Steven Bartlett announced the joint venture OBSN in New York on Monday and summed up its purpose in a single sentence. Future global media and brands will, in his view, be built around creators, but “a global audience of millions is not yet a company, and it certainly should not be the ceiling of a creator's potential,” he said, according to Podnews.
An audience of millions is raw material. The company is only what someone builds out of it. That sentence is a diagnosis of the whole industry, and it applies especially to Europe.
A licensing machine alongside the audience
OBSN, read as Obsession, joins Bartlett's Steven.com with Authentic Brands Group. Steven.com brings the audience, data and the commercialisation of digital media. Authentic adds the other half, which creators do not have themselves. According to its own figures, it owns more than 50 brands, operates in more than 150 countries, and its brands generate around $38 billion in annual retail sales. It is a machine that buys and licenses names such as Reebok and has partners manufacture and distribute them around the world.
This is what the creator economy has long called infrastructure, usually without content. Here it takes shape: retail, product, licensing, rights, global distribution. Matt Maddox, president and CEO of Authentic, talks about creators in the language the firm uses for sports brands. Creators are, in his words, “poised to become multigenerational brands in their own right,” he said in the press release. In that language, a creator's value is measured by what can be made and sold from their name, not by how many people saw them that week.
Bartlett aims to deploy up to $400 million into creators over the coming years. The figure is not yet an allocated fund but a declared ceiling for several years. More important than the amount is what it buys. Advertising buys reach. This buys a share in a company built around a creator.
Capital is flowing into companies around creators
OBSN is not alone in this logic. In June 2026, the agency CAA and the fund TPG launched Compound Creative Holdings, a $250 million company for buying and scaling creator-economy businesses. A year earlier, the group Whalar received a valuation of $400 million from investors including Marc Benioff and Shopify.
A layer of players is emerging whose product is not representing a creator for a commission, but a company built around them. This also shifts what counts as a creator's success. While reach was the yardstick, audience and advertising were enough. Once the yardstick is the value of a company, its own product, rights and margins start to be counted. Bartlett's line about an audience that is not yet a company describes exactly this transition.
The European gap is growth capital
This is where the European position breaks down. A European creator with the ambition to build a company around themselves hits the same wall as a European startup. The wall stands at growth capital. Talent and audience do not form it.
The numbers are out of proportion. According to the European Central Bank, American venture funds have combined capital of around €930 billion, European ones roughly €150 billion, about a sixth. Early-stage financing is available in Europe, according to the ECB, but the investment needed to scale exceeds what individual European funds can manage. More than 50% of the money of EU-based funds has therefore ended up, over the last decade, in companies outside the union.
Lucien Burm of the Dutch Startup Association summed it up in one sentence at South Summit in Madrid. “Europe's problem is no longer creating startups, it is helping them become global scaleups.” According to the same overview, only 8% of the world's scaleups are based in Europe today.
These numbers are about startups in general, and the creator economy is simply inheriting them. A creator who gains an audience in Europe and wants to turn it into a company with its own product and rights needs exactly that growth capital and operating apparatus, which is in shortest supply here. The partner capable of building something like OBSN sits in New York and London. The European creator therefore increasingly chooses between staying as reach or leaving to find infrastructure abroad, and building their value under a foreign flag.
What a European version would need
Something is being built on the continent piece by piece. The agency of Arcade, Europe's largest YouTube group, is turning into a media company and preparing the first European upfront for creators, a format until now reserved for television networks. Bartlett's own company, meanwhile, grew out of a European podcast. CreatorsHub previously described the holding that grew around The Diary Of A CEO.
The difference is that Bartlett is now building infrastructure for other creators' audiences, and he is doing it with American capital and American distribution. A European version would need the same: patient capital willing to finance growth, and an operating layer that builds product, rights and distribution around the creator. Europe has enough talent and audience. What it lacks is what turns them into lasting value.
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