Articles
The creator economy magazineAnalyses of the European creator economy from primary sources. Pick a topic and read.
Phia has $35 million and a cap table instead of a media plan. The investor is also the audience
Phia raised a $35 million Series A at a $185 million valuation in January 2026. Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni built an AI shopping app at a time when founder and creator are starting to mean the same thing.
Brandcast 15 and the MrBeast Upfront: New York shows the end of greenlighting
Brandcast 15 and Beast Industries’ first MrBeast upfront breakfast, held a day apart in New York, showed a shift from greenlighting to programmatic matching. Vyro is now scaling to more than 100,000 creators.
Streaming giants stop competing for evenings. They are competing for the tram ride
Streaming apps have adopted a vertical feed as their new default. Netflix Clips, Disney+ Verts and YouTube Shorts on Google TV all arrived within a single month. TikTok’s mechanics now carry a Madison Avenue signature.
The ad-free TikTok era begins, though not entirely
TikTok launched Ad-Free in the UK at £3.99 a month. Platform ads disappear, while sponsored creator content stays visible to subscribers. With one line in its pricing, TikTok has split advertising from creator content for the first time.
A hundred people, four studios, one voice: how The Diary of a CEO became a $425 million media company
Steven Bartlett built a company of around a hundred people, four studios, its own fund and an internal AI competition around his voice. Steven.com is valued at $425 million, and FlightStory is now building the same machine around other hosts.
Creators as studios: YouTube teaches brands to invest in shows before they exist
At Brandcast 2026, YouTube sells partnerships with creators rather than ad spots. Its Creator Partnerships tool uses Gemini to match brands and channels, brands invest before a show premieres, and the rights stay with the creator.
One slide, one caption: Instagram is finally fixing the carousel
Instagram is testing a caption for each slide in a carousel, not just one for the whole post. The test comes as carousels attract a higher engagement rate than Reels.
Choose your lifestyle: why creators are winning over the media
Traditional media are losing because of what they sell, not how they distribute it. Their model runs on adrenaline, fear and catastrophe, while social feeds sell emotional calm. In 2026, Czech media began to admit this too.
SHIFTS 2026 comes to Prague, with Huberman, Křetínský and General Nicholson
The spring edition of SHIFTS 2026, held on 28 April at the Clarion Hotel in Prague, again covers business, medicine and geopolitics. Speakers include neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, entrepreneur Daniel Křetínský and former NATO commander in Afghanistan John W. Nicholson Jr.
Instagram did not change because of the algorithm. We users are behind it
The Instagram we knew is gone. Viewers rewrote it. Median engagement fell by more than a quarter year on year, and the ranking factors the platform now highlights came from viewer decisions, not from an engineer.
Bartlett launches the Steven.com website. A creator is a franchise
Steven Bartlett this week published the Steven.com website as an operating system for the creator economy. The thesis of one sentence is that a creator is a new franchise. Behind it stand a $425 million valuation and an architecture the creator economy has not had until now.
Micro creators deliver more value than mega influencers
A mega influencer with a million followers looks like a safe bet, but 2025 data tells a different story. According to Meltwater, micro creators on Instagram average a 3.86% engagement rate, against 1.21% for mega influencers.