Good morning. Lifestyle creator and “only living girl” Victoria Paris is hosting a closet sale on Depop. A Gucci watch? ✋ $5. A Jacquemes bag? ✋ $5. Finally, the Cyber Monday deals we want to see.
MKBHD Scraps His Wallpaper App
Marques Brownlee sunsets the Panels app, which he launched last year / Marques Brownlee
Tech creator Marques “MKBHD” Brownlee is shutting down his phone wallpaper app, Panels, one year after launch.
“We knew it was niche, but we made mistakes in making our first app and ultimately we weren’t able to turn it into the vision that I’d had,” Brownlee said in an unlisted video.
Set the scene: The initial vision for Panels was to create a place for users to discover artists and phone wallpapers. But Panels had a bumpy rollout—after launching in October 2024, it quickly received pushback for its pricing and advertising model.
The app launched with hundreds of free wallpapers, but they were in limited resolution and required users to watch two video ads to download.
Higher quality wallpaper bundles cost $8 or $11.99 for monthly subscriptions (of which artists got a cut).
Brownlee responded to criticism quickly, making more wallpapers free with no ads and dropping new features and an explore page. “If I was reviewing this app, I wouldn’t have been very nice,” Brownlee said of the initial rollout.
Panels was downloaded 2+ million times by summer 2025, but it never hit its stride—Panels’ website says that a change in its development team and challenges finding new collaborators made it difficult to grow.
So now: Panels will begin to refund users after it shuts down December 31, and all user data will be deleted. The app code will become open source so other developers can build on it.
Zoom out: Fans had high hopes for Brownlee’s first foray into app development, but Brownlee has found more success in other collaborative ventures—like dBrand phone cases, Atoms sneakers, and his role as chief creative partner at Ridge.
How Steven Bartlett’s FlightStory Scales Creator Businesses
FlightStory CEO Georgie Holt (middle) says Paul C. Brunson's (left) podcast found success through using strategies from Steven Bartlett's (right) 'Diary of a CEO' / We Need To Talk, Photography courtesy of FlightStory
Dating and lifestyle podcast We Need To Talk just hit its one-year mark—averaging 1 million views and listens per episode. FYI, 90% of podcasts don’t make it to year two, per PodNews.
One reason for the growth? The show applied the same frameworks Steven Bartlett used to grow The Diary of a CEO—with help from Bartlett’s media company, FlightStory. Breaking it down →
FlightStory plugged in its full playbook from DOAC across titles, thumbnails, guest selection, and set design.
“Our greatest experiment was ‘is The Diary of a CEO repeatable?’ The answer is yes, we can,” FlightStory CEO Georgie Holt told us. “We have two shows in the UK that are growing 9x faster than [Bartlett] was at this stage.”
Keep in mind: FlightStory sits inside Barlett’s holding company, Steven.com, alongside podcast distribution platform FlightCast and venture firm FlightFund—altogether valued at $425 million.
FlightStory works with creators and brands like Shopify and Oracle on singular services (like managing Facebook pages) and full-scale content management—We Need to Talk is an example of the latter.
The toolkit: “We’re building tools that kill our guesswork. It’s not vibes, it’s data-led decision making,” Holt said. FlightStory’s Guest Radar tool analyzes relevance, audience fit, and social performance to predict how well a guest will perform. Next up: Creator Radar, built to determine which creators FlightStory should partner with.
Holt said FlightStory partnered with TV host and educator Paul C. Brunson for We Need to Talk because he embodied the company’s ethos—he was focused on video analytics and “thinking like a founder.”
YouTube Culture and Trends Report: All About You
The 2025 YouTube Recap will match a user's data with a "personality" reflecting how they use the site, such as "The Skill Builder," "The Sunshiner," or "The Trailblazer" / YouTube
For the first time, YouTube released its own version of Spotify Wrapped—personal highlights based on users’ watch histories, including top creators, music artists, and interests (we don’t even need to check—our top creator is definitely Ryan Trahan).
YouTube also announced platform-wide trends. Here’s what stood out to us→
Joe Rogan, former Navy Seal Shawn Ryan, and true crime creator Stephanie Soo (aka Rotten Mango) top the US podcast rankings.
Gaming creator CaylusBlox is the second-most popular creator in the US, just behind MrBeast. The channel has tallied 2+ billion views since it started just last year. Caylus is quickly becoming one of the most-streamed creators on YouTube by hours watched.
Minecraft remains a hot topic. Technoblade was one of the fastest-growing channels in 2025, even posthumously, thanks to a subathon and 20-million-subscriber livestream.
➕ Community Tab
It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Our 2025 Spotify Wrapped is in. Syd’s top artists are (unsurprisingly) all the artists she saw in concert this year—Lorde, Addison Rae, Beyoncé, Charlie XCX.
Syd’s influence runs deep and wide throughout this office. In August she put Hannah onto french musician Oklou, which ended up being her most listened to artist.
Her focus music rec, the Stardew Valley soundtrack, also ended up in the top albums for our Colin and Samir teammate Jesse.
What’s on your Spotify wrapped? Hit reply and Syd will respond with her thoughts.
🔥 Press Worthy
Comedy creator Becca Moore relaunches her podcast, For The Girls.
Adobe is empowering creativity in the age of AI.*
JSchlatt is ending his main YouTube channel, jschlattLIVE.
Lifestyle creator Lydia Keating is hosting a six-week writing and fiction workshop next month.
MrBeast releases beef sticks with Jack Links.
YouTube partners with NBC to send creators to the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan.
*This is sponsored content.
Editor's note: We included a link in Monday’s Press Worthy section that led to our Slack channel. As much as we’d like to have you on our team—we didn’t mean to leave that link in. Sorry about that. Here’s the link to Noel Miller’s announcement ending TMG’s podcast.
