Good morning. ICYMI, we’re surveying creators to learn more about their revenue. If you’re a creator…and you earn revenue…and you have 30 seconds…you know what to do.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Today’s lineup:

1) An education creator returns to his 6.6 million subscribers
2) Two YouTube strategists tell us how brands think like creators
3) An AI creator launches a product studio

After a two-year hiatus from posting videos, education creator Tom Scott is back with England, a 39-episode series roadtripping through every county in the country.

Why he left: After uploading weekly travel and education videos for a decade, Scott stepped back from his 6.6 million YouTube subscribers. At the time, he said he wasn’t ready to expand his business at the rate it was demanding. Over the course of his two-year break, he continued his podcast game show Lateral and released a corresponding book.

Why he’s coming back now: “The absolute best part of my job was going to see interesting places and meeting interesting people. That's what I'd want to do anyway, without any audience,” Scott told us via email. “I found a format that works, and the alternative was not doing it.”

“It's the best version of my old format, but updated for 2026 and for a world where people watch half-hour videos on big television screens instead of two-minute videos on desktop computers,” Scott said.

“39 episodes is a big swing in itself: If this crashes and burns after three weeks, the rest of the year's going to be really awkward,” Scott said. “But if it succeeds: I guess I'll figure out what's next.”

Germany-based YouTube strategists Max Behrens and Dimcha Aiwi have worked on video packaging for the internet’s biggest creators: Nick DiGiovanni, the Stokes Twins, Jesser—contributing to over 4 billion views at just 18 and 20 years old, respectively. Now they’re helping global brands think like creators, too.

The key difference? Brands like Nike, Red Bull, and Disney are spending considerably more with consultants like Aiwi and Behrens than creators are, Behrens told us.

Here’s why: It’s all about the target audience age. “[For the Stokes Twins], the audience would be ages five to 15. Whereas a brand could be aged 20, all the way to 70,” Behrens told us. What works for one—highly exaggerated thumbnails, for example—doesn’t work for the other.

And brands are eager to make YouTube work. 

“I don't think [Red Bull] wants to make any money specifically off of YouTube,” Behrens said. “They just want to gain more trust and a better relationship with their audience.”

What this means for creators: With Behrens and Aiwi’s help optimizing their content for YouTube, Cadillac has gone from averaging 10K-25K views per video to over 1 million this year. As brands start thinking about video more in terms of original series (like Nike’s Comfort Zones) than simple commercial plugs, could they begin to rival creators on platforms like YouTube? Let us know what you think by hitting reply.

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On the heels of her Physical Phones product launch, AI education creator Catherine “CatGPT” Goetze’s next venture is Cat Labs: a production studio where coders and builders can collaborate with her on ecommerce projects. We got an exclusive peek under the hood.

Here’s how it works:

Who she’s looking for: “We're getting people who love to build, maybe don't have their own media presence, but are totally open to the idea of being on camera,” Goetze told us.

Big picture: Shared creator studios and production spaces are becoming more common (for example: our team at The Publish Press is based out of The Lighthouse in Venice). The difference with Cat Labs? Goetze is offering an opportunity for participants to earn with the studio.

*This is sponsored content