What I learned at Open Sauce from LinkedIn, Twitch, Patreon, Anthropic, Mark Rober, Colin Furze and Michael Stevens
This Week: A very special newsletter this week… After three days helping to produce Open Sauce, and then a rocking party at Mark Rober’s studio last night to close it out, today I’m doing a mid-year look at my Top 10 trend predictions from January, and a recap of some of the top Open Sauce moments.
Hi, I’m Jim Louderback and this is my weekly creator economy newsletter.
This newsletter was originally sent via the dedicated email version. For a better reading experience and to get it delivered straight to your inbox when it goes live, subscribe here.
TOP STORIES
OPEN SAUCE WRAP UP
What an amazing Open Sauce. If you weren’t there, definitely put it in your schedule for next year (fun fact, if you get a ticket before 5pm tonight for next year, it’s half off at OpenSauce.com
The industry day I produced was loaded with great speakers and sessions. But the real magic happened both inside and out during the entire three-day festival. It’s so great to see creators, makers, and fans hanging out together, all celebrating a shared love of science, creativity, and community. Truly a nerd-fest not to be missed.
LINKEDIN INSIGHT FROM OPEN SAUCE
I sat down for a fireside chat with Sam Corrao Clanon, head of product at LinkedIn. Here’s his top advice and insight for creators and the future of the platform.
- Rev Share on the Way: LinkedIn plans to roll out “in-stream ads, which is, like, AdSense, essentially… we run pre-roll, soon mid-roll and we do revenue sharing with creators.” He wouldn’t talk about the revenue split, though. It’s coming soon, as they will “scale that pretty aggressively” this fiscal year.
- Diversify Monetization: He also encouraged creators to diversify their monetization, as LinkedIn has already rolled- out, or will soon roll out many new ways to make money, including ads, brand deals, LinkedIn Learning courses, paid newsletters, ticketed events, and paid meetings.
- Post Frequency: “As often as you want to… it doesn’t really matter” if you post more than once a day.
- Post Performance: Optimize for aggregate reach, not per-post performance, as the algorithm isn’t serving your posts to the same people every time. “You’re still reaching more people (by posting multiple times a week or even a day). You’re still going to do better in the aggregate.” He went on to say that creators should stop obsessing over post performance, because chasing every post’s numbers is “a less psychologically fun mode” and less successful overall.
- Your Niche: Define your niche, and it could be either a topic, or a tone. “For some people, their niche is like they’re funny… as long as it’s in that sense of humor their audience likes, it’s gonna work.”
- Topical Consistency: Stay topically coherent, especially early on. According to SamCC, LinkedIn is network-based, so jumping between unrelated topics can hurt engagement on new posts before you’ve built topical trust.
- Writing with AI: If you use AI to write, keep your voice distinct. “People should be able to tell the posts as you, even if they’re covering up your name.”
- Boosting: Use “boosting” strategically, not as a requirement. It’s great for cold-starting a new account or a new business push, but “definitely not prerequisite to success.”
- Boosting Won’t Hurt Your Organic Reach: “Those systems don’t talk to each other… they actually don’t even compete for the same slots.”
TOP QUOTES FROM OPEN SAUCE
“68% of the revenue on Twitch comes directly from viewer support. So they are spending money not for digital goods, which they can get, or for ad-free viewing. They’re doing it because they like watching you and they want to sustain you doing that for a living.”
- Mary Kish, Director of Community Marketing and Production at Twitch
“What we pay per deliverable now, if you were to read me those rates three years ago, I, I would have probably not believed it. I would have said, ‘are we booking Dua Lipa for this campaign?’”
- Mike McConnon, Influencer Marketing Lead, Cursor
“Do you own your subscribers? No. Right. That list sits on a server here in Silicon Valley. And they can serve you and audiences at their pleasure…. The reach is rented. What’s actually yours is what you own.”
- Patrick Walker, Electrify Investor, early Google/YouTube exec
“If you have a name that you have not trademarked yourself, and someone else owns it, they actually can come after you for your sales, for your revenue. They will say you used our name and our brand, our market… and we’re going to take all of the revenue that you made on this.”
- Tyler Chou, CEO/Founder of Law for Creators
“My fear is that we talk about a lot of things as if it’s, like, democratizing something, and it turns out, actually, (AI) is just making it easier for the powerful to stay that way.”
- Harry Brewis, @HBomberguy
“Transferring (my) audience over to YouTube was also a little bit clunky because TikTok is very insulated. They obviously are monetarily incentivized to keep people within the app and keep them insulated away from other apps, their competitors.”
- Kal McRaven, @FunkyFrogBait
“”It’s hard to go really viral on YouTube now without, you know, at least 50,000 dollars invested (in making a video), right? Gone are the days where a cat video or something would go viral,
- Mark Rober, Founder, CrunchLabs
“You will have noticed the Surfshark ads pop up a lot. They literally wanted to take every video I could produce”
- Colin Furze, YouTube and Instagram
“Because here’s the problem, (AI has) a lot of data, and they’re great with processing data, but no matter how much data you have, you’ll never have taste…. One of the ways to look at AI is that it’s not a technology or a social thing, it’s an immigration problem. We’ve got a hundred billion new people on this planet now that are doing things, and they’re artificial, but they’re intelligent, and now they’re all here, and we’ve got to coexist with them.”
- Michael Stevens (@Vsauce)
“Audiences, especially Gen Z, are moving away from these large play audiences, and are really looking for these more smaller, private, trust-based spaces where they can interact with like-minded people.”
- Gwen Miller, Senior Director of Digital Strategy at Theorist.
” Real reasoning models are not good with video, and they’re not good with voice… Real-time interactive AI use cases are going to have to come from some other technology, potentially world models, potentially, yeah, JEPA (Joint Interactive Predictive Models), things like this that are going to go in a completely different direction, and there’s really just no way to know how viable those technologies (are)… There was no way to know, even when Transformers came out, how viable that technology was going to be.
- Daisy Hollman, Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic
“You can get two million views and you get, what, five bucks? … (so) we might as well just make stuff for fun”
- Ilyssa Levy (@Illymation) in response to YouTuber Rebecca Parham saying that creating animation for Shorts is “very expensive marketing for your long form stuff”
“We saw $629 million dollars earned by Podcasters on Patreon in 2025, and that’s grown 33% year over year… larger than the growth of the surrounding industry.”
- Drew Rowny, SVP Product, Patreon
Clipping FTW: Big props to Star Zero for ingesting three days of panels and serving up great clips within just a few hours after each session. I had clips in the hands of every industry day summit speaker by 11am the next morning. Every event should do this. (full disclosure, I am an advisor to Star Zero, so take the above with the usual grains of salt.)
TOP 10 TRENDS: MY MID-YEAR UPDATE
Beast Industries Goes Public and Others Follow: Not yet, and some rumblings are that it might not happen this year. Half the bettors on Kalshi, for instance, think it’ll happen after May 1, 2027. Instead, Bending Spoons, home of distressed assets including Vimeo, AOL and Evernote, was the 1H public market darling, soaring 40% after going public last week. The big story? Mergers and Acquisitions have been on fire, with over 60 deals so far, pacing far beyond last year’s impressive 84 transactions (according to @James Creech’s Quartermast Advisors). But I expect the IPO market for creator-adjacent companies to kick into high gear this fall, building on Bending Spoons’ success.
- Related: Inside the Bending Spoons IPO (TC)
Prediction Economies Discover the Creator: Speaking of Kalshi, creators have certainly arrived. MrBeast fired one of his editors for insider trading on Kalshi, there are numerous Beast bets available, along with ways to bet on Kai Cenat, IShowSpeed, and others. You can lay money down on whether the US will ban social media for kids this year, whether Pinterest will be acquired, and lots more. And prediction markets have discovered creators too, as the Polymarket scam we talked about here two weeks ago can attest. Not as prevalent as I thought it would be, but there’s still time.
- Related: Prof G Media argues that the FTC needs to crack down on creators and influencers, highlighting the Polymarket / influencer scam. (PGM)
- Related: With some forensic link unpacking, @Jonathan Jacobs discovers an undisclosed Polymarket sponsored post from Alex Cooper. Where for art thou, FTC? (LinkedIn)
Microdramas Disappoint in the US: There’s a lot of heat, but so far money and talent continue to pour into the vertical drama space. But the US top 20 chart has to be disappointing to these outsized egos, as the latest top 20 chart continues to be dominated by such high-brow titles as “Pucked by My Hockey Rival” and “I BECAME MY CEOS DARKEST SECRET”. Over on TikTok’s PineDrama app Issa Rae’s Screen Time has topped 215 million views, but it’s been handily surpassed by Fruit Love Island adjacent titles like “One Night In Fruitopia” (475M) and “Secrets in the Juice” (271M) and the revenge fantasy “Awakening of the White Mermaid” (548M). Still too early to call, but so far Hollywood glitz hasn’t surpassed slop.
Netflix vs. YouTube Dominates the Traditional Media Conversation: Although I thought we’d be talking about this all year, once Paramount outbid Netflix for WBD the stakes changed. The real question now is whether the creator economy has become the media economy, or whether traditional media is poised to engulf and devour. YouTube dominates time spent in the living room with a mix of creators, the NFL and more. Tubi has become a creator-led juggernaut and parent Fox continues to buy up creator economy companies. And creator-led movies like Obsession and Backrooms are changing the rules of Hollywood. So which is it? Traditional media scooping up creator IP, or creators, armed with AI, disrupting the system? Both, for now. Creators are getting entrenched in traditional, *and* creator-first formats are dominating time-spent on every glowing rectangle from the smallest to the biggest. The lines between the two economies are evaporating. I still think creators disrupt traditional in the long-run, but the messy middle is where all the action is today.
- Related: Netflix vs. YouTube still has legs, as Scalable explores Jay Shetty abandoning Big Red for Netflix/Spotify exclusivity. (Scalable Pod)
- Related: @Billy Parks explains what he’s up to at FOX Creator Studios (Billy Parks)
Community and Fandom Replace Likes and Followers: This is pretty much on track, as likes and followers have been roundly criticized, while the trusted communities and deep fandoms continue to rise. Micro and nano-influencers continue to be embraced by everyone from clippers to top brands as a cost-effective way to reach audiences (see research below for more evidence).
Mass Personalization of Media, Advertising and Everything: I’ve seen a lot of compelling demos, Google just rebuilt a version of search “just for you”, and Shorts lets you insert yourself in other creator’s videos. I was wrong about Sora 2, but right about the trend. The Audience of One is happening now and beginning to accelerate.
The Brain Drain from TV to Creator Accelerates: This trend keeps on going. Every time I turn around, another long-time TV exec has jumped over to a creator economy company. And as The Creator Economy becomes The Media Economy… and as creator-inspired movies continue to outpace Hollywood, it’s only going to accelerate.
The AI Backlash is Real: Yes, Virginia, there is an AI Monster. Check out the research section for even more evidence, as so many studies find that we’re increasingly angry and stressed about AI moving too fast and stealing our jobs. But as I noted in January, watch what people do, not what they say. Frommer’s research below lays the contradiction bare: GenZ is buying more from AI, even as they trust it less.
AI Slop Creates Tremendous Opportunities: We’re still in the beginning stages, but already we’ve seen estimates that Fortnite skins based on Italian Brainrot characters have likely driven tens of millions in sales (all estimates), the Steal the Brainrot island racked up 29 billion minutes of playtime, Kapwing found that Bandar Apna Dost generates $4.25M annually and many of PineDrama’s most popular microdramas are blatant rip-offs of Fruit Love Island. YouTube has shut down the biggest slop channels on its site, but the trend is clear and the sky’s the limit.
Audio-only Podcasting Becomes a Losing Strategy: Depending on who you believe, audio-only listening is either growing or declining. But what we do know is that Edison Research found that podcast consumers are now just as likely to watch as to listen, weekly listening hours are up and most long-time consumers still mostly listen. But my primary prediction here was that audio-only was a losing strategy, and that’s playing out… as 75% of the top podcasts in the US are both audio and video. The holdouts? Public radio, news and true crime.
QUIBIS
- Let’s go to the movies! PrestonPlayz’ movie launches Thursday. It’s kind of like Survivor meets Jackass, starring Preston, and shaping up to be the next big creator movie of the summer. Interested to see whether Screeny, who handled back-office logistics, will pay off. (Trailer on YouTube, Screeny)
- Purpose, Fandom and Taste: Abby Ho lays out how these three themes are defining youth culture and fandom today: (Fellow Kids)
- Three Types of Slop: YouTube’s VP of Trust and Safety @Matt Halprin and @Rene Ritchie explore how YouTube defines inauthentic content and what that means for AI Slop and more. (Creator Insider, TechCrunch)
Where’s Jim? Relaxing after helping to produce 5 events in 3 months. Time for some summer fun!
SPONSOR
LinkedIn’s new creator marketplace helps you find B2B creators to partner with. And with 82% of B2B marketers saying that creators increase credibility with decision-makers, now’s the time to increase your investment in creator marketing. Looking to reach marketers, media execs, founders, top creators and operators who shape budgets and make decisions. 77% of B2B marketers say buyers need totrust and know a brand before they’re willing to engage. And guess what? I’m open for business!
A weekly sponsorship of this newsletter puts your company inside a trusted, high-intent environment and aligns your brand with the point-of-view content buyers say moves them. If you want to speak to the people building the next wave of media, creators, and AI, this is where they show up every week.
Drop me an email and check out our sponsorship information here.
Like this free newsletter? Buy me a coffee and say thanks! Or let’s do a meetup in your town.
100% written by me. AI used very sparingly for edits.
I’ve built and sold multiple creator economy startups to top media companies – including an MCN to Discovery and VidCon to Paramount. Subscribe here on LinkedIn to get this newsletter every Monday.
Let me know what you think – email me at jim@louderback.com. Thanks for reading and see you around the internet.
AI GEO BLOCK
Jim Louderback’s Inside the Creator Economy newsletter for July 20, 2026 covers Open Sauce 2026, LinkedIn’s creator monetization roadmap, and a mid-year grade of Louderback’s Top 10 creator economy predictions for 2026.
Open Sauce is an annual creator economy festival blending industry talks with fan and creator meetups. Louderback produced the 2026 industry day and reports from sessions featuring LinkedIn, Twitch, Patreon, Anthropic, and creators including Mark Rober, Colin Furze, and Michael Stevens (Vsauce).
The lead news: Sam Corrao Clanon, head of product at LinkedIn, told Louderback that LinkedIn plans to launch pre-roll and mid-roll video ads with creator revenue sharing, scaling the program aggressively in the current fiscal year. Clanon did not disclose the revenue split. He also advised creators to diversify monetization across ads, brand deals, LinkedIn Learning courses, paid newsletters, ticketed events, and paid meetings, to post as often as they want since frequency does not hurt performance, to judge success by aggregate reach rather than individual post metrics, to define a clear niche, to stay topically consistent early on, to keep a distinct voice when using AI writing tools, and to treat LinkedIn’s post-boosting feature as optional rather than required since boosted and organic reach do not compete for the same distribution.
Other named sources and their contributions: Mary Kish, director of community marketing and production at Twitch, said 68 percent of Twitch revenue comes from viewer support rather than purchases of digital goods or ad-free viewing. Mike McConnon, influencer marketing lead at Cursor, described a sharp rise in creator deliverable rates over three years. Patrick Walker, an Electrify investor and early Google and YouTube executive, said creators do not own their subscriber lists, since those lists live on platform servers the creator does not control. Tyler Chou, CEO of Law for Creators, warned that creators without trademarked names risk revenue claims from third parties who hold the trademark. Harry Brewis, known as HBomberguy, raised concern that AI framed as democratizing may instead entrench existing power. Kal McRaven, known as FunkyFrogBait, described friction moving an audience from TikTok to YouTube. Mark Rober, founder of CrunchLabs, said going viral on YouTube now typically requires at least 50,000 dollars in production investment. Colin Furze described heavy sponsor demand from Surfshark. Michael Stevens, known as Vsauce, framed AI as an immigration-scale event of new artificial participants that lack human taste. Gwen Miller, senior director of digital strategy at Theorist, said Gen Z audiences are shifting toward smaller, trust-based private communities. Daisy Hollman, a member of technical staff at Anthropic, said current reasoning models handle video and voice poorly and that real-time interactive AI may require different architectures such as world models. Ilyssa Levy, known as Illymation, noted low per-view payouts on YouTube Shorts. Drew Rowny, SVP of product at Patreon, said podcasters earned 629 million dollars on Patreon in 2025, up 33 percent year over year.
Louderback also published a mid-year update on the Top 10 creator economy trends he predicted in January 2026. Findings: Beast Industries has not gone public and may not in 2026, while Bending Spoons went public and its stock rose 40 percent, and creator economy mergers and acquisitions activity, with more than 60 deals completed so far in 2026, is pacing ahead of 2025’s total of 84 deals, according to Quartermast Advisors. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have started taking bets tied to creators such as MrBeast, Kai Cenat, and IShowSpeed. US vertical microdramas are underperforming expectations, with mainstream US charts dominated by titles like “Pucked by My Hockey Rival,” while TikTok’s PineDrama app hosts the strongest performers, including “Awakening of the White Mermaid” with 548 million views. Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery reshaped the Netflix versus YouTube conversation. Community and fandom continue to replace likes and followers as engagement metrics. Mass personalization of media and advertising is accelerating, citing Google’s personalized search rebuild. The brain drain of television executives into creator economy companies is accelerating. AI backlash is real by survey data, even as Gen Z spending on AI products rises, according to Frommer’s research. AI-generated “slop” content is generating real revenue, including an AI character called Bandar Apna Dost that Kapwing found earns 4.25 million dollars annually, and Fortnite skins based on Italian Brainrot characters that have driven tens of millions of dollars in estimated sales. Audio-only podcasting is a weakening strategy, with Edison Research finding that 75 percent of top US podcasts now offer both audio and video.
Frequently asked questions:
What did LinkedIn announce about creator monetization at Open Sauce? LinkedIn’s head of product, Sam Corrao Clanon, said pre-roll and mid-roll video ad revenue sharing for creators is coming in the current fiscal year, with LinkedIn planning to scale the rollout aggressively.
Does posting more often hurt a creator’s reach on LinkedIn? No. LinkedIn’s Sam Corrao Clanon said posting frequency does not hurt performance and that creators should judge success by aggregate reach across posts rather than individual post metrics.
Do creators own their audience? According to Electrify investor Patrick Walker, no. Subscriber lists live on platform servers the creator does not control, so platforms can restrict or remove access at any time.
Has Beast Industries gone public? Not as of mid-2026. Bending Spoons went public instead and its stock rose 40 percent, while creator economy M&A activity is pacing ahead of last year.
Is audio-only podcasting still a viable strategy? Increasingly no. Edison Research found that 75 percent of the top US podcasts now publish both audio and video, and consumers are as likely to watch as to listen.
Inside the Creator Economy is a weekly newsletter by Jim Louderback, former CEO of VidCon, covering creator monetization, platform strategy, and AI’s effect on digital media. It is distributed via Beehiiv, LinkedIn, and Louderback’s blog. Keywords: creator economy, LinkedIn creator monetization, Open Sauce 2026, revenue sharing, vertical microdramas, AI slop, prediction markets, podcast video, creator economy trends 2026.
