Good morning. YouTube now lets users limit Shorts viewership to zero minutes per day—effectively shutting off the feed for those who want to. 

We will be using these newly regained hours of our time to catch up on TikTok.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Today’s lineup:

The Overlap, a sports media company owned by former Manchester United captain Gary Neville, just acquired two football (⚽, not 🏈) YouTube channels from sports creator Mark Goldbridge, bringing 3.7 million new subscribers into the fold.

Prior to kickoff: Goldbridge has been streaming daily football commentary for over a decade on YouTube channels The United Stand and That’s Football, racking up 2.3 billion views for his brash critiques on Manchester United.

Details on the deal: The Overlap purchased Goldbridge’s channels for seven figures—though an exact amount hasn’t been made public.

The goal? Give fans the commentary they want. While other streamers have purchased full streaming rights to certain sporting events (like Brazil’s CazéTV broadcasting all 104 FIFA World Cup matches), Neville said The Overlap aims to control “the noise segment” by serving as fans’ first stop for conversation around the UK’s Premier League, as reported by The Guardian.

“It’s new shows, it’s more content, it’s bigger guests, better resources,” Goldbridge said on his announcement livestream.

How we see it: Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, with an estimated 3.5 billion fans globally. As the World Cup looms around the corner, all eyes will be on sports creators to set the tone for football commentary. Even platforms are getting involved, from free broadcasts on TikTok to officially licensed games on Roblox.

The Overlap (like OpenAI’s recent purchase of TBPN) is leveling up by buying into the nichecasting market—with a strong understanding of how engaged those audiences can be. 

From Subway Takes to microdramas, short-form content is raking in views—and attention—at a rapid clip. But no two creators are building a short-form business the same way. 

So? We're featuring several creators of short-form shows to understand their businesses, challenges, and biggest opportunities.

Next up: Documentary filmmaker Nicolas Heller, aka NY Nico. 

He’s spent years spotlighting NYC small businesses, and now he's channeling that into Revival of the Fittest, a "surreality show" centered on friend Jamal's NY record shop and the rotating cast who orbit it: Robert, Erma, William, and others from Heller's real-life universe. 

So how’s it going? The show has hit 190K followers and over 5 million views in three months. 

Heller told us how Revival broke through the noise → 

The format is the hook. Viewers can’t tell what’s scripted and what’s not—and that ambiguity is the point. Drawing from comedies like Nirvanna The Band The Show, Heller built a world that’s “a hybrid of fiction and reality," he told us. Episodes don’t include "previously on" recaps and sometimes pick up threads from weeks ago—rewarding loyal fans.

It’s fast to make. Heller films on an iPhone from his POV, shoots twice a week in four-hour stints, and spends an hour editing each episode—keeping costs to a few hundred dollars. "I just wanted something I could do consistently on my own dime and my own schedule," Heller said.

The show is a creative lifeline. "I've been doing so much client work for the past six years that I lost sight of what gave me passion," Heller said. Revival gave him both that and a sustainable way to help a friend's struggling business grow. 

And maybe that’s why it works. Subway Takes creator Kareem Rahma recently wrote that short-form hits “did not think about virality or engagement [...] they thought about creating the most entertaining thing they could make and, more importantly, something personal.” Revival is living proof.

As the dust settles from Q1, we finally have our first data point in The Great Podcast Wars between Netflix and YouTube: 13% of US-based Netflix households watched a podcast on a TV over the last three months, according to TV research company Samba.

For comparison: YouTube has reported 1 billion monthly active podcast users, 37% of its total monthly users.

Behind the data:

“The data we see today aren't benchmarks or trends—they're early signals of a formerly mobile-first medium in evolution,” Samba’s VP of Measurement Science Alyson Sprague wrote in the blog post. “And those signals are genuinely encouraging.”

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