3 Trends Reshaping the Creator Economy in 2026

14:56Colin Rosenblum:Because the recipe for live streaming is do something provocative. Do something crazy, yeah. Get clipped. That moment gets exposure.

15:02Samir Chaudry:And there's an economy around clipping. So like everyone's incentivized in this infrastructure. Everyone. The platform, like kick, incentivized to push clavicular. Clavicular, incentivized to do something crazy on camera. The Clippers, incentivized to get him millions and millions and millions of views and make him ever present on the internet. Yeah. Everyone's incentivized. And then you also have like the New York Times, incentivized, drive clicks because this guy's controversial and crazy. And he has crazy terms like looks maxing and he's hammering his face. Like, all of it is good for business.

15:36Samir Chaudry:Okay, so the clavicular story is a dark story. Just like, in my opinion, that's dark. It's not a success story. It feels like a cautionary tale for everyone. I mean, just this past week, he was arrested on battery charges for allegedly instigating a fight between two women and filming it for his stream. So like, this to me is dark. There is a light side of this. The strategy we just said, go live every day. have like an ideology clip to create relevance has been used by a group of creators who've been named one of Fast Company's most innovative companies of the year. And that's TPBN. We interviewed them on this show.

16:19Samir Chaudry:And I think they represent the other lane of what we're talking about here. They represent like a lot of hope for me on the internet of building small communities and making something fun and valuable and show me the value of live streaming. So this is a daily technology and business show that's hosted by two guys named John and Jordi. And they stream for three hours a day. Their concurrent viewership can be anywhere from like 3 ,000 to 10 ,000 people on YouTube and Twitter. They have 312 ,000 Twitter followers, 58 ,000 subscribers on YouTube. And by every traditional metric, they are small or niche in this world of the creator economy.

16:57Samir Chaudry:But they are an absolute powerhouse media company. Like reportedly and kind of just by back of the napkin math, you can estimate their revenue. They're doing around$20 million in advertising. And they're using the same strategy. They're live every day. They talk about things that they're passionate about. They create a space for an underserved community, which was the world of technology, the engineers at a lot of the companies that are building tech, people who wanted to have like a cooler place to talk about tech and business. And it's working.

17:31Colin Rosenblum:Yeah, I like the story because these guys are not necessarily provocative. They might be provocative in the way that they reimagined tech news, tech and business news. But they are by no means going to extreme lengths to create clips that are universally interesting to anyone in the world because they are shocking. You know, they are streaming three hours a day. And for them, the provocative clip is maybe something that a tech CEO says about a new product, right? And it's provocative and interesting to that community that they are serving.

18:10Samir Chaudry:Yeah, I'll say like some of the more recent clips have been like Mark Cuban talking about this moment for young people in jobs. There was a very big moment on Twitter, which was Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber. his first interview since Uber was on TPBN talking to these guys. And like I said, the concurrent viewership is not huge. It's anywhere from like three to 10 to 20 ,000 people. But daily viewership of TPBN is large because of the quantity of clips. I think they said they do like, I don't know, probably 20 to like maybe 30 clips a day across all platforms. It's like everywhere. So if you're in this world of business and tech, you cannot be on the internet without tpbn in your feed somewhere and it's showing me how valuable live streaming is and how valuable it is that like again they emerged really fast and i think if you're live every single day and your clips are new and fresh every day you are exactly what you just said trust is built by exposure over time and adopting the you know like the live streaming playbook for a different context has proven to work.

19:18Samir Chaudry:There are countless copies of this show now in every category. Everyone wants to make this show now. Everyone, I think everyone's dream is to go live. My dream is to go live. I think it's easier to go live as a content creator.

19:32Colin Rosenblum:That's what I think is appealing about it is that it takes the pressure off of the editing, the value per second that you feel you need to jam into a video. It's just, yeah, I can exist and be myself for three hours. And even if I say one good thing or one interesting moment happens, it was worth it.

19:48Samir Chaudry:So I think if we're looking forward here, I think we will continue to see a rise in live streaming. I think there's an appetite from the audience. And then again, I think it provides amazing source material for clipping. And the clipping economy is not going anywhere. You know, people getting paid to generate clips on your behalf, that to me is like the gig economy of our world. And it is only going to increase. And so I would imagine that we're going to see a lot more launches of live streaming shows.

20:16Colin Rosenblum:My hope is that it continues in the vein of live news in every different industry and sector and live news, live sports. It's going to be interesting to see where creators truly innovate in a lane that is not just provocative for the sake of eyeballs.

20:32Samir Chaudry:Yeah. I hope we see more TPBNs, more innovation in the space, but the positive will always come with the negative, there's going to be chaos as well. You know, I think my hope is that there's more of a crackdown from the platforms in terms of what you can film.

20:48Colin Rosenblum:The problem is the sheer mass of clips that come from the chaos will always overpower the clips that come from.

20:55Samir Chaudry:It's more interesting to look at a car crash. Yeah. Plain and simple. So who knows what'll happen, but I think live streaming will continue to shape what happens next. I'm really curious if we're going to see any of it in the context of political campaigns and elections as we get to the midterms. And like considering we saw different media strategies used at different elections, podcast election for the presidential election, Instagram election for the New York mayoral election, are we going to see a live streamed like campaign or somebody who's like every day leading up to, you know, the election, they're live.

21:34Samir Chaudry:It's a pretty dangerous strategy.

21:35Colin Rosenblum:That's a very dangerous strategy. I say that dangerous meaning like, powerful strategy. The problem is it's going to be, whoever adopts that will perform better with a more provocative. With more provocative content. Content, yes. Yeah. So we'll see what plays out. But I think that's a pretty solid prediction that the next election. We'll have some live streaming.

21:54Samir Chaudry:Yeah. The second thing that feels like we can't not talk about it is the insane evolution of AI video over the past three months. Where we started on January 1st with AI video to then the launch of Sora and like the weird ability to use everybody's face and see Jake Paul all over the internet and Sam Altman all over the internet to then the launch of SeedDance, the Chinese AI platform or AI model that was able to generate like insane movie quality, you know, Higgs field and all these, all these AI platforms that just emerged and flooded our feeds all have resulted in like this really insane kind of acceleration of what's happening in video and what's happening in content, leading us all the way up to at the end of this quarter, within the past week, one of the most bizarre things I've seen, which is AI Fruit Love Island, Catching Steam.

22:50Samir Chaudry:Maybe you can explain. Catching Steam, it's already over. It's already over, but it was like, it was like maybe the most popular show of the quarter. It was. Like Heated Rivalries and AI Fruit Love Island. Those were like the two biggest shows. Wow, we didn't even bring up Heated Rivalry. This is the first time we're bringing up Heated Rivalry? I brought it up. It's up now. Consider it being brought up.

23:09Colin Rosenblum:Okay. Yeah, great. Yeah, AI Fruit Love Island. First off, if you haven't seen Love Island, I would recommend you actually truly watch a season of Love Island, probably Australia season one or UK season two, if you're just getting started. I love that you are an encyclopedia of Love Island seasons. I truly believe it is one of the best reality TV shows, but that's not what we're talking about. on this episode. AI Fruit Love Island is scripted, short form, made with AI skits, largely about interpersonal relationships and drama, very much like Love Island was. Instead of people, the skits are played out through fruit, personified as people.

23:57Colin Rosenblum:And it is also kind of a car crash that you cannot look away. It was launched on TikTok March 13th, has 3.1 million followers, or had, I will say. And the viewership ranges from 12 million to 40 million per episode.

24:15Samir Chaudry:Now, you know, there's storylines of like an apple falling in love with a mango while being jealous of a banana, you know? That's a great retelling of the story. So you've watched. Yeah, I just want people to understand

24:28Colin Rosenblum:what the narratives are that we're following. So what happened here is actually there have been takedowns of the channel. Specifically, there was a takedown of the channel on YouTube. TikTok took down over half of the episodes, largely without explanation as far as we know. And the creator of this franchise kind of lashed out and spoke out, angry at all of the hate that they were receiving in the comments. You know, these platforms taking down his AI series and pledged to come back even stronger, which apparently he did because he launched a new channel very recently, actually, where they're not personified as fruit.

25:04Colin Rosenblum:They actually look like humans. Okay. So, everyone still with me? Yeah, yeah, yeah, still with you. I swear there's a point here. So this, I keep calling it a franchise because I think that's actually what matters. So, traditionally, we're used to seeing viral moments on short-form feeds. It's the Hawk Tour girl. Like Hayley Welch became a viral moment. And we're used to humans being the viral moment that then takes off. And like you said earlier, there's a shelf life normally to that fame. If you look back even to the Ellen show, Ellen always had the person of the moment. Remember like the damn Daniel kids?

25:45Samir Chaudry:Yeah, damn Daniel kids. Yeah.

25:46Colin Rosenblum:So she would always have the person of the moment on the internet on her show during that time. And that's kind of what we're used to. if you want to build a franchise that gets popular, traditionally you can't really do it in a viral form in a very short amount of time like this did being launched only in March. This feels very new to me that this is a viral franchise. This is new IP that was the thing that went viral, not just a moment. And I think that's what's interesting here and that's what we're going to see more of because of AI video. we will see people build entire worlds and franchises in very short amounts of time that are able to get popular very quickly.

26:32Samir Chaudry:I think the other thing that happened in AI this quarter is Sora launched from OpenAI. Again, we saw like these cameos of creators like Jake Paul and people using each other's faces. And it was a social feed of AI video. And at the end of this quarter, about two weeks ago, they announced they were killing the app, shutting it down. So some stats around Sora, the burn rate was roughly a million dollars a day to run this thing, to run this app. Their peak users were around a million and collapsed to under half a million by the time of the shutdown. They saw a download decline of 66%. So 66 % drop from November 2025 to February 2026.

27:13Samir Chaudry:And the biggest news around this was that there was a Disney deal attached to this, that Disney had given their IP, licensed their IP to Sora, and they were set to invest over a billion dollars into OpenAI. And that was a really big deal to go, okay, this major movie company is saying you can use our characters and people can use our characters to create video with. Now, I think one thing that's important to talk about here in terms of like this sophomore year of AI video, as I think about it, is the question of if we enjoy consuming it or not. Like for real, do we enjoy consuming it or creating it?

27:54Samir Chaudry:And Sora was this feed of AI video. Once you did it once, the novelty wore off in my opinion. And I, like when I was playing with it, I just thought it was interesting to create. And then I thought it was interesting to download my creations and text them to my friends. I didn't care that there was a feed.

28:10Colin Rosenblum:It was a tool.

28:10Samir Chaudry:It wasn't an entertainment feed. But it was built as a social feed and a social platform. But I think it's a completely misguided assumption. Like, I don't think we actually enjoy consuming any of it more than we enjoy creating it. And if we're creating it, it's mostly for private consumption, mostly to show our friends or to laugh. To me, AI video, again, is the equivalent of an inside joke. So wherever an inside joke can go is where it would go. Sometimes inside jokes become big on the internet. like AI Fruit Love Island, but the majority of AI video is built for private consumption. So I think if the first three months showed us anything, it's that there's only going to be an exponential increase in this type of content across platforms.

28:52And some of it is going to be enjoyed by audiences.

28:55Samir Chaudry:Some of it's going to be bizarre, but the platforms are going to have to reckon with policies. They're going to have to reckon with also just like, what do you do with this much content with YouTube? Like there's no clear policy that covers AI Fruit Love Island, right? Like it's not impersonating a real person. It's not mass produced spam. It's actually original. It's weird. And it's creative AI content. So there's like, it's almost like the policies in January that Neil put out in his letter are written for one era of the internet. And we've already moved on to the next era.

29:32Colin Rosenblum:Yeah.

29:33Samir Chaudry:That's what feels crazy to me right now. All right. So the third trend to me feels like the memification and the gamification of everything. So when I think about the early days of the internet, the internet was kind of a place that was originally understood by people who played video games and people who were into computer science. I remember my uncle, who's an engineer, like he would like play these games and he would show me how to play, but you had to like know code to play the games. And he was like really good with computers. And that, because that was the first crop of people who started using the internet, there was like a language to it, jokes to that, that I think the internet has actually just carried on over the past 35, 40 years of like, like memes and jokes and stuff that you find in like Reddit threads and Discord servers.

30:26Colin Rosenblum:I mean, the term looks maxing actually even has its origins in gaming. Oh, really? Yeah, you know when you've ever played maybe Tony Hawk's Pro Skater? Yeah. And you'll get a certain amount of coins or money to put towards your character, and you can either buy a new board or you can increase the height of your ollie. Yeah. Looksmaxing in a game is just taking all of those funds and coins and putting them towards your physical appearance in the game. Huh.

30:52Samir Chaudry:That's really interesting. Yeah, so I've kind of always said that I think everything that becomes successful on the internet is kind of rooted in video games. And to cut to the chase here, I think the thing that we all kept bringing up is how memes have entered into the world of the White House. And largely under this Trump presidency, we've seen like memes be like a primary language tool to explain to the public what's happening or like hype up the public what's happening. and something that we saw most recently is after three days after the u.s strikes iran the official white house twitter account began posting videos that were mixed real war footage with clips from video games and tv shows and they were like hype reels that were memes and mashups of what was happening it was almost like fan edits that you'd see on tiktok but like from the official white house account.

31:55Samir Chaudry:And to me, that feels like the sensitivity to absurdity has gone up because the past 40 years of the internet have been mostly based on memes, jokes, making everything lighthearted, joking about anything absurd. And our capacity to watch something that is absurd and just accept it has gone through the roof. And now we have the, you know, the White House, the like government of the United States putting out video game style edits of real war footage. This reminds me of like when Call of Duty was becoming a big thing. Like you go back to YouTube, the early days of YouTube was people playing Call of Duty, right?

32:45Samir Chaudry:Like war edits, but from a video game. This is like—

32:49Colin Rosenblum:Yeah, it's a bizarre new world that we've entered into where this language of the internet, of these edits, is being applied to something like war. Because traditionally, war was covered on the news in a certain type of way. even the military the way that the military interacted with culture whether it was a military parade or when you see the jet planes that fly over you know before the Super Bowl like those are those are in a way that's the language of the era of media that they came up in people are going to live entertainment let's have the military fly over so it's cool

33:34Samir Chaudry:and it's accessible to these people.

33:37Colin Rosenblum:Let's have a military parade so people come and enjoy this, right? Like that was the medium for the time. The news was the medium for the time. And the storytelling language today are these edits. And to see it adopted. And it's really the storytelling language of young men on the internet.

33:55Samir Chaudry:I think that's what I was going to say is important is like whose language is being spoken right now and what is it telling us, right? And it is that like the White House is trying to speak the language of like the most important group of people to them. Right. And that language is video game edits.

34:12Colin Rosenblum:Yeah.

34:12Samir Chaudry:And it's the language where like you show something and somebody goes, oh, that's sick. Or, oh, that's cool. And or goes, that's funny. And you're noticing that like this kind of thing of like that's funny is the way to communicate something no matter how serious it is. Yeah. and i think this what this signals to me is that like the internet will increase in its absurdity over the next couple months that the the things that we see we will be like whoa i i didn't know i didn't know that was going to be something i saw today and then you'll move on to the next thing the next thing the next thing the next thing and i think to contrast this where like the memification of everything is is is something you know we're seeing across the internet back to the KitKat thing.

35:00Samir Chaudry:That's been a very fun, funny version of a meme where like KitKat had 12 tons of KitKat stolen, but like it's made into a funny thing. Everyone is like, that's funny and adopts it as a funny thing. It's not serious. It's not serious, but I think that is what the memification of everything is. It's like taking everything and making it less serious. The other side of this, or the additional side of this, of like the video gamification of everything, I think is looking at like if the meme layer has turned reality into, you know, comedy and absurdity. We saw the other side, which is prediction markets turning the internet and turning life into like a casino.

35:38Samir Chaudry:And that casino, by the way, is like booming. It's one of the biggest businesses on the internet. So prediction markets are mostly led by two companies called Calci and Polymarket. And they've exploded from$1.2 billion a month in activity at the start of 2025 to over $20 billion a month just one year later?

35:59Colin Rosenblum:I mean, I've even noticed it just, you know, watching the Super Bowl this year. Like, most of the people around me were placing bets on these platforms or were talking about it. Whereas I think, you know, sports betting, some of these websites were more specific to sports betting. And now it's just like Kalshi and Polymarket have become universal for just betting and gambling on absolutely anything.

36:23Samir Chaudry:I mean, Kalshi, by the way, it's an Arabic term that means everything. There you go. And the CEO of the company said his plan is to turn everything into a financial asset and allow you to bet on everything. Yeah. And to take a step back and talk about why we think this is happening.

36:45Colin Rosenblum:As the world gets more absurd, you have to go to more absurd lengths to capture people's attention. Yes. What better way to capture someone's attention than putting real stakes on the line as they're watching? To win or to lose, truly, by the end of watching this experience, which is why sports betting became so popular. Because you could win or lose watching a game you actually don't even really care about. You might not even care who these people are who are competing against each other. You may have no skin in the game, but it gets infinitely more interesting if you can win or lose by the time it's done.

37:16Colin Rosenblum:So apply that to anything. Yeah. Whether Mr. Beast is going to upload a certain video that's going to get a certain amount of views, war, it all becomes, unfortunately, more interesting. And more fun. And more fun, like a video game, when you can win it or lose it.

37:32Samir Chaudry:Exactly. And this has crossed over into our world where we saw an editor at Mr. Beast was charged, allegedly, with insider trading because he had placed a bet on something Mr. Beast was going to do. And obviously, he edits the videos, so he had knowledge of it. and it feels like a crazy thing that's happening in our world. But all this to say, where I want to go with this is I think what's happening as a result of all of this absurdity on the internet is the inverse effect of people doing two things. One, finding smaller spaces on the internet. Like the public square is getting too crazy. Yeah.

38:14Samir Chaudry:And then also just being offline. and uh the the first is something i'm noticing is like johnny harris great example launched um a community on circle called new press which is like all about his community coming together to like talk about the news and like write about what they care about and i'm noticing that movement a lot more there's another creator named jay klaus who has a community called in the lab i've met a ton of people from this community there's 500 people in this community they all love it they've met their best friends in that community. They hang out in that community every day.

38:46Samir Chaudry:I've talked to some people. I'm like, why don't you leave? And they're like, I like it there. And I'm like, oh, what's happening here is almost like you live in Las Vegas and there's the Las Vegas strip and the chaos of like the lights and the casino and everything's like, everyone's coming at you and it's all crazy. But down the street, there's like a cool coffee shop and your friends hang out there and you want to go get some fresh air and go hang out there. That's what's happening with the internet. It's like the internet's getting so absurd that like our Slack, our company Slack channel is like a safe space for me.

39:15Samir Chaudry:And it's like fun. And I get to like make a joke and like people thumbs up it. And I'm like, that's cool. I like that. Yeah. You're the boss though. Yeah, that's true. They have to like that. But you know what I mean? Like it's, it's, uh, the group chat is, is, is more fun.

39:28Colin Rosenblum:Of course. I mean, I think about being a creator. There are many different spaces right now that I share, the easiest, most carefree flowing space for me to share is probably my Instagram DM group with my buddies Marty and Ben from college. It's just flowing. I don't think about it. It's just a safe space to share. And then sometimes the hardest place to share is our YouTube channel, where everyone potentially could see it.

40:02Samir Chaudry:Right. And where there's so much happening on the platform. Like, and again, the rise of just absurdity.

40:06Colin Rosenblum:The context that you're throwing your video into is this noise. It is loud. It is hectic.

40:13Samir Chaudry:Right.

40:14Colin Rosenblum:And that's what, when we make a video for the main channel, you know it's existing in that landscape. And that's very different than making something for five people in a group chat or a hundred people or a thousand people in a specific online community.

40:26Samir Chaudry:And again, I think that's the second outcome of this is people going offline. There was some quote that said like offline is the new luxury. And I think that's really true. I think people seeking out opportunities to be offline is a major thing. It's also why we've invested in putting on more events, which by the way, we have one coming up May 28th in Los Angeles, Press Publish LA. We're just looking at the branding for it right before this, which will be out soon. But if you want to come, presspublish.la. Get offline. Feel luxurious. Feel luxurious. Yeah. Feel the luxury of being in person with 500 creators.

41:02Samir Chaudry:Of the absence of the internet. That's funny. Yeah. But yeah, I think this absurdity of everything is having some positive outcomes, which is people finding smaller spaces, people valuing smaller spaces, and people valuing being offline. Because it's like, it's a crazy place right now. All right. Thanks everyone for listening. Again, if you want to come hang out in Los Angeles, Press Publish LA is happening May 28th. And if you have thoughts on things that we missed, I really love reading the comments on Spotify. So if you're listening on Spotify, leave a comment. All right, see you next week.