Good morning. After taking her prolific music career to Instagram, TikTok, and Letterboxd, Charli XCX has now launched a newsletter on Substack—collecting social platforms like Infinity Stones.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Fresh off a minority investment from the MLB, creator-led media company Jomboy recently hired former TikTok agency lead Brett Joss to grow its long-term sponsorships as VP of Sponsorship Sales.

The plan: Operate Jomboy like a professional sports league with multi-year sponsorships. 

“We’re really focusing on upleveling our roster of creators to that league sponsorship level of sales,” Joss told us.

How does Jomboy’s MLB partnership come into play? “Sports brands want to associate with the actual [MLB] footage, on-screen highlights, and we have access to all official and VIP footage, camera angles, statistics—putting that in the hands of creators and letting them do their thing,” Joss said. “MLB has no creative oversight on what we do—that’s been hugely powerful.”

FYI: MLB received record-setting social viewership during last month’s World Series. And Jomboy saw a similar uptick—World Series content generated 2 billion views across Jomboy’s channels in October, a 72% increase from last year.

The flipside of that? Generating sales when baseball isn’t in season. Jomboy has year-round coverage with its Warehouse Games and international sports like cricket, one of its fastest-growing verticals. Joss wants to apply the same MLB sponsorship strategy to its other sports.

“Why cricket? It all comes back to the fact that we’re a creator-led company and [founder Jimmy O'Brien] has an authentic passion for cricket, so that leads the way,” Joss said. “We listen to the creator's content plans and it’s my team’s job to go out and find the brands who can enhance it and make it happen vs. coming to the creators with a brand-led idea.”

Hannah here. This week, I went to the launch party for Gymnasium’s new short-form show, Girl Room. It’s made with Amazon Prime and hosted by actor and creator Owen Thiele, known for shows like Adults, Overcompensating, and his Unwell podcast In Your Dreams.

The scene: It started at 9pm at a bar in Silverlake, which for me (a 34-year-old living on the west side) was very much out of my usual form. I knew it’d be a scene, and a scene it delivered—Thiele was there, along with Emma Chamberlain, Megan Skiendiel of KATSEYE, and LA creators like Max 4 Cracks and Caroline Ricke. 

While there, I spoke with Gymnasium producer Damion Bucenec and met the star of Girl Room’s first episode, Roni (whom Gymnasium found through Craigslist).

But what surprised me more than that: Gymnasium founder Adam Faze texted me later explaining that Girl Room is Gymnasium’s first show co-owned by Amazon Prime (last season’s Boy Room was sponsored by Amazon, but owned by Gymanasium). 

Faze told me that this is the kind of short-form content Gymnasium is working on now—producing original IP with brands.

“Brands are media companies whether they realize it or not and owning formats that are viral in their own right is a better form of marketing than 95% of campaigns,” Faze said.

For the What's Poppin’ and Shop Cats of the short-form wave, this is a new third option in addition to 1) full creator IP ownership and 2) traditional sponsorship setups. Already, it seems to be resonating—Girl Room’s first episode has received 1 million organic views across platforms in two days.

Yesterday, newsletter platform beehiiv launched an expansion pack—offering 10 new products, from integrated sales setups to a link in bio tool. Here are the top features →

Dynamic content. Segment ads or content to different newsletter audiences in one send. For example, we could run an ad to just our subscribers who went to Press Publish NYC, then run another ad to readers who didn’t—in one email.

Digital products. Let readers book calls or buy an ebook directly through the newsletter. Beehiiv said it won’t take a cut of sales.

Native podcasts. Users can host their podcasts directly on their beehiiv sites without linking out to another platform.

Big picture: Beehiiv joins platforms like Substack and Patreon in the bid to become an all-in-one platform for newsletter writers building 360 media brands. For their parts, Substack offers livestream video and network recommendations, and Patreon offers courses, chats, merch, and podcast tools.

^{*This is sponsored content.}

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