Hello from Prague. This week I read more financial statements than scripts, and it shows. The creator economy is starting to talk like a stock exchange, not an influencer agency.

America's GigaStar sells fans a share of a specific YouTuber's future income. They are not buying a meme coin. They are buying a security registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission under Regulation Crowdfunding, one that carries a contractual claim on a percentage of the channel's ad revenue.

By March 2026 the firm had run 37 creator offerings and raised more than $6.9 million for them. It has distributed more than $1.2 million in ad revenue back to token holders. On August 31 its team rang the bell at Nasdaq and opened a registered venue for secondary trading in those papers. A YouTuber's income has become an asset you can trade.

So why did a regulator wave through something that sounds like securitizing a creator?

Because a registered offering carries what the crypto grey zone does not — the investor gets disclosure and protection. The SEC wrote last year that meme coin buyers and holders are not protected by the federal securities laws. GigaStar built the opposite. The creator sells the stake themselves, under supervision, with mandatory disclosure, through a portal registered with FINRA.

Europe ends up with the same two buckets. A token that grants a real claim on income or assets is effectively a security and falls under the strict rules for financial instruments. The MiCA regulation, in force since the end of 2024, carves those out and does not apply. A meme coin with no such backing stays in the grey zone here too.

Goldman Sachs pegs the creator economy at roughly $250 billion, heading toward $480 billion by 2027. Sizing the market was always easy. Getting capital to one specific creator was not. GigaStar is betting it can close that gap with an instrument every startup knows. A share of a creator's revenue stops being a rhetorical figure and becomes a security backed by numbers.

Five things you need to know

  • Agentio raised $40 million from Forerunner for a marketplace where a brand buys a creator ad as automatically as it buys Google. The valuation jumped to $340 million. The company says less than 2% of digital ad spend reaches creators today.
  • YouTube shut down twenty channels where paid actors read AI scripts on camera. A real face slipped past synthetic-content detectors, so the platform only caught it as spam. Europe's AI Act does not reach this hybrid format.
  • Creator Sports Network started selling creators the rights to broadcast live matches on their own channels. The model already runs from Germany's Bundesliga to Brazil's Série A.
  • TikTok added voice notes, polls and moving photos to comments, borrowing the logic of chat apps. Audio in comments also opens a fresh surface it now has to moderate under the Digital Services Act.
  • Adobe surveyed more than 16,000 creators across eight countries, France and Germany among them. Three quarters put generative AI at the core of their work, yet 85% want the final call to stay human and 90% want copyright protection for AI-assisted work.

Who actually lives off the creator boom

Creator ad spend in the U.S. is set to reach $37 billion for 2025, up 26% year on year, according to IAB. That is roughly four times faster than the media market overall. The segment more than doubled in three years, from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $29.5 billion in 2024, and IAB expects $44 billion this year. The consensus is settled and the budgets are following it.

But the budget brands pour into the segment and the money that lands with a specific creator are two different numbers.

The top takes most of it. Per CreatorIQ, in 2025 the top 10% of creators took 62% of all payments, up from 53% two years earlier. The very top, the top 1%, jumped from 15% to 21%. The median creator made $3,000, while the average per campaign came in at $11,400. A growing pie is being eaten by an ever narrower group. For a brand that changes the brief. A bigger budget does not open a thousand new partners, it just thickens the competition for the same handful of names.

Platforms hold distribution. The clearest proof comes from YouTube's own numbers. It paid creators, artists and media companies more than $70 billion over the past three years, by far the most in the world. It is also a dependency. That payout runs through one algorithm and one interface the creator does not own. Even MrBeast, the name cited as proof that a creator outgrew television, built his flagship show Beast Games on Amazon. Prime Video renewed it for two more seasons and runs it in more than 240 countries. The creator supplied the audience and the format; the streamer supplied the reach and the budget.

Capital offers the sharpest reading. Slow Ventures last year announced a $60 million fund aimed directly at financing creators, with checks of one to three million dollars per name. The line "creators are the new startups" holds literally here — including the half the hype leaves out. A startup means outside capital, dilution and shared control. The Czech version is smaller and the same shape. Stanislav Hruška built the subscription-based Talk TV around StandaShow, broke free of a single algorithm, and remains a smaller player next to established services, a model that stands or falls with one name.

Best of CreatorsHub (and other stuff)

Brands learn to shoot like creators

Gap, Cuisinart and Life360 are moving from buying ads to producing their own series. They are copying the model creators have run for years. For them, content is where the company starts.

For a brand director that flips the old logic. A brand that can hold an audience with its own show stops depending on the price of media space. It pays once for production and keeps the audience, instead of re-buying it at auction month after month.

Number of the week is $15 million

That is what OnlyFans earns per employee. Parent company Fenix International reported forty-six direct employees and $684 million in pre-tax profit for fiscal 2024. The most interesting part is the split around that profit.

  • Fans paid roughly $7.22 billion. The platform sent $5.8 billion of it to creators. An 80/20 split in the creator's favor.
  • YouTube keeps 45% of ad revenue on long-form video. Spotify sends about two thirds of its music revenue to rights holders, and the artist sees a fraction.
  • 5,076 creators have passed one million dollars in cumulative earnings.
  • In May, Architect Capital bought 16% for $535 million, valuing the platform at $3.15 billion. The stated goal is financial products for creators that ordinary banks will not give them.

Deals of the week

  • Agentio took $40 million in Series B from Forerunner, valuation $340 million.
  • GigaStar rang the Nasdaq bell on August 31 and opened secondary trading in papers tied to creator income, with more than 30,000 investor accounts.
  • Architect Capital bought 16% of OnlyFans for $535 million, valuation $3.15 billion.
  • Publicis merged its acquired platforms Captiv8 and Influential into a network of 15 million creators.
  • X is exploring paying creators in stablecoins. Meta already pays in USDC through Stripe and is heading into 160 markets.

Next week I am watching whether any European regulator says a word about tokenizing creators. So far Brussels only speaks up about crypto. Take care, Tereza.

By Tereza Tiller