This Week: Roblox wants a cut, LinkedIn wants a velvet rope, and Grammarly wanted your name without asking (or paying). Busy week for platforms that matter.
Hi, I’m Jim Louderback and this is my weekly creator economy newsletter.
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TOP STORIES
THE WRITERS ARE REVOLTING (AS WELL THEY SHOULD BE)
Grammarly infuriated journalists, authors, and academics with its “Expert Review” feature, which impersonated writers without their permission. For $12 a month, users could get “feedback” from Stephen King, Kara Swisher, Casey Newton and dozens of others who had no idea any of this was happening. It essentially stole their name, along with the writing equivalent of “Image and Likeness”, without shame or revshare.
What makes this especially galling: Grammarly’s CEO, @Shishir Mehrotra, ran product and engineering at YouTube and helped build the revshare system enriching so many creators even today. What were you thinking? Apparently still not enough, as comments were eventually turned off on Mehrotra’s inevitable “sorry we screwed up” post on LinkedIn.
Investigative journalist Julia Angwin filed a class action lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan, alleging Grammarly violated the privacy and publicity rights of journalists, authors, and editors, and this is likely just the beginning.
It also foreshadows the video version of this. Soon AI versions of MrBeast, Steven Spielberg, or Akira Kurosawa will be able to “edit” anyone’s raw footage. The writers revolted. Video creators should be ready to do the same. (Bookwars, Shishir Responds)
TAMING THE WILD, WILD WEST
It’s no surprise that brand deals and sponsorships on Roblox are uneven and unregulated. That’s part of the charm. But Roblox thinks differently and just announced a major overhaul of its ad policies. Starting May 4th, creators must register all brand deals before campaigns launch and incorporate standard ad labeling. And starting in January, Mama Roblox gets its own revshare from creator deals. Percentage tithe TBD.
This is the YouTube playbook from 2012-2014. Formalize the rules, push creators toward platform-owned monetization products, and defang the MCNs too. Roblox argues that wild-west pricing undercuts creator deals and keeps brands on the sidelines. Maybe. But standardized pricing sets a ceiling as often as a floor. My biggest fear? Creators gain compliance busywork, Roblox poaches the brand/creator relationship and creators get screwed. I expect the top monetizing creators to feel it first, with no guarantee the rising tide lifts anyone but Roblox. At least the hammer isn’t dropping all at once. (Roblox Dev Forum)
STUCK ON LINKEDIN AT 33°
LinkedIn just launched Top Voices 360°: A premium tier of creators who get brand sponsorships, co-branded posts, event appearances, and presumably a better table in the cafeteria.
The rest of us? Stuck here at 33°, which is technically an angle but apparently not a full one. The full circle gets brand deals. The rest of us get “organic reach.”
I’m happy for my friend @Aishwarya Srinivasan, who made the cut. Can’t wait to hear about what it’s like running circles around the rest of us.
But I do have one small question for the platform that built its brand on “professional community”: why does a company with 1 billion members need to publicly sort its creators into first class and coach? You’re already an algorithm. We already know your biases. Announcing it with a branded name, a geometry theme and a fast-track to direct brand revenue is just… a lot.
82% of B2B marketers say creator campaigns are essential to ROI. 100% of creators not in the 360 club wish they had a seat at the cool kids’ table. (LinkedIn)
- Related: @Matt Navara uncovers a new tool to help turn your prose into a guaranteed successful LinkedIn Post. Perhaps this is the path to 360 we’ve all been searching for. (Kagi)
PRESTIGE, INTERRUPTED
Hollywood’s sophisticated crowd is convinced microdramas will “save” their auteur craft. A quick look at the U.S. short drama Top 20 for February suggests otherwise. It’s more Only Fans than prestige TV.
Number one… in ALL CAPS, naturally… is “I BECAME MY CEO’S DARKEST SECRET.” Speaks for itself. At number 5, “My Sexy Mentor Seduced Me” sounds less like a Sundance selection and more like a cloistered obsession. And for the cinema equivalent of fast fashion we’ve got “Love Again, My Hockey Superstar.” This is prime time, not late-night dreck.
The full list includes “Spark Me Tenderly,” “Lace Game with the CEO,” and “I’m Her Most Dangerous Obsession.”
Somewhere in LA, a writer with a Gotham nomination and three Emmys is pitching their microdrama concept. Hope they’ve checked this chart. (WenWen Han)
- My Sexy Robot Seduced Me: : Someone should loop in Google, as their 100 Zeroes film-funding/AI promotional arm started funding microdramas. (Variety)
PUTTING THE “PERSONAL” BACK IN BRANDING
Anyone drawing a paycheck or running a company should be investing in personal branding. LinkedIn is a great place to start. But most of the advice floating around the platform misses one critical thing. The personal.
@Thomas Pearce recently shared this infographic from @Chris Donnelly on personal branding. It’s good, but… here’s the problem: every step could be replicated by AI. Every single one.
When I talked onstage at @1BFS with LinkedIn’s director of product @Sam Clanon in January, he said LinkedIn closely analyzes whether “human connections are being formed” from your posts and comments. He also said the algorithm already rewards diversity of tone: “If you want to post a one-line observation, that’s something that we will welcome and reward.”
LinkedIn is actively de-prioritizing the formulaic hook-body-CTA content that most personal branding advice produces… and rewarding the specific, the real, and the distinctly human. As AI floods LinkedIn with polished, generic, soulless content, the imperfectly messy you stands out. Own it. (LinkedIn)
- RELATED: Personal shouldn’t mean uncomfortable. McDonald’s tried to humanize their CEO by having him introduce a new burger. It did not go well. @Lia Haberman posted a great reminder that not every CEO can be a TikTok star.
- RELATED – This Is NOT About Punch: Inside the “Hype Monkey” approach to growing Linkedin engagement. McDonalds should probably consider this instead of embarrassing their CEO. (MarketingIdeas)
RESEARCH
You’re Doing YouTube Wrong. 1of10’s 2025 YouTube Data Report analyzed 323,000 viral videos and revealed some non-obvious trends. The three things creators do the most significantly underperform. Thumbnails with text get 19% fewer views, titles with numbers average 11% less, and titles that spin negative (which are not widely used), outperform positive ones by 22%. And the results were consistent across all niches. Even faces in thumbnails only work for channels with more than 200,000 subscribers.
Their research also found that optimal video length is 18-24 minutes, even though more than half of the videos they studied were under 12. But take this with a major grain of skepticism, they only studied already-viral videos. Directional and thought-provoking, but not predictive. (1of10)
Dentsu on Dentsu: MediaCat’s new influencer report is ass-covering data for marketers who need to justify their budgets. Two things worth knowing: a 2016 meta-analysis of 46 celebrity endorsement studies found zero average brand lift, and the Influencer Marketing Trade Body analyzed 500,000+ Instagram posts and found #ad disclosure has no effect on performance. (MediaCat)
QUIBIS
PLATFORMS
- There You Go Again: Facebook targets Youtubers and Tiktokers with its new creator monetization plan. Maybe this time it’ll result in a long-term and sustainable program. (Lindsey Gamble)
- Sky’s the Limit: The price paid to acquire US TikTok just went way up. In addition to the $14B purchase price the buyers are paying the US government a 70% transaction fee. Or $10B. Good money if you can get it. (The Guardian)
- Is This Thing On? How did ever did we survive without “TikTok Radio”? (iHeartMedia)
- Ready For Your Close-Up? How did we ever survive without TikTokers on TV? TikTok and Tubi (TripleT?) launch an incubator to bring creators to the biggest screen in the home. (Tubi)
- Order In the Court: The jury is literally still out in LA, deliberating the merits of the social media addiction civil case against Meta and YouTube. Meanwhile, a second federal case is spinning up in Oakland, with jury selection scheduled for June 12th. And in Meta’s New Mexico trial, closing arguments are due next week. (Fox 11, Courthouse News Service, AP)
- Stop Already: According to @Mike Shields, Conan O’Brien agrees with me about the sorry state of YouTube’s on-TV ad load (Next In Media)
- Slop First: YouTube adds Google’s Nano Banana image and short video creation tool to the YouTube Create app. (@Neal Mohan)
OTHER CREATOR ECONOMY
- Tech Rising: Looking forward to seeing ex-WSJ tech journalist @Joanna Stern build her new micro-media company @The New Things, along with becoming a part time stringer at NBC. (Project C)
- I Can Swing My Sword: Mini-Katana’s successful $50M exit to Reality Marble offers a great example of how a founder built and sold a content-first business. (Rockwater)
- Swiss Cheese: James Murdoch is working on a new global cultural even in Basel, set to debut in 2 years. Here’s hoping they have a deep focus on creators. (Vanity Fair)
- It’s an Outing Not a Movie: GenZ globally are going back to movie theaters. But the cinema’s not the hook. It’s a participatory experience and social identity wrapped around a movie core. (Lab Thoughts)
- Creators On Demand: LTK launches an interesting way to standardize the creator/brand connection and get paid within three days. Sounds great, but again the devil will be in building a balanced market across brands vs. creators and dollars vs. expectations. (LTK)
- Great Ideas Never Die: I had a great time chatting with Twitter’s first employee Rabble about the creator economy and his relaunch of Vine (revolution.social).
CREATOR TECH – AI, AR, VR, MORE
- Hey Bytedance… Get Off My Lawn: Two US senators sent a formal letter to Bytedance’s CEO saying “you must immediately shut down Seedance” due to copyright infringement. (Scribd)
- It’s Not Slop If You Like It: Apple’s been posting brainrot on TikTok, and the world loves it. (TikTok)
- Building With Bots: Slow Ventures is hosting a two-day hackathon for “our creators and friends” to accelerate creators with AI agents. (Slow Ventures)
- AI Is Everywhere: a16z’s list of top 100 AI Apps includes a number of creator stalwarts, including CapCut (number 2!), Canva, Notion, Edits and many more. The question for creators is no longer “do you use AI to make content?” but “how much?”. (It’s Time To Build)
SIGNAL VS. SLOP
Every year I build a big presentation on the weird, creepy, and genuinely wonderful future of the creator economy. I took this year’s to SXSW – focused on how AI will change the creator economy and what human creators and the industry should do. Each week (until I run out), I’ll be exploring one of the key themes here in this newsletter, anchored by a current event. Today we’re exploring synthetic podcasts.
Grab the full deck free right here (drop me a tip if you want): https://buymeacoffee.com/jlouderb/e/521396
The Synthetic Podcast Empire Has Arrived
A few years ago, when Google’s NotebookLM launched its AI co-host feature, it was dismissed as a cute party trick. Then Inception Point AI announced it had produced 200,000 podcast episodes and hit 1% of all podcasts released globally in a single week. Ten million listeners. Zero human hosts. Almost nobody cared.
Until this week, when The Publish Press did a feature on @Adam Levy. Six weeks ago, Levy built an AI production workflow using Claude Opus 4.5 that generates a self-updating podcast called The Epstein Files. Each day his system aggregates news sources and released documents and produces automated episodes. It delivered two million downloads in the first month and hit #1 on the UK podcast charts. There are currently 139 episodes and counting.
The only thing new here is the size. Steven Bartlett uses AI to extend his podcast. The Washington Post built individualized AI podcasts for each user, got roasted, and kept going. Inception Point keeps producing 3,000 episodes a week. It’s similar to other synthetic slop patterns: dismissal, then criticism, then listeners, then scale.
What we’re seeing is that podcasting, and likely creator-first factual video as well, is splitting into two categories. “Relationship Media” that you listen to because you trust the person making it. “Info Media” that gives you fast facts and analysis and you don’t care who’s talking. AI will own the latter category.
Samir asked the right question in The Publish Press: ”Who am I as a creative that an AI model couldn’t replicate?”
What Should Humans Do? Every creator needs to ask themselves Samir’s question. If you’re merely synthesizing, analyzing and regurgitating facts without a distinct voice and a unique perspective, then you need to rethink your format. (The Epstein Files, The Publish Press, Levy’s Newsletter)
This was one of 44 different themes I presented at SXSW a week ago. Look for a new theme each week as we explore the creepy, weird and ultimately hopeful future of creators in our new AI economy.
Where’s Jim? Loving the warmth on the northern California beaches during these first days of Spring, hoping the Sharks make the playoffs andliving my best Pokopia life.
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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.
