Good morning. Just six months into his year of daily Minecraft videos, Ryan Trahan decided to end the series—alluding to something bigger on the horizon. 

“I’ve just accepted that there’s no way I can make next year what it should be unless I fully focus on it,” Trahan said. 

While we wait for Trahan’s next big step, we’ll be mining the archives.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Today’s lineup:

With less than two weeks left in the World Cup, viewership numbers are exceeding expectations across streaming and live TV—and creators are leading the charge. 

Context: This is the first World Cup where FIFA has formally integrated creators into its media strategy. Through YouTube’s partnership with FIFA, 25 creators, from Sidemen to Kelly Wakasa, are producing official World Cup coverage, while select creators have secured rights to stream matches.  

Here’s a breakdown, by the numbers:

Both of these games pulled 10% of their respective countries’ population. The difference? In Brazil, that audience watched through a creator-led broadcast, not traditional TV.

And on the ground, IShowSpeed is IRL streaming from the stadiums—racking up 95M views across matches so far. Yesterday’s Brazil vs. Norway match averaged 100K concurrent viewers, with nearly 7M views total.

Big picture: As live sports viewing shifts toward digital platforms, FIFA is betting that creators can become part of the broadcast itself—not just the marketing around it. As advertisers and platforms expand to more nontraditional means of distribution, they might turn to more creators with strong global audiences.

Six months ago, former Colin and Samir showrunner David Gorvy had never hosted his own show. Now, he’s leading a YouTube series with GM and branded content studio Loud on the formation of Cadillac’s F1 team. 

So far it’s gained over 10M views across 11 episodes—and is already releasing episodes for season two. The series is a multi-team collaboration: GM brought the story, Loud (formerly Room 1041) brought the platform expertise and production infrastructure, and Gorvy brought the creative direction.

But why did a brand like Cadillac go full throttle on YouTube? We talked to Jessica Wang (GM’s Executive Director of Editorial, Social, and Influencer) to learn more →

“I feel like [YouTube is] the front door to the way people think about brands,” Wang, who previously spent five years at YouTube, told us. 

GM has been working with creators for longer-term brand deals and larger campaigns, but wanted to create something more permanent on their own channel. Cadillac had unique access to the technical side of the F1 world, and the team knew there was an audience out there that wanted to see how the cars work, not just the glitz and glam of the sport. 

The trick to finding an audience? Leading with a creator.

“[If you watch] any good YouTube video, whether it's made by an individual creator or a big brand, you have a sense of who actually made it,” Gorvy told us.

Most branded YouTube channels post ads and corporate content. Unlike shows including Converse’s series with Amelia Dimoldenberg or Toyota’s talk show with Kareem Rahma, GM let Loud and Gorvy produce the entire series, instead of just acting as talent. It was able to feel like a true YouTube-native series because Wang trusted the vision.

And it worked: Beyond organic views and engagement on socials, Wang said GM accomplished its goal of showcasing the team behind the F1 engines. 

“[Creators] know how to tell stories in a way that actually resonates with audiences and builds community,” Wang said. “So I'm always going to lean on them first.”

Last week, in a two-hour conversation, self-development creators Ali Abdaal and Matt D’Avella shared what it takes to keep a creator business alive long-term. Each have run their businesses for a decade, and each have taken two different approaches (Abdaal running a 10+ person team, D’Avella running solo). Here are three lessons they aligned on →

1. Build on your strengths, not on the strengths of the creators you admire. Both admitted trying to copy each other's model and failing.

Abdaal said he couldn’t film in D’Avella’s style "I care less about every individual video than you do." Your unfair advantage is the thing you do without effort (and would do for free)—find it before you try to scale it.

2. Cohort-based launches have a decay curve. D’Avella’s YouTube course was his biggest revenue driver, and launched on a 6-7 month cycle. Each relaunch made roughly half of the previous one:

Meanwhile his payroll kept growing to match the first launch's revenue, not the declining ones. D’Avella’s fix: scale down his team from 10 to one, and focus on making videos for the joy of it.

Abdaal hit a similar wall with his own course revenue, but solved it by adding instead of cutting. He built an evergreen business school and a software product so revenue wasn't tied to a single launch cycle. Same problem, opposite solutions—and both are still in business.

3. Delegation isn’t optional past a certain size. Abdaal's structural fix for team growth was bringing on his business partner Angus as an equity partner (not an employee) to run HR, legal, finance, and course operations, freeing Abdaal to focus only on content and curriculum. D'Avella tried the inverse: after burning out as a manager, he cut headcount entirely, hiring filmmakers and editors per project instead of maintaining permanent staff. The mistake, they agreed, is growing headcount without a plan for who's actually managing the people.

Zoom out: The first generation of professional creators are hitting a milestone— iJustine just hit 20 years on YouTube, and MKBHD is closing in on 17. As our own Samir Chaudry put it, many channels take on the cost structures of media companies without the balance sheets or diversified revenue those companies use to absorb the natural ups and downs of business.

“Abdaal and D'Avella show two ways through: hire and grow on purpose, or stay small and keep your costs low,” Chaudry said. “Both work. The trap is doing neither, and letting your expenses creep up until the work that was supposed to give you freedom is the thing you can't afford to stop.”