Good morning. I have good news and bad news. Bad: My Swiftie psychosis is back in full swing. Good: I just spent over two hours ranking every Taylor Swift song, thanks to a fan-made website that gamifies the whole process.

To see my full ranking (and do your own), here’s the link.

— Syd Cohen

Today’s lineup:

Last week, talent agency WME launched Creator Labs, a new in-house team designed to help its creator clients grow their media businesses.

We touched base with Creator Labs’s general manager Joanne Lee on what gap Creator Labs is intended to fill →  

“Building and managing an audience at scale [...] takes strategy, programming, production, analytics, platform expertise, and consistent execution to turn that audience into a sustainable media business,” Lee told us via email. “We launched Creator Labs to bring those capabilities together in a bespoke, high-touch model built around the different needs and ambitions of each client.”

Inside the operation:

“Our clients are all very different, but many are solving for the same fundamentals: how do I reach more people, deepen my relationship with my audience, and monetize in more ways?” Lee said.

Zoom out: WME is the latest major Hollywood agency to invest more resources into helping creators build businesses beyond traditional talent representation. UTA pioneered the digital representation space in 2006, then rebranded to UTA Creators in 2024—helping launch businesses like Chamberlain Coffee and experiences like ZCON. Earlier this year, CAA started a $250M creator venture holding company.

As Hollywood’s biggest agencies compete to become the go-to home for creator businesses, what would make one stand out to you? Hit reply and let us know.

Is it time for clippers to say goodbye to YouTube? Last week, the platform announced an update to its short-form algorithm that prioritizes original content.

The change: Channels that rely on aggregating or re-uploading clips will now reach fewer Shorts viewers. To avoid deprioritization, creators are encouraged to exercise their creativity by adding commentary, storytelling, or analysis if they decide to repurpose existing content. 

“YouTube’s goal is to connect viewers with videos they’ll genuinely find valuable, and ensure creators publishing original content have the absolute best chance to grow and succeed,” YouTube creator liaison Rene Ritchie said in a Short. 

Context: Earlier this year, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan shared that Shorts average about 200B views a day. As a result, clipping has become a key distribution strategy for long-form creators and podcasters, with new marketplaces emerging to feed growing demand.

In August, we spoke to Eric “Airrack” Decker, who took us behind the scenes of his clipping agency ClipFarm. He revealed brands and creators are paying a minimum $10K–20K per campaign for its army of 450K clippers to recut and redistribute content.

How we see it: The update could make it harder for secondary clipping channels to distribute creators’ long-form content on Shorts without adding something new. But it could also give short-form creators more room in the feed to reach their audiences and earn the 10M views needed for the partner program.

For creators using clippers as a growth strategy, the takeaway is clear: repurposing alone may no longer be enough on YouTube.

For most moviegoers, previews are meant to be sat through (or skipped) before the main event. But for film creators Curtis and Lucas Nicotra, they’re the whole point.

Together, they make the duo Sticks, a YouTube channel with over 1M subscribers and 64M views devoted to making movie trailers about creators’ lives.  

Their final act? A three-stop theater tour celebrating the series and premiering their final trailer about the late Minecraft creator Technoblade. In partnership with Alamo Drafthouse, the tour will stop in New York City, Austin, and Los Angeles this week. In addition to showing their own work, the Nicotra brothers will screen one fan-made film at each stop.

“If there's any time to do it, it's now,” Curtis told us. “I think it's a nice way to reflect on the series and bring our fans in on the journey.”

What comes next: From day one, Sticks’ goal has been to make a feature film about MrBeast. Now as their trailer series comes to a close, the Nicotra brothers are moving into pre-production on a The Social Network-style biopic about Jimmy Donaldson’s life.