Happy Halloween Eve. This morning, NPR released a tiny desk concert from the Broadway musical The Rocky Horror Show—featuring comedy creator and cast member Anania.

If you don’t mind me, I’ll be Time Warping into the Halloweekend.

— Syd Cohen

Today’s lineup:

Hi everyone, Syd here. Wednesday, I attended Apple’s “Pro and Tell” day in LA, where the tech company announced its first touchscreen MacBook Pro at an invite-only event for creators and creative professionals.

Why this launch felt different: Apple knew where attention was and how to capture it. If it announced the MacBook Pro in tandem with the iPhone Duo back in September, it would have gotten lost in the sauce of the foldable phone hype. Instead, Apple waited until a week after the phone was released, then announced the MacBook in a room full of the most prolific tech creators in the world.

Beyond the surprising product drop, the event was centered around Creator Hollywood—culminating in a roundtable where Colin and Samir spoke to Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach, Kane Parsons, Petra Collins, and Issa Rae about media diets, the pressure that comes after a huge success, and the importance of authenticity over virality. 

Here were some of my favorite takeaways.

Big picture: “In the attention economy, there's the kind of content that you use to pass the time and then there's the content that you make time for,” Rae said.

The internet has become a more crowded and competitive space for attention. One launch at a time is a better strategy in today’s world than ten announcements at once. This event was angled at capturing the attention of creators (and their audiences) by speaking to them about experiences that affect them, like the convergence of creators and Hollywood.

Since Instagram announced Features on Monday, the conversation online and at Colin & Samir HQ has centered around one thing: monetization.

Social platforms make money by attracting audiences. But how much creators earn, and what they have to do to qualify, varies significantly from platform to platform.

We did a deep dive into five traditional long-form platforms to review their annual revenue, how they pay creators, and what it takes to qualify for monetization.

Three themes emerged from our research:

Qualifying doesn't guarantee a paycheck. Nearly every platform has monetization requirements, but meeting those thresholds doesn't necessarily mean creators will be accepted into a program or earn meaningful revenue. In fact, Substack is the only platform where anyone can start earning immediately, with no thresholds attached.

Official payouts don't tell the whole story. As traditional streamers like Netflix compete with social platforms for creator talent, some creators are receiving financial incentives to stay on or join a platform. This week, Business Insider reported that Meta has offered creators between $50K and $500K to post long-form videos on Instagram.

Platform payouts are only one revenue stream. These figures don't account for brand partnerships, courses, products, or other businesses creators build around their audiences. A smaller creator can earn more than a larger one depending on how they monetize beyond the platform.

For a deep dive into how each platform pays creators and who qualifies for a piece of the pie, keep reading.

Sponsored by The Lighthouse

There's something about fall that brings us back to our creative practice with a little more intention. Across its campuses in Venice and Brooklyn, The Lighthouse is asking Creators a simple question: What are you making this fall?

To find out, The Lighthouse followed five creators into their worlds, from recording studios and test kitchens to backstage at New York Fashion Week, film screenings, and editorial reviews.

The result is five stories offering a closer look at creative practice, the people who help move it forward, and everything that happens between an idea and bringing it to life.

And there's more ahead. As Creators return to their practice this fall, The Lighthouse is making room for new ideas, new connections, and more opportunities to share their work with the world.

Watch the stories unfold on YouTube and follow The Lighthouse on Instagram for what's coming next.

In 2025, creator Amie Tollefsrud, better known as Lazy Millionaire, was burned out. She had generated more than $12M selling online courses but wanted to try something new.

A year later, she reports $500K in annual recurring revenue from her more than 186K subscribers on Substack.

We spoke with Tollefsrud about how she built the business. Here were her three tips →

1) Monetize immediately: Unlike platforms with audience thresholds for monetization, Substack lets creators offer paid subscriptions from day one. 

“When you are charging for something, it sets the standard that your time and the publication is valuable,” Tollefsrud told us. “It also makes me write better articles because I know people are paying for them.”

2) Repurpose what you make: Tollefsrud starts with a Substack article, then adapts it into long- and short-form content that points audiences back to the publication.

“If you already have a podcast or YouTube channel, it’s so easy to repurpose a lot of the content you've already done into a Substack article,” Tollefsrud said. 

3) Build recurring revenue: Tollefsrud says her $500K annual earnings figure excludes brand sponsorships, affiliate marketing, or product sales. For her, subscriptions provide a more predictable income stream.

“[With other revenue streams], you never really know when you'll get paid,” Tollefsrun said. “I say: ‘Substack is the guy that you marry, [everything else is] a weekend fling.’”

Zooming out: Tollefsrud already had an audience of more than 500K on other platforms, but she told us most of her Substack subscribers discovered her on Substack itself.

“A large majority of the people who subscribe to me found me on Substack,” Tollefsrud told us. “So not only am I bringing people who already follow me on Substack, but I’m reaching an entirely new audience I wasn’t before.”

Different audiences live on different platforms. Repurposing content to reach an untapped fanbase can be the difference between $0 and $500K.

The creepy content we’re looking forward to reading, watching, and listening to this Halloweekend.