What an amazing Open Sauce.  If you weren’t there, definitely put it in your schedule for next year (fun fact, if you get a ticket before 5pm tonight for next year, it’s half off at OpenSauce.com

The industry day I produced was loaded with great speakers and sessions.  But the real magic happened both inside and out during the entire three-day festival.  It's so great to see creators, makers, and fans hanging out together, all celebrating a shared love of science, creativity, and community.  Truly a nerd-fest not to be missed.

I sat down for a fireside chat with Sam Corrao Clanon, head of product at LinkedIn.  Here’s his top advice and insight for creators and the future of the platform. 

"68% of the revenue on Twitch comes directly from viewer support. So they are spending money not for digital goods, which they can get, or for ad-free viewing. They're doing it because they like watching you and they want to sustain you doing that for a living."

“What we pay per deliverable now, if you were to read me those rates three years ago, I, I would have probably not believed it. I would have said, ‘are we booking Dua Lipa for this campaign?’” 

"Do you own your subscribers? No. Right. That list sits on a server here in Silicon Valley. And they can serve you and audiences at their pleasure….  The reach is rented. What's actually yours is what you own."

"If you have a name that you have not trademarked yourself, and someone else owns it, they actually can come after you for your sales, for your revenue. They will say you used our name and our brand,  our market… and we're going to take all of the revenue that you made on this."

“My fear is that we talk about a lot of things as if it's, like, democratizing something, and it turns out, actually, (AI) is just making it easier for the powerful to stay that way.”

“Transferring (my) audience over to YouTube was also a little bit clunky because TikTok is very insulated. They obviously are monetarily incentivized to keep people within the app and keep them insulated away from other apps, their competitors."

“"It's hard to go really viral on YouTube now without, you know, at least 50,000 dollars invested (in making a video), right? Gone are the days where a cat video or something would go viral,

“You will have noticed the Surfshark ads pop up a lot. They literally wanted to take every video I could produce”

“Because here's the problem, (AI has) a lot of data, and they're great with processing data, but no matter how much data you have, you'll never have taste….   One of the ways to look at AI is that it's not a technology or a social thing, it's a (population) problem. We've got a hundred billion new people on this planet now that are doing things, and they're artificial, but they're intelligent, and now they're all here, and we've got to coexist with them."

"Audiences, especially Gen Z, are moving away from these large play audiences, and are really looking for these more smaller, private, trust-based spaces where they can interact with like-minded people."

" Real reasoning models are not good with video, and they're not good with voice…  Real-time interactive AI use cases are going to have to come from some other technology, potentially world models, potentially, yeah, JEPA (Joint Interactive Predictive Models), things like this that are going to go in a completely different direction, and there's really just no way to know how viable those technologies (are)...  There was no way to know, even when Transformers came out, how viable that technology was going to be.

“You can get two million views and you get, what, five bucks? … (so) we might as well just make stuff for fun”

“We saw $629 million dollars earned by Podcasters on Patreon in 2025, and that’s grown 33% year over year…  larger than the growth of the surrounding industry.”

Clipping FTW: Big props to Star Zero for ingesting three days of panels and serving up great clips within just a few hours after each session.  I had clips in the hands of every industry day summit speaker by 11am the next morning.  Every event should do this. (full disclosure, I am an advisor to Star Zero, so take the above with the usual grains of salt.)

Beast Industries Goes Public and Others Follow:  Not yet, and some rumblings are that it might not happen this year.  Half the bettors on Kalshi, for instance, think it’ll happen after May 1, 2027.  Instead, Bending Spoons, home of distressed assets including Vimeo, AOL and Evernote, was the 1H public market darling, soaring 40% after going public last week.  The big story?  Mergers and Acquisitions have been on fire, with over 60 deals so far, pacing far beyond last year’s impressive 84 transactions (according to @James Creech’s Quartermast Advisors).  But I expect the IPO market for creator-adjacent companies to kick into high gear this fall, building on Bending Spoons’ success.

Prediction Economies Discover the Creator: Speaking of Kalshi, creators have certainly arrived. MrBeast fired one of his editors for insider trading on Kalshi, there are numerous Beast bets available, along with ways to bet on Kai Cenat, IShowSpeed, and others.  You can lay money down on whether the US will ban social media for kids this year,  whether Pinterest will be acquired, and lots more.  And prediction markets have discovered creators too, as the Polymarket scam we talked about here two weeks ago can attest.  Not as prevalent as I thought it would be, but there’s still time.

Microdramas Disappoint in the US:  There’s a lot of heat, but so far money and talent continue to pour into the vertical drama space.  But the US top 20 chart has to be disappointing to these outsized egos, as the latest top 20 chart continues to be dominated by such high-brow titles as “Pucked by My Hockey Rival” and “I BECAME MY CEOS DARKEST SECRET”.  Over on TikTok’s PineDrama app Issa Rae’s Screen Time has topped 215 million views, but it’s been handily surpassed by Fruit Love Island adjacent titles like “One Night In Fruitopia” (475M) and “Secrets in the Juice” (271M) and the revenge fantasy “Awakening of the White Mermaid” (548M).  Still too early to call, but so far Hollywood glitz hasn’t surpassed slop.

Netflix vs. YouTube Dominates the Traditional Media Conversation: Although I thought we’d be talking about this all year, once Paramount outbid Netflix for WBD the stakes changed.  The real question now is whether the creator economy has become the media economy, or whether traditional media is poised to engulf and devour.  YouTube dominates time spent in the living room with a mix of creators, the NFL and more. Tubi has become a creator-led juggernaut and parent Fox continues to buy up creator economy companies.  And creator-led movies like Obsession and Backrooms are changing the rules of Hollywood.  So which is it?  Traditional media scooping up creator IP, or creators, armed with AI, disrupting the system? Both, for now. Creators are getting entrenched in traditional, and creator-first formats are dominating time-spent on every glowing rectangle from the smallest to the biggest. The lines between the two economies are evaporating.  I still think creators disrupt traditional in the long-run, but the messy middle is where all the action is today.

Community and Fandom Replace Likes and Followers:  This is pretty much on track, as likes and followers have been roundly criticized, while the trusted communities and deep fandoms continue to rise.  Micro and nano-influencers continue to be embraced by everyone from clippers to top brands as a cost-effective way to reach audiences (see research below for more evidence).

Mass Personalization of Media, Advertising and Everything:  I’ve seen a lot of compelling demos, Google just rebuilt a version of search “just for you”, and Shorts lets you insert yourself in other creator’s videos.  I was wrong about Sora 2, but right about the trend.  The Audience of One is happening now and beginning to accelerate.

The Brain Drain from TV to Creator Accelerates: This trend keeps on going.  Every time I turn around, another long-time TV exec has jumped over to a creator economy company.  And as The Creator Economy becomes The Media Economy… and as creator-inspired movies continue to outpace Hollywood, it’s only going to accelerate. 

The AI Backlash is Real:  Yes, Virginia, there is an AI Monster.  Check out the research section for even more evidence, as so many studies find that we’re increasingly angry and stressed about AI moving too fast and stealing our jobs.  But as I noted in January, watch what people do, not what they say.  Frommer’s research below lays the contradiction bare:  GenZ is buying more from AI, even as they trust it less.

AI Slop Creates Tremendous Opportunities: We’re still in the beginning stages, but already we’ve seen estimates that Fortnite skins based on Italian Brainrot characters have likely driven tens of millions in sales (all estimates), the Steal the Brainrot island racked up 29 billion minutes of playtime, Kapwing found that Bandar Apna Dost generates $4.25M annually and many of PineDrama’s most popular microdramas are blatant rip-offs of Fruit Love Island.  YouTube has shut down the biggest slop channels on its site, but the trend is clear and the sky’s the limit.

Audio-only Podcasting Becomes a Losing Strategy:   Depending on who you believe, audio-only listening is either growing or declining.  But what we do know is that Edison Research found that podcast consumers are now just as likely to watch as to listen, weekly listening hours are up and most long-time consumers still mostly listen.  But my primary prediction here was that audio-only was a losing strategy, and that’s playing out… as

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