Good morning. This fall, card game UNO is hosting a Championship Series on Twitch, with qualifying rounds across the country before hosting the $50K finals in LA in November.

Somewhere, an Uno Reverse card is about to change someone's life.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Today’s lineup:

This week, Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson—known for big-budget, high-retention videos—uploaded a 17-minute vlog to YouTube documenting a week in his life.

Why it matters: When the platform’s most-optimized creator makes something deliberately lo-fi, some creators are reading it as a sign. “This is a huge signal for anyone making YouTube videos,” streaming strategist Ashni Christenson said on X, “Pivot to personality.”

Donaldson isn’t the only creator who's returning to the format. Charli D’Amelio, Kylie Jenner, Quen Blackwell, and Casey Neistat have started vlogging again in 2026 after years away—bringing back the low-budget, personal, talk-to-camera storytelling that grew popular on YouTube in the early-mid 2010s. In the last three months, Neistat has averaged 14M views, and Blackwell 33M.

How we see it: In December, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri forecasted we’re entering an era of authenticity that’s becoming “infinitely reproducible.” 

“In a world of infinite abundance and infinite doubt, the creators who can maintain trust and signal authenticity—by being real, transparent, and consistent—will stand out,” Mosseri wrote. Vlogs are some creators’ answer to that.

What if the next Kane Parsons came out of a university film program? That’s the bet that indie creator film studio Creator Camp is taking with their new pilot program with the University of Creative Arts (UCA) in the UK. If it works, it could give student film creators a path from posting online to premiering in theaters. 

“The internet to theaters model is still being figured out,” Chris Duncan, Creator Camp’s co-founder and president, told us. “But if we can have a step-by-step process that people can go through, [it’s] super valuable for us and for them.”

The idea took shape after Creator Camp sold the distribution rights to its own feature, Two Sleepy People, at Cannes. While promoting it, Duncan hired UCA student Ali Khan to edit content—who introduced the team to UCA film professor Paul Usher, a longtime advocate of creator-led filmmaking.

How it works: 

Zoom out: Students are proven to join majors that correspond with cultural and political events (nursing majors saw a massive jump between 2019 and 2020 in response to the pandemic). Demand for creator-made films is at an all-time high, and many schools are incorporating creators into their curriculum to accommodate these new means of development. 

Last week, livestreamer Warren Pandiscia filed a class-action lawsuit against Twitch and parent company Amazon over the companies’ generative AI training policies.

Here’s what you need to know →

“By design, [Twitch and Amazon] never obtain—and their systems are incapable of obtaining—the consent of all parties to the communications they capture,” Pandiscia said in his court-filed complaint.

Big picture: Social media users are winning more lawsuits against platforms, but this is one of the first cases challenging a platform over a forced policy change—and tests whether creators can control how their content trains AI.  

LA creators—it’s the last chance to grab a spot for Coffee with Creators this Friday at 9am in Venice. It’s one of our favorite times to meet other creators, share ideas, and properly caffeinate. Here’s a quick rundown of the morning →

What to expect: Comedian Esteban Gast will be our host and emcee, joined by Syd and Hannah from the Publish Press editorial team, and our special guest: creator of Link in Bio newsletter and social strategist Rachel Karten. 

We’ll have a coffee bar and light breakfast, followed by some community building and conversation with Karten. We’ll be talking about creator consulting, and the opportunities in the space. Join us here.