market when he had to purchase a new phone for his kid. The salesperson told him he needed a plan with unlimited data. His friend Paul McAleese, the former president of Shaw, told him he got ripped off. His kid was never going to use all that data.

“All the data you don’t use is what stunned us,” said [Jason] Bateman.

Generally, I'm in favor of media outlets diversifying their business models by selling non-media products, though this strategy usually works best when there's some synergy between the content and the product. Given that SmartLess has a broad, general audience, perhaps it’s a smart move is sell a generic product like a cell phone plan — something that every person over the age of 12 needs anyway. That's probably the same reasoning MrBeast used to justify launching a chocolate brand, which appeals to a pretty broad base of young consumers.

Still, I'm wondering how SmartLess will leverage its enormous reach to drive signups for these phone plans. These are huge bankable stars with recognizable faces, so maybe the idea is that they simply become celebrity spokespersons for the brand, similar to Ryan Reynolds' marketing for his own telecom company he sold to T-Mobile.

David Zaslav the accountant

From the moment David Zaslav took the reins at WBD, it's been in decline, and all his major moves since then have been focused on managing that decline so that the company avoids complete implosion and continues to throw off profits — basically the same strategy embraced by most private equity firms. He's more an accountant than any sort of visionary leader:

The announcement this morning that Warner Discovery will split into two businesses is basically an admission that Zaslav has failed. The original thesis was flawed; the streamer grew to 122 million subscribers, but by its own admission those customers didn’t find much value in 1,000-lb Sisters and My Feet Are Killing Me. The rebrand from HBO Max to Max struggled to widen the tent and squandered the best brand in television. The math on the declining linear business never worked, despite the best efforts of C.F.O. Gunnar Wiedenfels to cancel movies and fire thousands of employees and slash the company’s debt by an astonishing $20 billion. It wasn’t enough.

It’s time for publishers to give up their Google addiction

WSJ reports that publishers continue to see a steady decline in Google traffic as more and more of the search engine’s users are exposed to its AI summaries:

Traffic from organic search to HuffPost’s desktop and mobile websites fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at the Washington Post, according to digital market data firm Similarweb.

Business Insider cut about 21% of its staff last month, a move CEO Barbara Peng said was aimed at helping the publication “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.” Organic search traffic to its websites declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, according to data from Similarweb.

If there's any silver lining to this, I hope it's that media companies stop devoting so many resources to creating content specifically geared toward Google searches. I honestly think we'll never reach what Verge editor Nilay Patel calls Google Zero — the day Google stops sending any traffic to outside websites — and that it'll always be a valuable tool for content discovery, but the media also always overvalued this traffic, catering to it at the expense of building a core audience of repeat visitors.

ICYMI: How Tim Burrowes helped build Mumbrella into a $7 million media brand

My other newsletter: The best longform journalism we consumed this week

Are you following me on social?

You can follow me on Substack Notes, Threads, my private Facebook group, LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Twitter