Happy Thursday. On Tuesday, Ben Woods, who heads creator economy research at Enders Analysis, summed up the YouTube–Netflix relationship in one LinkedIn line — "YouTube helps build the value; Netflix licenses without the development risk." Over the weekend Netflix did the same with finished seasons from Disney.

Five things you need to know

  • YouTube is offering creators millions of dollars to stay exclusive and keep their videos away from Netflix, Bloomberg reported in August.
  • ElevenLabs is now valued at $22 billion after a tender offer for employee shares. The company itself didn't raise a dollar.
  • Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures says mass-market creators have had their moment, so his fund invests in cults, including a commercial fisherman.
  • Xavier Niel is backing Astel, a free Paris townhouse for creators that opened last Thursday in the Marais. (Members are picked by application, with no subscriber minimum.)
  • YouTube is expanding Watch With to long-form videos, and whoever reacts live to someone else's upload keeps the ad revenue.

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Josh D'Amaro puts a Disney+ original on Netflix

Less than seven months after replacing Bob Iger as Disney's chief executive in March, Josh D'Amaro has put Percy Jackson, a Disney+ series of its own, on Netflix. Disney announced a non-exclusive licensing deal last Friday, and since Sunday the first two seasons of Percy Jackson and the Olympians and all five Ice Age films have been streaming there.

Four years ago, Iger compared licensing Disney's content to Netflix to "selling nuclear weapons technology to a Third World country, and now they're using it against us." That was his case for pulling Disney's titles off Netflix once Disney+ launched. Now Pixar's Soul and Elio are due on Netflix early next year, and shows like Will Trent and This Is Us are in the deal too.

The deal is meant to get Disney's titles in front of a broader audience. Netflix has more than 325 million subscribers, roughly two and a half times the Disney+ count for last September. (That was the last count Disney published.)

When content and platforms are infinite, "exclusivity = anonymity," Jo Redfern, a senior vice president at Coolabi who used to work at Disney, wrote on LinkedIn. She also suggested Disney may now see more value in "selling their 'spent' shells knowing they'll do limited damage."

Part of the deal is timed to Disney's own releases. Everything stays on Disney+ and Hulu, and Percy Jackson and Ice Age get a three-month run on Netflix. Season three of Percy Jackson premieres November 20 on Disney+, and the sixth Ice Age movie hits theaters in February.

Disney sent Percy Jackson and Ice Age into a kids lineup where Netflix licenses YouTube creators much like established brands. Ms. Rachel generated 208 million hours viewed in the first half of the year, and Mark Rober's CrunchLabs added 81 million. The top of the animated chart still belongs to PAW Patrol, Gabby's Dollhouse and Peppa Pig. Since Sunday, Percy Jackson and Ice Age have joined them in the lineup.

D'Amaro isn't writing off his own service, though. On the August earnings call he called Disney+ "the digital centerpiece" of Disney's strategy and said it would start adding games, merchandise and other experiences in the spring of 2027. Disney+, he said, gives the company the global reach to develop new fans and the consumer data to personalize. So he lent Netflix two older seasons and kept the newest one for Disney+.

The best of CreatorsHub (and elsewhere)

OpenAI shows five ChatGPT ad results

OpenAI on Monday connected about twenty measurement firms to ChatGPT Ads, from AppsFlyer to Kantar, and published five campaign results those partners measured. The headline number came from DV Rockerbox, which put WeightWatchers' cost per conversion on ChatGPT 15.3% below the brand's paid search average.

Four days earlier, Digiday explained why advertisers are keeping ChatGPT budgets at test level. The agency Accuracast saw about a hundred clicks in ChatGPT's reporting while its own tracking caught twenty. One executive described clients who put less than one percent of their Google budget into ChatGPT. (OpenAI said in late August that ChatGPT ads had reached a $1 billion annual revenue run rate.)

All five results arrived without spend, dates or sample sizes, as PPC Land pointed out. The WeightWatchers figure also came from a DoubleVerify company, and Nielsen agreed in August to buy DoubleVerify. Who checks the checker, PPC Land asked.

In the European Economic Area, ChatGPT ads run without personalization. OpenAI doesn't say which country any of the five campaigns ran in.

Joshua Brown counts the jobs Taylor Sheridan's contract skipped

Joshua Brown, the chief executive of Ritholtz Wealth Management, used Taylor Sheridan as his example of where media jobs went. Sheridan was making twelve shows at once for Paramount and CBS, and Brown says his contract bars anyone there from even asking to read a script. Five years ago, Brown wrote, that would have been fifty high-paying executive jobs.

Brown was illustrating Wall Street Journal data showing US media lost 200,000 jobs in four years, about 15% of the workforce. Sheridan himself moves to NBCUniversal once his Paramount contract runs out, on a deal that Deadline says could be worth about $1 billion.

He closes by saying that what has changed in America is how media gets made, how it's consumed and who captures the economics. Brown isn't a neutral observer here. His own company, The Compound, has eleven full-time employees and tens of millions of views, downloads and impressions.

Deals of the week

  • Fremantle and RoseBerry will recut the Neighbours archive of 9,363 episodes into vertical drama for phones, starting with Margot Robbie's storylines.
  • Singapore's media authority IMDA and TikTok are training twenty media companies to make microdramas over six to nine months.
  • Cherub put out equity guidelines suggesting 0.75% to 3% for a creator who takes a long-term creative role at a seed-stage company.
  • Paris-based Motion Society, which drives more than 8 billion monthly views, hired Chanel Simmons from Spotify to run its US business.

See you next Thursday.

Tereza

By Tereza Tiller