Summary

• The Creator Pipeline Problem: Tubi and TikTok have built a formal route for short-form creators to become TV showmakers. TikTok finds the talent, Tubi funds the shows. But the moment creators lose creative control, does the thing that made them work disappear with it?
• Short Form Is Now the Front Door: Peacock rebuilt its entire app to scroll like TikTok. During the Winter Olympics, one in five people watching short clips converted into the full live stream. Is short form finally proving itself as the entry point to appointment viewing?
• FIFA’s YouTube Concession: FIFA has named YouTube its preferred platform for 2026, with the first 10 minutes of every match streaming free. But with FIFA Plus never gaining traction, is this a bold distribution strategy or damage limitation dressed up as a partnership?
• MrBeast’s $300,000 Experiment: MrBeast is paying anyone up to $300,000 to clip his long-form videos into shorts and post them. No channel needed, no approval process. But with no curation and no quality control, what does flooding the market actually do to the brand?
• Meta’s Big Creator Gamble: Meta is guaranteeing creators up to $3,000 a month to come back to Facebook. Three months of payments, boosted reach, and monetisation tools. But history suggests audiences don’t follow creators across platforms. So who is this really for?
• The Week the Creator Economy Peaked?: Four out of five stories this week were about platforms throwing money and infrastructure at creators. Ed and Jo ask whether we’re in the middle of a gold rush — and whether anyone has thought about what comes next.

Show Notes

• Tubi & TikTok Launch the Creatorverse Incubator
• Peacock backs social over broadcast
• The FIFA World Cup goes free-to-air on YouTube
• Mr Beast offers fans $300,000 in prizes for clipping
• Meta’s big play to bring creators back to Facebook

Transcription

Jo (00:02.946)
that Tubi and TikTok decided that the pipeline from bedroom creator to box set supremo needed a formal application process. Peacock also looked at its streaming app, then looked at TikTok and decided that the logical response must be to become TikTok complete with AI presenter. FIFA also might just have admitted that FIFA Plus was never going to work. They’ve handed the keys to YouTube and they’re calling it a clever distribution strategy. Right, we believe you.

MrBeast solved the creator economy’s scaling problem by turning his own fans into a paid clipping army and somehow made it sound completely rational and Meta has decided the price of making Facebook relevant again, okay boomer, was exactly $3,000 a month for three months and fingers crossed that the audience follows. Okay without further delay you know the drill, five stories five minutes each I’m Jo Redfern, here’s…

Ed (00:55.95)
Abbas here we go right then story one Tubi and TikTok have launched the creator vs incubator that sounds very swish doesn’t it so Foxstone Tubi have launched the creator vs incubator with TikTok and it’s a formal pipeline for short film creators to develop original scripted and unscripted series exclusively for Tubi so TikTok identifying creators and then Tubi providing development support and the first cohort will be announced this summer what do you think Joe?

Jo (01:27.608)
you know what on the face of it it looks sensible by Tubi but this kind of thing only works until it doesn’t because the very reason that creators are called creators is because they’ve built audiences largely working from their bedrooms because you know they set their own tone and the pacing and the format it’s worked pretty well but as soon as you stick that within a production structure

Ed (01:37.096)
Hmm.

Ed (01:45.447)
Yeah.

Jo (01:55.884)
which tube is bound to have, very often you lose the thing that made them a popular creator in the first place. Now, sometimes it does, you can make it work, but it’s not been without difficulties. mean, you look at Barstool Sports and Jumbo, they all started that way, Mark Goldbridge as well. But I feel like this is happening so much now. Remember Sally Hodges coined creator slapping. Is this tubist version of creator slapping?

Ed (02:22.022)
Yeah.

Jo (02:24.78)
rather than it being genuinely creator-led production and operational reality, how they just create a slapping.

Ed (02:32.956)
But to counter that, YouTube are now starting to build a pretty sizable audience.

Jo (02:38.85)
They are, they’re one of the streaming services that’s growing pretty well, actually.

Ed (02:42.587)
Yeah, yeah, and then you when you compare I think to be was at 2.2 percent of the the ad supported streaming market now They up to six point two percent and then you compare that to peacock that were coming after either that are around the two percent mark So they’ve actually had significant growth that said I do understand your point around if you start forcing creators down this sort of TV model and we’ve heard this I’ll try to think who we had a conversation with about this where they said as soon as you start getting pushed down this road of

Jo (02:50.669)
Mm.

Ed (03:08.794)
make content like TV, a lot of the creators get really frustrated because they lose their creativity. Yeah, they’re the autonomy. And then you’ve got, we find this more and more now, so obviously Netflix have been leaning into creators and Amazon’s leaning into creators and Peacock’s leaning into creators. If everyone starts doing this and they’re not just all doing the same thing in the end, well yeah, they’re not just all doing the same thing in the end. So what’s the point of differentiation if everyone does the same stuff?

Jo (03:13.826)
Yeah, autonomy, yeah.

Jo (03:26.99)
Create just laughing!

Jo (03:31.726)
Mmm.

Jo (03:36.183)
Yeah, and I was talking about this recently with somebody because I mean, Netflix has done similar in the sense that particularly with their kids and family originals team that they had quite a big team creating originals for Netflix. They let more or less all of them go apart from a very small number that stayed with it because really what Netflix did were like, hang on a minute, we can de-risk this. We’ll sit back. We’ll watch YouTube and we’ll wait for creators like Miss Rachel.

to build a proven audience on YouTube and then offer them a deal once that they’ve iterated and they’ve built their communities and all of that development risk is gone. So it feels like Tubi’s perhaps following Netflix’s lead. Let someone else fund the production, the experimentation phase. Let them make all the mistakes and iterate and then they’ll acquire it only when it’s been perfected, which, you know, it worked for Miss Rachel because she already had 10 million YouTube subscribers when Netflix went.

Ed (04:31.708)
Yeah.

Jo (04:32.554)
knocking on her door, it feels like Tubi is kind of saying to TikTok, we’ll take them a little bit earlier, but then does that mean they’re gonna get half formed formats? I don’t know, that’s the risk.

Ed (04:43.672)
You can see why they’re chasing it though. think I read that close to 70 % of US consumers say that they find creators more authentic than traditional TV. it… No.

Jo (04:53.358)
I don’t think that that’s exclusive to US consumers. think if you spoke to any teenager in the UK, you’d get a similar response. I’ve read any number of reports that say similar, that Gen Z, Gen A, they feel much more connected to creators than they do to traditional broadcasts and in sports, traditional commentators and pundits, which is why the aforementioned Mark Goldbridge is doing what he’s doing and the others. So it makes sense.

But I think to your point, there’s a limit to this. It kind of tips into just that. I’m just gonna keep saying creator slapping, because it feels like a very apt way to describe it at the minute.

Ed (05:35.52)
The one thing as well, the long game with this as well is obviously if TikTok are doing this at what point does TikTok turn around and say I don’t want to be your talent pipeline anymore and actually I’m losing some of the best creators to essential something that becomes a competitor at what point do say no I’m alright with this we’re just going to keep them where they are thank you very much.

Jo (05:52.239)
Maybe, yeah, maybe. And they’re already getting into supporting kind of micro dramas and those scrollable multi-episode vertical dramas, TikTok. that would, yeah, they might want to keep them in the future rather than let them go to Tubi. Okay, Peacock, talking of TikTok, Peacock has changed its app to scroll vertically just like TikTok.

Ed (06:06.887)
Absolutely.

Ed (06:14.405)
Here we go again.

Jo (06:21.058)
They are all morphing into one, aren’t they? Yep, so Peacock, particularly with its Bravo, they’ve got 5,000 hours of content. We know that shorts and vertical videos, ESPN has got verts, mean, everybody’s got a vertical video play, but they’ve got 5,000 hours of content that they think will work quite nicely vertically.

Ed (06:23.452)
Yeah.

Jo (06:44.95)
And also during the Winter Olympics, 20 % of their shorts viewers converted into live stream audiences. That’s really interesting. Hold that thought. Because that conversion rate is pretty good. That’s punchy, 20%. So, mean, well, validation if we needed it, that short form is a funnel, can be a funnel. We’ve got a story coming up later that also would imply that that’s how it’s being seen.

Ed (06:51.685)
Which is crazy, that’s driving tuning, which is the holy grail.

Yeah.

Jo (07:15.072)
So I think what it tells me, mean, certainly when I’m thinking about sports is there needs to be much more focus and science put around clips and vertical in terms of how it could be potentially a conversion into other platforms. I mean, you can even stream vertically live on YouTube now. They’ve rolled out a product where you can stream live vertically.

and it re-centers the frame that I saw an example of that when we were at Sports Pro Media in Madrid back end of last year by YouTube. Pretty good stuff. If you can move one in five of those casual vertical scrollers to a live product, that starts making shorts look really compelling. yeah.

Ed (07:57.8)
Absolutely.

Yeah, I was gonna say, mean, what’s clear is, I mean, I think that’s the point where I think vertical for me only works when it is short. And I think the thing that tells me that is the case when you see the stats around YouTube and long form that 50 % of people are now watching on TVs and laptops and bigger screens than a phone, that suggests to me that long form actually.

needs to be the other way around rather than the short itself but like you said but if you but the two things work together so when you see now what youtube are doing with shorts alongside the long form stuff it connects the dots and it all makes sense right but i think the like i said the clever bit here is the fact that you know in the for the winter olympics mbc are saying that or peacock are saying that ultimately they taking people back to their own platform so going from which we talk about a lot which is like rent in reach to owned and operated

Jo (08:48.045)
Yeah.

Ed (08:53.927)
There’ll be a lot of people looking at that going, right, how do we take that and replicate it?

Jo (08:58.594)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it almost feels like, well, we’ve said this before, everything is homogenizing. Everybody’s going to have a vertical play. Everybody’s going to have, yeah, they need to stop looking at shorts and long form in isolation. But again, you know, God, I’ve spoken until I’m blue in the face about ecosystem strategy and how you march your consumers around your ecosystem, thinking about how you service their needs data each one. Well, maybe this is a nod to that.

Ed (09:28.411)
Yeah, look, and I think, you know, they’re not the only ones that are doing a lot of vertical stuff. The BBC have been doing it across, certainly BBC Sport, BBC News now for a couple of years. At very least, when you scroll down, you can see the vertical videos. The thing I really, like about this as well is this new ad format that they’ve created where they’ve AI cloned Andy Cohen. If anyone doesn’t know Andy Cohen, he’s the host of Watch.

Jo (09:37.475)
Yeah.

Ed (09:52.742)
What happens live and also he’s the creator of the Real Housewives franchise Which is what people most people will have heard of and they’ve effectively cloned his voice To be able to turn into a brand vehicle during these these videos effectively so your brand can get basically get shout outs by him Which again is another monetizable way so I quite like I think it’s quite creative And they’re not trying to pretend that he’s not AI right so when you’re not trying to pretend I think it’s perfectly fine

Jo (10:18.86)
And also, isn’t this just an AI version of the old continuity announcer? It all comes back round, doesn’t it? Before we go on to the next story though, can we just say the first two stories, Quby has launched this creator verse incubator, and then we’re just looking at this Peacock headline feature, which is your Bravo verse. Can we stop giving things the verse suffix? In the week that Meta’s killed its metaverse ambitions, let’s stop giving everything the…

Ed (10:22.669)
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ed (10:46.587)
Maybe it is the end of us. Maybe that is the point.

Jo (10:49.934)
Enough! Enough of the verses already. Okay.

Ed (10:52.999)
Right then, so next story is about FIFA and not TikTok. So least we managed to get away from TikTok for at least one… And there’s no verse in this as far as we’re aware. So FIFA and YouTube. look, hot off the heels of… I always pronounce Kaze TV wrong, so do want to pronounce it properly for me? Oh, was it right then? I usually get it wrong. That happened, what, last year where ultimately Kaze TV got the exclusive rights to stream the World Cup for FIFA in Brazil.

Jo (10:59.042)
And there’s no verse in this one.

Jo (11:09.038)
That’s right, it’s Kazé

Ed (11:20.551)
They’ve now gone one step further and they’ve basically given YouTube the moniker of preferred platform for 2026 for the World Cup We are yet to see what totally what that entails But the headline thing here is is that 10 minutes of every match is going to be streamed live on YouTube plus extended highlights shorts and select full matches It’s going to be interesting to see are they looking at exactly what peacock did around

the Olympics, like are they looking to how do they drive tuning? Because I think for me it’s one thing when you create content that’s compelling and interesting to drive tuning, it’s another thing going you can watch 10 minutes now, stop, you can’t watch it anymore. Does that start to annoy people rather than do what it’s intended to do?

Jo (12:08.27)
I’m gonna read out in a minute some comments that I saw on a sub Reddit on r slash soccer. There was some brilliant comments. I’ll read them out in a minute, I mean, preferred platform. I’m doing the little air quotes and eye rolling for those who were just listening.

Ed (12:11.302)
girlfriend.

Ed (12:22.628)
Yeah. Special, special, special platform.

Jo (12:28.686)
This is a concession dressed up as a partnership. There you go. That’s my thought. This is FIFA going, well, FIFA Plus didn’t work. And now we’re going to claim that we’re all over YouTube and we’re really forward thinking. And genuinely, I am going to read some of the Reddit quotes because they were doing this. This really, it’s not FIFA driving to FIFA Plus. So think they’ve already acknowledged defeat on that one, but

Ed (12:34.576)
Yeah.

Ed (12:50.644)
you should.

Ed (12:57.21)
Well they did, sorry, they did didn’t they when they ultimately decided to do what they did with his arm for the club World Cup. Yeah, yeah.

Jo (13:01.612)
Well, there you go. Yeah. So really, this is just FIFA protecting its own broadcast partners revenue. But I mean, really, that just means that YouTube is a promotional layer for the broadcasters who have already paid. I don’t know. That’s how, when I was reading it, that’s what I took from it. Maybe I’m, yeah.

Ed (13:14.543)
Yeah, well, yeah.

a retrofit and an answer to the question how are you going to help us to drive how are going to drive to our broadcast when everyone’s going on YouTube to watch all manner of other stuff

Jo (13:25.614)
Yes

Jo (13:31.401)
Exactly. Anyway, I’m on this Reddit thread. Why would I watch only the first 10 minutes of a game on YouTube? What is the point of this? And then somebody put, literally just to make people want to watch and have to pay for whatever, what other services showing the full game. Now, of course, some people going, well, it’s free on the BBC in the UK. And then someone else put, yeah, well, I don’t think they realize that I’m already watching it on YouTube. Which I thought was…

hysterical. Yeah, there was some really, yeah, quite scathing. A lot of them had swear words in a lot of a lot of the comments. But I mean, always go to Reddit when you you want an honest read on something.

Ed (14:10.862)
Yeah. Well, I know. And also when any of these kind of things are ever announced that do in a sense look a bit different, people will always pile in and go for the negative first and have a bit of a go at it. Right. So it’d be interesting to see as they get closer and closer when they start to sort of explain to us exactly what they’re going to be doing this, where they’re going to be doing it, who were they working with to do it, to get the distribution, because is this just going to be on

on FIFA channels? Are they going to be working with other channels to distribute as well?

Jo (14:43.458)
The broadcaster channels apparently get it on their own and some will have select live matches, but I guess, again, that would have already been negotiated in the deals when their deals were done. But it’s interesting. I mean, I’m assuming FIFA is gonna want to champion some big numbers after it because that’s gonna make FIFA look good. But if it does that, then what stops the Premier League, the Champions League?

Ed (14:46.702)
Okay.

Ed (14:54.628)
Yeah.

Jo (15:11.796)
All other leagues really are going to be forced to follow suit, do not think.

Ed (15:15.238)
Absolutely and the reality is they’re trying to drive more value for FIFA partners and sponsors right and because they’re not necessarily getting… Interestingly right and I’ve written a post already for LinkedIn that’s coming out in the next couple of days so I’m just wondering when we’re recording this and when I’ve released it. I saw a really good panel from South by Southwest about a week ago. Ret & Link who are… yeah yeah I’m glad you knew they were.

Jo (15:22.008)
Yeah.

Jo (15:41.802)
yeah, yeah, I agree. Yeah, yeah.

Ed (15:44.743)
You always do. Talking about how, so they reckon that 50 % of all digital video content now created is created by creators, not media companies, but only 1.5 % of ad budgets is going towards it. That came from their own panel. And someone else said on that same panel that for the first time in 100 years, the ad money is not necessarily following.

Jo (16:02.754)
Yep.

Ed (16:13.37)
where the majority of content is being distributed. I.e. it’s followed radio, it’s followed newspapers, it’s followed TV, but it’s not necessarily following creators at the same pace, that it followed all of those places. So is this part of the answer to that question going? We know the audience is somewhere else other than where we want them to be, so we have to do something, but we’re so tied into all of our different broadcast deals at the moment that this is the best we can do right now.

Jo (16:37.806)
I don’t know about that ad money claim though, because you look at a lot of, I’m thinking of Evan Shapiro, when I watched him recently do his keynote at MIT London, he’s got a slide in his deck about where the ad money is going and a lot of ad spend is being diverted towards YouTube and creators. Now it’s a whole different ecosystem there. CPMs and RPMs, all different.

Ed (16:49.861)
Yeah.

Ed (16:53.541)
Yeah.

Jo (17:04.908)
So I don’t necessarily know about that. I’d have to do some homework on that one, but.

Ed (17:09.616)
Well I went down that rabbit hole for the whole entire weekend and still didn’t get a massive amount of clarity but I’ve written what I’ve written and I’m gonna stand by it because other people said it. But yeah. Cool.

Jo (17:16.653)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, but yeah, interesting because the next story is kind of related. So Mr. Beast. I mean, Mr. Beast, the poster child, the OG creator, but maybe, yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, he’s maybe got too big. Anyway, personal views aside, he’s launched Vyro, this platform. He’s launched quite a few platforms and different products before. This is a platform where anyone can clip his long form videos into shorts and post them.

and then he’s paying money per view. So he’s offering up to $300,000 in payout. There’s not necessarily a huge audience required or a channel needed, you just need to upload. So he’s basically flooding the space. And it’s saying top clippers on similar platforms, they can make quite a lot of money. I mean, a lot of this stuff is automated, right? So he’s basically offering his content as raw material and he’s outsourcing that mass distribution.

Ed (18:08.453)
Yeah.

Jo (18:17.078)
Whilst the scale potential is huge, you could argue, why does he need more scale? And that is almost because he is about as big as you can get. There was another story recently about him buying subscribers in really low CPM markets. But that actually dilutes your brand and it dilutes your revenue. He’s only able to do that and sustain because he’s got revenue sources from…

Ed (18:25.316)
Yeah.

Jo (18:45.078)
multiple so he’s fine. It’s not a strategy I would advocate going and buying subs from cheap markets.

Ed (18:47.398)
Unnies, unnies.

Ed (18:51.783)
And he’s so commercial, right? And he’s got so many commercial deals going on that he’s got so much inventory he needs to deliver. He’s part of the reason why he’s doing this, right?

Jo (18:58.69)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, so this I’m kind of torn on because I don’t necessarily think it has an application outside of someone the size of Mr. Beast because you’re basically just buying the cheapest scale that you can. And he’s only able to sustain it because he’s already so massive. It’s not a strategy for growth for smaller creators.

Ed (19:25.392)
See I’m, so essentially Mr. Beast is building an army of micro-influencers right, which at face value I like the sound of, and I must admit I’m a big advocate for trying to find micro-influencers that can take your content and put their own spin on it. But again, it feels like it’s gonna be, is it a Sally Hodges one, it’s just gonna be some kind of slapping of stuff on stuff. Most of this content is probably gonna be utter crap and

Jo (19:54.648)
Mm.

Ed (19:55.694)
Is anyone going to be necessarily interested or is that going to start to dare I say switch people off on Mr. B’s and get people fed up of content from him?

Jo (20:04.418)
Yeah, that’s the risk, isn’t it? No.

Ed (20:06.757)
Because there’s no curation there, right? You’re not being a… I don’t think… There’s no approval process. You just go in, you do it, and that’s fine.

Jo (20:13.058)
Hmm. So you’re giving away any kind of control or approval just for pure scale and flooding the market. And I don’t necessarily think that that works. And if we apply it to sport and originally I’m thinking, well, this actually could help distribute content for sport, know, distributed influence, you spread it around. You don’t necessarily need five creators when you can have 55,000 if you just let them do it. But one…

Sports rights holders and federations tend to be slightly more protective about their brand. And two, again, like we talked about with creator slapping, if everybody does it, it’s just a tsunami of similar clips just flooding the market. And that goes sour very quickly. yeah, interesting play by him. I’m not massively convinced that his strategy is one for new up and coming creators to follow. It’s mainly because he is about as big as you can get. So he’s having to try everything.

to continue his growth trajectory and maybe raise money.

Ed (21:14.757)
Yeah, that makes sense. again, this is a business that he’s invested in, ultimately, I think. So it’s not necessarily his business, but it’s one of those that’s probably come along. It’s an opportunity. He’s pushing it, widening the audience. Yeah, okay.

Jo (21:22.178)
Yep. Yep.

Jo (21:29.25)
Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of, a lot of his platforms are creator tools. So he has to kind of champion them and use them before other creators are going to come on board. He’s got his view stats platform, which does the same.

Ed (21:38.181)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, good luck to him. All right then, so speaking of paying creators with cash to get rich, so Meta are now paying creators to come back to Facebook. There we go. So they’ve launched their own creator fast track where they’re guaranteeing monthly payments to lure established creators from TikTok and YouTube to Facebook. What I’m not quite sure of is if they lure you across the page, does mean you have to stop on their toys? Is just extra cash? I wasn’t entirely sure on that.

Jo (21:55.288)
God.

Jo (22:12.755)
Lord, he knows. mean, God, does anybody under 60 go on Facebook anymore?

Ed (22:13.955)
Yeah, who’s digging on that?

Ed (22:18.693)
Only to see when it’s people’s birthdays. No, I’m joking. Yeah, but the thing is, I mean, I go on there, because ultimately I have family members who that’s the only place they go on and do anything, right? So, I mean, that’s part of reason I go on there, but I know exactly what you mean. So these payments run for three months, after which creators keep boosted reach and access to Facebook’s monetization tools.

Jo (22:29.422)
Mm.

Ed (22:41.029)
Yeah, you get that guarantee for three months as long as you’ve got a certain scale. So that’s only creators with a hundred thousand followers earned this money. Those over a million are the ones who earned three thousand. I have seen a few comments around LinkedIn the last couple of days as well saying that creators are spending way more than this on creating good content and this is not gonna…

touch the sides in terms of funding any of what they’re doing. So there’s been a healthy degree of skepticism, but there will be plenty that will probably pile in and do it and take the cash in the short term, because it’s bit of extra cash on top of everything else they’re doing.

Jo (23:00.972)
Yeah.

Jo (23:14.542)
Where are these creators coming from is my first question because as we’ve seen back to the old Mr. Beast, can, a creator can move platforms and in his case he went to Amazon. Now the second season of Beast Games has been a lot more successful than first, but you cannot count on the fact that the audience follows the creator across platforms. And again, I go back to, are people really gonna go back and embrace Facebook in big numbers?

I literally go on it once a month, yeah, just to see whose birthday it’s been.

Ed (23:46.277)
Yeah, and also there’s an assumption there that a lot of these creators, because I think you’ve got to not already exist on Facebook as well, so there’s assumption that they don’t already exist, but surely a lot of these will have had some kind of cursory presence on there, even if they’re not doing a great deal with it already.

Jo (24:01.528)
Yeah.

Ed (24:03.683)
The criteria that you’ve got to meet to go and do it, mean, part of me thinks is it just some kind of ruse to actually make a lot of noise around the fact that we are painting creators too, because there’s just so many other people doing it, but yeah, who knows?

Jo (24:13.911)
Yeah.

Jo (24:18.594)
Yeah, Jury’s out on that one. think, you know, let Facebook be Facebook. Let your grand stay on there. They’re having a lovely time.

Ed (24:28.739)
Wow, harsh.

Jo (24:29.582)
Nobody else is moving on. Interesting Ed, that of our five stories, creators, four out of five.

Ed (24:40.493)
Anyone would think we corrected it.

Jo (24:41.998)
And Peacock, we’re essentially talking about TikTok. yeah, which, I mean, that’s probably the first time that we’ve had that many stories. But then in my head, I’m thinking, is, God, how long have we been talking? I mean, as long as I’ve known you, we’ve spoken about the creative economy and where retention is flowing and ad dollars flowing behind it.

Ed (24:46.703)
Yeah, true. Witches craze.

Ed (25:04.09)
Yeah.

Jo (25:09.344)
I wonder if it feels like we’re in the middle of the gold rush now and everybody is rushing, know, creators are going to save us. We need a creator strategy. I’m worrying it’s going a bit too far.

Ed (25:21.989)
I don’t think there’s a massive coincidence that all these things came out in the last week when it was South by Southwest last week So these were a lot of these big announcements would have been made for anyone doesn’t know South by Southwest the original is in Austin, Texas And like I said, it was last week. So I think a lot of these things will have been It’s almost become a little bit like the TV upfronts for sort of the creator and content marketing world now So all this these will all

Jo (25:28.664)
This is true.

Jo (25:43.448)
you

Jo (25:47.084)
That’s true. Lots of announcements yet.

Ed (25:49.645)
Yeah, these will have all come around in the last week because of that, essentially. So actually, we haven’t curated it. It’s totally by accident and because of self-advice. But I think you’re right. think, look, again, we’re massive advocates for the way that content creation, content marketing’s gone. And I’m also a massive advocate for working with creators because I think they give a unique distribution point.

Jo (25:52.6)
Good point.

Jo (26:14.254)
So undoubtedly, undoubtedly, but as we made a point in last week’s episode when we were talking about Jessa and Chicago Bulls, and we had someone from the Chicago Bulls email us saying that they’d heard the episode and saying thank you. The very point we made there is that the creators have to be invested. They have to be fans themselves. They really need to get behind it and get stuck in, as Jessa did, plonking himself on the court in the middle of all those kids.

Ed (26:21.828)
Yeah.

Ed (26:35.961)
Yeah.

Jo (26:43.906)
That feels much more native. My concern is there are only so many creators to go around that will have that level of connection and authenticity. The rest will just take the paycheck and show up. And that, again, most fans and most particularly most young people will be able to see through that a mile away. So at some point it starts being disadvantageous and the creator is not the answer to everything. I know.

Ed (27:07.426)
Yeah, dare we use the word authentic, which is often what gets thrown in. I know you were trying to avoid using that then, but I couldn’t help it. It just popped into my head as you said it. I couldn’t help it. But that’s the reality, right? I think the audiences do see through that. So please, everyone, don’t burst this bubble. Do try and be a bit more discerning about your partnerships. Do try and work with people who have a genuine passion for what you’re doing.

Jo (27:14.092)
I know, I know, I’m trying to figure out another word.

Jo (27:24.866)
They do.

Jo (27:29.262)
You

Jo (27:36.974)
Absolutely, 100%, why wouldn’t you? I think sometimes it’s just a function of lack of time or lack of creative, well, maybe lack of creative thinking and or laziness. Brief your agency, go and find a creator. Tick, I ticked that box on my OKRs.

Ed (27:50.754)
I’ll live of-

Ed (27:55.5)
Right, I think that’s us.

Jo (27:56.909)
We are done. Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of the Attention Shift. Give us a like and subscribe, send us some feedback. You can email us on hello at attentionshift.media and here’s been.

Ed (28:11.392)
Ed? Abyss? I didn’t think about that, sorry!

Jo (28:12.782)
Let’s think about that. I’ve been Jo Redfern. Thank you for tuning in.

Ed (28:18.542)
Goodbye.

Dan Nagar (28:22.64)
Excellent. Cool. Yeah, we were kind of speeding through it all, you made up some good time at the end, like with that chat.

Ed (28:24.43)
Cool.

Yeah!

I think we were, because there were similarities, that’s why we got through it quicker. Yeah. True.

Dan Nagar (28:34.32)
Yeah. The intro was quick as well. So like that shaved like a few minutes. So yeah, we did make up some time in the end there with the nice chat. So it was good. Yes. Let’s do one set. Let me get it open. Let’s do conversation shorts or let me see.

Jo (28:35.03)
Yeah.

Ed (28:47.224)
So do you want us to do the conversation short script now? Have you seen that Joe?

Jo (28:52.781)
Yes.

Dan Nagar (29:06.21)
I wanna do, let’s pick.

Dan Nagar (29:11.182)
I want, we don’t have to do all the conversational ones. Like I think maybe one or two. And then, yeah, yeah. Let’s do.

Ed (29:16.356)
It’s up to you. Yeah.

Dan Nagar (29:22.992)
Let’s see.

Dan Nagar (29:27.16)
Let’s do the singles really quick. you put a lot in there.

Ed (29:31.544)
singles. Short scripts, yeah?

Dan Nagar (29:32.856)
Yeah, short scripts there. Yeah, he’s put a lot in there.

Ed (29:38.21)
Yeah, just because we have more stories, we’ve only done the first five in the pod, so.

Dan Nagar (29:42.352)
Okay, yeah. Let’s do the, let’s do those, let’s do five of those and then we’ll just pick two conversational ones to do. Is that okay? Yeah. And then yeah, plenty to…

Ed (29:51.748)
Okay, yeah, that’s fine by me. Yeah. Do you wanna take turns on these Joe? You do one, I do one, yeah?

Yeah, go for it.

That’s what you say you want.

Jo (30:03.47)
Should I just go for it, Dan, or do you need to?

Dan Nagar (30:05.526)
Yeah, go for it. Are you going with 2B and TikTok? Yeah, go ahead.

Jo (30:13.784)
Fox’s streaming platform, Tubi, has partnered with TikTok to turn short form creators into full TV showmakers. TikTok finds the talent, Tubi funds the shows. That’s 150 million US users that get pushed straight to them. Now Tubi has gone from two to 60 % of US streaming share in a single year, so it’s growing really fast in that fast market. God, I said that. Let me, I’ll do that one again.

Dan Nagar (30:38.381)
Yeah, I think your audio was kind of like dropping out a bit. I don’t know if it’s it might be a connection thing. But yeah, try that. Just do that one more time for me.

Jo (30:41.752)
Okay.

Jo (30:48.684)
Now, hang on a minute, let me just…

Jo (30:52.809)
lost a little bit of strength okay

Fox’s streaming platform, Tubi, has partnered with TikTok to turn short form creators into full blown TV show makers. TikTok’s gonna find the talent and Tubi funds the shows. That’s 150 million US users that get pushed straight to them. Now, Tubi has gone from 2 % to 6 % of US streaming share in a single year. That’s fast channel. So the moment creators lose… Sorry, gonna read that last line again.

Dan Nagar (31:26.916)
Yeah, no worries.

Jo (31:27.052)
The risk is though, the moment that creators lose creative control, their authenticity disappears with it.

Do want me to do the whole thing again or can you close that last line in?

Dan Nagar (31:38.704)
Can you just do the last line? I’m worried that I maybe spoke while you’re just as you’re doing it.

Jo (31:41.741)
Okay.

The risk is though, the moment creators lose creative control, their authenticity disappears with it.

Dan Nagar (31:52.432)
Okay, perfect. Do you wanna do the next one, Ed?

Ed (31:56.024)
Yeah, you ready?

Dan Nagar (31:58.19)
Ready.

Ed (31:59.47)
Peacock just turned short clips into full live streams and their numbers are mental. They rebuilt their app to scroll like TikTok, vertical, personalised, AI powered clips from 5000 hours of content. During the Winter Olympics, 20 % of people watching short clips went straight into the full live stream. That’s actual acquisition of viewers. Short form isn’t killing long form, it’s becoming the front door to it.

Dan Nagar (32:25.652)
excellent, That’s very nice. Okay, who wants to do FIFA? Cool.

Jo (32:28.504)
High energy that head.

Ed (32:29.763)
I don’t know where I got that from. I don’t feel like I’ve got any energy.

Jo (32:40.59)
I’ll do the next one.

Jo (32:45.454)
So you’re gonna be able to watch the World Cup on YouTube for free, let me explain. So FIFA’s named YouTube a preferred platform for 2026. Every match gets its first 10 minutes free, plus highlights, shorts, and some archive footage, but only 10 minutes. 2.7 billion of the 5 billion viewers in 2022 were already watching digitally. So is this an acknowledgement that FIFA Plus has failed and YouTube is really the distribution layer that they couldn’t build themselves?

excited to see where this goes but be warned if FIFA does it every other league is gonna have to follow suit

Dan Nagar (33:23.524)
Very good. Making it very easy for me. Now I’m jealous. I’m actually having a lamb as well. Two more and then one. Yes.

Ed (33:29.26)
That’s the plan, Dad. I’m trying to get through it because I’ve got to go and get some lamb koftas.

Jo (33:34.752)
Nice.

Ed (33:39.299)
Mr Beast? You heard it?

Dan Nagar (33:46.789)
Go for it.

Ed (33:47.94)
MrBeast is at it again. This time he’s giving away $300,000 to people who going to clip his videos for him. But what this actually means is crazy. He’s launched a new product called Viro. Anyone can clip his long form content to short form, post it and get paid per view. No audience, no channel, just edit. Top clickers on similar platforms earn $30,000 a month already. But the risk is quality control. When hundreds of people clip the same content, how do you protect the brand?

Jo (34:21.28)
a mad thing he’s done it’s a really mad thing he’s done yeah

Dan Nagar (34:21.392)
Great. Awesome.

Ed (34:23.073)
Yeah, Phil’s a bit shit, I’m not gonna lie.

I think he’s got to the point where he It was funny because I heard Jordan, Jordan who’s son of mine I can never pronounce, saying on one of the podcasts that actually for a lot of the stuff he does he doesn’t actually make that much money because he’s got such a big team working behind it and he needs a lot of things to work and I just looked and thought but that seems mad to me the kind of volume he’s doing.

Dan Nagar (34:27.962)
Yeah.

Jo (34:32.302)
Schwartzenberger.

Jo (34:41.482)
really?

Jo (34:51.266)
He’s, yeah, well, you see, that’s the thing now. He’s got 400 people that work for him. And I mean, he’s got what, 370 million subs? But again, more, all the additional subs now are coming from really low value countries where they are, yeah, where the RPMs are super low. It’s, yeah.

Ed (35:07.019)
and you spend your money on them.

Ed (35:13.965)
interesting.

Jo (35:14.232)
There comes a point where you just can’t grow anymore, but it has to. It kinda has to, and YouTube want him to, because then Neil Mowin stands and gives him another whatever, diamond, platinum play button.

Dan Nagar (35:17.988)
Yeah.

Jo (35:28.032)
Right, okay, meta.

Dan Nagar (35:29.817)
Yeah, go for it.

Jo (35:32.28)
So meta is now pre-

So Meta is now paying creators to come back to Facebook and the numbers might surprise you. If you’ve got 100,000 followers, $1,000 a month guaranteed. If you’ve got over a million, you get 3,000 for three months straight. Now Meta paid 3 billion to creators last year, they claim, up 35%. So the timing isn’t random because TikTok in the US, well, the future’s shaky and Meta is standing right there with a check. But like anything,

Will the audiences really follow back to Facebook? Is TikTok’s US future really shaky? I don’t know if it is.

Ed (36:13.059)
Fucking hell, who knows? like, I don’t know what’s going on over there.

Dan Nagar (36:13.872)
It’s always up and down. It’s been like for like a decade now. It’s been rumored to close and then it doesn’t close.

Jo (36:24.808)
Now it’s owned by the Ellisons, it’s pretty safe right because they’re just going to control all the messaging.

Dan Nagar (36:28.012)
I think so. Yeah, there’s always this every year they have a scare. All right, let’s two of the conversational ones. I’m thinking maybe the FIFA one because and one of the creator ones, which one would be

Ed (36:30.061)
Well.

Jo (36:33.453)
Mm.

Ed (36:35.043)
I forgot the Alisens on it.

Jo (36:37.015)
Yeah, they do now.

Ed (36:47.085)
Okay.

and

Dan Nagar (36:51.214)
Not Mr. Beast.

Ed (36:52.769)
No, shit that.

Dan Nagar (36:54.76)
I like the peacock one, maybe.

Jo (36:55.874)
Definitely FIFA. Okay. Yeah, because we, the Peacock one mentions the Olympics as well, because it’s not a very sport heavy one this week, it’s all creators.

Ed (36:59.181)
Yeah.

Dan Nagar (37:02.948)
Yeah.

Dan Nagar (37:06.286)
Yeah, let’s do Peacock and the FIFA.

Ed (37:06.498)
Yeah.

Jo (37:10.615)
Okay.

Ed (37:10.947)
That’s mad that Olympic stat. Because no one ever, you don’t ever see a stat like that. No one ever quantifies that.

Jo (37:13.678)
Yeah, it’s really good, isn’t it?

Jo (37:20.022)
Well, where have they got it from?

Ed (37:22.017)
Well, whether it’s actually true or not. Maybe that’s why no one ever quantifies it. Well, they’ve probably gone, this many people watch all of our content, this many people watch all of our streams. yeah, that’s the number. Because I don’t know how else you quantify it.

Dan Nagar (37:23.433)
Thank

Jo (37:26.2)
Fingers in the air.

Jo (37:35.725)
Mm.

Yeah.

Okay.

Ed (37:41.183)
Anyway, let’s not get, let’s not let truth get in the way of a good story. Which ones are we doing again? Peacock first?

Dan Nagar (37:45.572)
What?

Jo (37:47.702)
Okay, peacock and FIFA. Yeah.

Dan Nagar (37:49.776)
Peacock and FIFA. Yes, Peacock first.

Ed (37:53.988)
Now what I’m going to do is just going to move this around then because then at least then it looks like I’m looking at you which is better. Cool.

Dan Nagar (38:03.62)
whenever you’re ready.

Jo (38:06.453)
Okay, listen up Ed. Peacock have just found a way to bring social audiences back to appointment to view.

Ed (38:14.275)
and the proof apparently is in the numbers. During the Winter Olympics, 20 % of people watching short clips on their app went straight into the full live stream.

Jo (38:24.59)
That’s insane. So Peacock have completely rebuilt their app to scroll like TikTok. It’s vertical and it’s AI powered personalized clip from all those thousands of hours of content, really designed to pull you in gradually.

Ed (38:38.603)
If it works, I think it’s really smart. Short form is the front door. Live ultimate for them is the destination.

Jo (38:45.388)
Will it work with just normal content though? Anything outside of that temple like the Olympics? mean the Olympics is a special case. People are already primed to watch and invested.

Ed (38:54.519)
Yeah that’s fair, but NBC Universal’s own chairman just said stop thinking it was a streaming platform and stop thinking it was an entertainment platform. Not quite sure what the difference is. Anyway, but it’s a pretty significant statement and I wish I were where you take it.

Jo (39:06.828)
The test will be when everybody else does it, as we’ve said before. Everybody is mirroring everybody else now. They’re homogenizing. So when they all do it, what makes Peacock any different from when they approach is everywhere. Jury’s out on that one.

Ed (39:21.475)
I guess they’re looking at it. If they can get in there early and have the live rights to back it up, then they’ll be getting a head start.

Dan Nagar (39:30.096)
Cool. I will shorten that one up. I didn’t realize, I didn’t see that line down there. FIFA and YouTube, and that will be the last short.

Jo (39:30.798)
I didn’t realize there was another line over the page.

Ed (39:32.737)
Yeah, I even till I scrolled. I thought, yeah, it just looked like, is it ending? I’m like, shit, there’s another line.

Ed (39:48.557)
So wait a minute, I’m looking at his book, well you can watch the welcome on YouTube for free and let me explain and then Joe explains it. How’s he written this? How’s he written this? Right, let’s, alright, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan Nagar (39:48.581)
Whatever.

Jo (39:52.994)
Yeah, don’t say it.

Dan Nagar (39:55.781)
Yeah, maybe like, maybe don’t put the let me explain and just take that. All right.

Ed (39:59.371)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m gonna, I’ll lean into you to explain, Joe. Alright. Bless him. Right then.

Jo (39:59.855)
Yeah.

No.

Ed (40:08.512)
So apparently now you can watch the World Cup on YouTube for free Joe.

Jo (40:12.662)
Indeed, FIFA’s named YouTube their preferred platform for 2026. Every match is getting its first 10 minutes free, plus some highlights and shorts and some archive footage. All unlocked free for YouTube.

Ed (40:26.242)
And it makes sense, right? This is not FIFA experimenting. 2.7 billion of the 5 billion people who watched the 2022 World Cup were already on digital platforms. Is that half the world?

Jo (40:35.982)
Well, yeah, they went on FIFA Plus though. That’s really what this is, isn’t it? It’s an acknowledgement that YouTube really is that distribution layer that FIFA couldn’t build themselves, right?

Ed (40:47.082)
Yeah, I think that’s a bit harsh though. Like, look, every major rights holder is thinking now, how do they get people from these platforms into their own environments? But is getting 10 minutes free in front of YouTube on it’s really going to be the hook?

Jo (40:59.842)
Yeah, I’m not sure, I’m not sure. I don’t think they’d be doing it if FIFA Plus had worked. Maybe damage limitation dressed up as strategy.

Ed (41:08.384)
Yeah, and whether it’s a win for the fans will remain to be seen, if FIFA does this and it works, every other league on planet’s going have a decision to make.

Jo (41:16.502)
Agreed. That’s the part I’m excited to watch unfold.

Dan Nagar (41:21.424)
Cool. Awesome. can I have one more thing from you Ed, real quick? You know, that lovely ad read. Can I, can we do it from like after where it says before we dive in, just go from the biggest of just that, then I can kind of stick that anywhere or use it for something else if we don’t put it in this. no, thank you so much.

Ed (41:22.124)
We nailed that Joe.

Jo (41:23.722)
You

Ed (41:28.2)
Is it that sudden script? Yeah, fuck’s sake.

Ed (41:45.142)
Yeah, that’s No, can go Joe, you can go and have your dinner.

Jo (41:45.536)
Do you need me for this? Because I might go.

Dan Nagar (41:51.428)
Have a good evening.

Jo (41:51.586)
Night. See you then.

Ed (41:53.292)
Thanks Joe, see later, bye.

Dan Nagar (41:54.532)
Yeah. That one, I’ll just keep this in an archive just in case we want to. Yeah.

Ed (41:59.744)
Yeah, just in case you get told off for not getting it recorded. Let’s give it a go then, yeah?

Dan Nagar (42:04.976)
Alright, cool. Go for it. I think it’s probably just going to be audio only values for this, but yeah. Cool. Go for it.

Ed (42:10.548)
Okay, yeah, yeah, worries, right then. Well that’s good, I don’t have to worry about my eyes all then and I can actually try and read it and slow down a little bit. Right, cool. Ready?

Dan Nagar (42:18.628)
Cool, sounds good.

Ed (42:20.704)
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Dan Nagar (42:47.523)
Easy, Yeah, first time. Awesome. Cool, I’m going to stop recording now.

Ed (42:49.238)
Nailed it first time. Cool.