Good morning. In Meta’s Q2 earnings report this week, Mark Zuckerberg shared that global time spent on Instagram received double-digit growth year-over-year—proving what our phone’s screen time report always knew. We love Instagram Stories.
Today’s lineup:
How to gain 1B views, according to Joshua Weissman’s former VP of Creative
The studio looking to make the next MGM for creators
Steven Bartlett’s 2026 podcast earnings
How This Strategist Helped Joshua Weissman Reach 1B Views
Vicram Chatterjee, former content strategist for Joshua Weissman, goes solo and shares his top tips for YouTube growth / Vicram Chatterjee
YouTube strategist Vicram Chatterjee recently left cooking creator Joshua Weissman's channel to go out on his own.
Chatterjee joined the team in 2020 as one of Weismann’s early hires to film the channel's one-million-subscriber special. Over the next six years he moved from filmer to editor to VP of Creative, helping the channel grow to 10M subscribers and reach 1B views.
Chatterjee credits much of that growth to a system built around making creative decisions early. We asked him to break down. “Decide everything one stage earlier than feels natural,” Chatterjee told us.
That applies in three areas →
The idea. "Decide the title and the thumbnail before you film anything," Chatterjee said. "If you package a video after it exists, all the packaging can do is describe what you happened to shoot." His test: if you can't package it before filming, the idea isn't ready.
Pre-production. Once the package is locked, pressure-test the idea before filming. Chatterjee said understanding the idea from every angle and identifying weak spots early makes the shoot day more seamless. "A shoot day should be execution, not discovery,” Chatterjee said.
Editing. "The most expensive thing on a channel is an editor, or you, discovering the video in the timeline,” Chatterjee said. He recommends taking stock of your footage before editing begins so the editor understands the story, structure, and creative intent from the start.
Going forward: Chatterjee is applying the same systems-first philosophy to help other creators scale through freelance strategy, channel audits, and production consulting. "Your creativity scales when you wrap it in systems," Chatterjee said.
This Studio Wants to Build the Next MGM For Creators
Ed Simpson (left) launches new creator acquisition company Wonderloom Studio and makes first deal with Dr Insanity (right) / Ed Simpson
Veteran reality TV producer Ed Simpson (whose credits include shows Wife Swap and Calabasas Confidential) is bringing the traditional studio model to the creator economy. This month, he launched Wonderloom Media with Carlyle-backed IP fund Content Partners to acquire and scale creator businesses into media studios.
Its first acquisition: Dr Insanity, a faceless true crime YouTube channel with more than 3M subscribers.
“The creator economy is the top of the pile. It’s arrived, full stop,” Simpson told us. “But it’s arriving at the start line—not anywhere else along the race.”
Simpson said creators are already building IP that can travel beyond YouTube to platforms like Netflix, Fox, and Tubi, but many lack the business infrastructure (including accounting, legal, licensing) needed to scale like studios.
What Wonderloom is looking for:
Established channels with proven audience and revenue.
Founders who want to focus on creative, not business operations.
Big picture: Wonderloom joins other creator acquisition companies like Compound Creative Holdings, the $250M CAA-TPG venture targeting established creator businesses. As more investors enter the creator economy, the race is shifting from signing creators as talent to build the operations to help them scale. Wonderloom is positioning itself as the studio operator, aiming to build "the next MGM," Simpson told us.
Sponsored by Microsoft Surface
A Device That Fits Your Creative Workflow
One moment you're polishing a last minute brand pitch at a coffee shop. The next? You're at an airport gate, editing photos and videos.
As a creator, most devices aren't built to bend the way your work moves. But the Surface Pro is.
It shifts from laptop to tablet to creative canvas with a built-in kickstand and detachable Flex Keyboard and Slim Pen. The Surface Pro fits any workspace (including coffee shop tables).
Under the hood, the Snapdragon X2 Series chip pushes through edits fast. Renders finish and files will export before your flight takes off. And with up to 15.5 hours of battery life, you can keep editing throughout the whole flight.
No matter where your day goes, you need a device that keeps up. Check out the new 13-inch Surface Pro today.
By The Numbers Roundup: The Highest-Earning Podcast Creators
Forbes names 2026's most profitable podcasts including Steven Bartlett's The Diary of a CEO (left) and TBPN hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays (second from right, right) /
This week we saw a few big numbers from the creator world that made us do a double-take:
$1B → How much revenue beauty sellers generated on TikTok Shop this quarter. The short-form retail vertical is expected to reach $23B in US sales this year, which is more than the ecommerce operations of Target, Costco, and Kroger.
$45M → Steven Bartlett’s 2026 earnings from The Diary of a CEO, according to a Forbes report. Bartlett is the report’s third highest-earning podcast creator, just behind TBPN at $70M. Worth noting: At Press Publish LA, TBPN said they are not a podcast, but a livestream show. It’s another sign of just how blurred the lines between podcasts, TV, and streaming are.
$2.5M → What brands paid for a 30-45 second ad on MrBeast’s main YouTube channel in 2024, according to newly filed court documents. For reference, Super Bowl ad budgets range from $8-10M for a 30-second spot. The filings also shared Beast Industries landed $91M in brand deals last year.
🔥 Press Worthy
IShowSpeed buys an $11M warehouse in south Florida to build out a content studio.
Gaming streamer Cinna is hosting a subathon tomorrow.
X launches a financial services platform.
Former Good Good golf creator Brad Dalke makes his PGA Tour debut this weekend at the Rocket Classic.
Instagram viewers outnumber creators two-to-one, according to an eMarketer study.
📚 Thank You for Pressing Publish
The content we’re looking forward to reading, watching, and listening to this weekend.
Read: GQ profiles WNBA livestreaming duo Courtney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman aka Studbudz.
Watch: Our colleague Jesse get surprised with a red Lexus in Colin and Samir’s first channel video breaking down their Lexus partnership.
Listen: On Plain English with Derek Thompson, the journalist explores how the 3,000 year-old poem The Odyssey outlived other epics with professor Karen Ní Mheallaigh.
