This is POST CREDITS Weekly, a newsletter from me, Ian Schafer, the President & Co-Founder of Ensemble. This newsletter will be a companion to a show (called, you guessed it, POST CREDITS) where I’ll be sitting with luminaries to get the stories of how the creator economy is impacting the general entertainment economy — and vice-versa. News on where you can find that series will drop shortly.

But in the meantime…

This week, TikTok’s “a lil’ bit more American” era launched with outages, censorship accusations, and a spike in uninstalls — a reminder that creators can’t truly be sovereign if their entire business lives inside someone else’s data center. In sports, the NFL didn’t just sell rights; it bought itself 10% of ESPN, while Comcast told Wall Street that live rights are the only thing keeping the lights on. Golf Channel’s new parent Versant is building a 50/50 cable-to-digital golf empire with tee‑time apps, women’s indoor team golf, and creator collective Good Good as co‑stars.

On the creator side, Markiplier just self‑financed a sub‑$3M horror film, opened on 4,000+ screens, and outperformed the box office — we may have found a path from YouTube to movie theaters — it’s just the one less-traveled. Apple is bundling it’s professional creator apps into a $12.99 “studio in a box/subscription,” while IAB quietly dropped the slide every CMO will be quoting:

“Creator ad spend is headed to $37B, growing four times faster than the rest of media”.

CHART OF THE WEEK

— Ian

Days after a U.S. investor consortium closed its takeover of TikTok’s American business, a weather‑related outage at an Oracle‑run data center froze feeds, broke view counts, and fueled a wave of glitches — just as activists accused the app of suppressing politically sensitive content and AP data showed app uninstalls jumping 130% over a four‑day window. It also led to the rapid (albeit temporary) App Store rise of UpScrolled [The Guardian; AP News, Forbes]

Creators don’t care whose name is on the cap table; they care if the For You page works and whether or not first-amendment protected speech mysteriously vanishes. This was a live demo of platform risk: you can be independent in brand deals and still be signed to a label when it comes to distribution. Choose where you build your channels and brand(s) wisely, knowing that everything can change in an instant.

ESPN has officially acquired NFL Network, NFL Fantasy, and the linear distribution rights to NFL RedZone, while the NFL receives a 10% equity stake in ESPN after U.S. and international regulators signed off just ahead of Super Bowl LX. RedZone production and digital distribution stay with the league, but ESPN controls cable/satellite carriage and can extend the “RedZone” concept to other sports — which could get tricky without more complex rights re-negotiations. [AP News, Washington Post]

You want access to live sports to be easier? You’re going to have to get used to consolidation — not to mention increasing prices, and relentless attempts at more monetization. The NFL now owns a piece of the megaphone that sells its own product, and ESPN’s DTC app becomes a one‑stop funnel for live games, fantasy, and eventually betting. For athletes and creator‑analysts, that’s a bigger, more centralized stage — and a reminder that leagues are becoming networks in their own right. Whether this leads to an improved audience experience or just more enshittification remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure — this is a joint venture created out of lust for your attention. I’m just wondering who’s pushing whose tush (and if I used who’s/whose properly)…

Spotify is expanding its video podcast partner program, lowering entry thresholds and adding tools like swappable host-read ads and a distribution API, while multiple creators report that their revenue per thousand views on Spotify is roughly two to three times what they earn from YouTube. The company has invested around $10 billion into podcasting over the last five years and is pitching the richer payouts as a way to lure YouTube-first shows — particularly in international markets where YouTube ad budgets are thinner — into Spotify’s ecosystem. [Bloomberg]

Video-first creators and brand-owned shows suddenly have real leverage to negotiate windowing, exclusivity, and ad formats across platforms. Don’t just “launch on YouTube and clip for socials” — architect your rights and revenue stack the way a savvy showrunner does with syndication. If you’re not thinking about Podcasts as “shows” and “series”, then you’re seriously underestimating their potential — whether you’re a creator or a brand (or their media buying agency).

Markiplier’s self-financed sci-fi horror Iron Lung opened January 30 and has already hauled in about $17.8M from 3,015 U.S. cinemas (and $21M globally) on a reported $3M budget, with a grassroots, creator-led campaign helping push the film onto more than 4,000 screens worldwide — all without a traditional studio distributor.  Critics are split (around 50% on Rotten Tomatoes), but audiences are all-in, with an 89% score and sellouts driven largely by his 38M-plus YouTube fanbase. [Gizmodo, Variety]

This is the “EP/mix-tape era” of cinema: no label, just a direct line from creator to crowd. For CMOs and creators, Iron Lung is proof that if you own the IP, the audience, and the channels, you can behave like a mini–Blumhouse and open like a studio tentpole — the feeds are your four-quadrant marketing plan now.

Newly spun-off Versant is rebuilding Golf Channel as the center of a golf “vertical” where roughly half the money comes from the linear network and the other half from tee-time and membership products GolfNow and GolfPass. It’s also kicking the tires on WTGL, a women’s indoor team golf league spun out of Tiger and Rory’s TGL concept, while deepening its partnership with creator collective Good Good to revive reality staple Big Break and fuel more alt-golf shoulder programming. [Front Office Sports]

This is what happens when a cable network has to start acting like a growth-minded startup: your “golf channel” is now a bundle of tee-time APIs, women’s arena golf, and YouTube-born talent all under one scoreboard. For brands and athletes, that’s a giant neon sign to think in ecosystems, not ad pods — if you’re only buying :30s in the telecast, you’re missing the parts of the game that are actually growing.

IAB’s 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report projects U.S. creator ad spend to hit $37B in 2025, up 26% YoY and growing nearly 4x faster than the overall media market. Creator budgets have more than doubled since 2021, rising from $13.9B to $29.5B in 2024, as brands start treating creator work as a standalone channel rather than just a social media tactic. [IAB]

Translation: creators aren’t “influencer line items” anymore — they’re a media line that’s outrunning cable, print, and a lot of digital, with the viewership numbers to match. If you’re still allocating creator dollars like “influencer marketing”, you’re not playing in today’s NBA. It’s showtime.

Wheelhouse CEO Brent Montgomery explains why he backed Holywater’s microdrama app My Drama, fresh off a $22M round led by Horizon Capital with Wheelhouse as a strategic investor, and why he thinks the creator economy is still in its “infancy” and poised to become the primary IP factory. He frames microdramas as a fast, data-driven way to spin up “emotive, repeatable stories,” argues that the real gatekeepers are now audiences, and bluntly says “Hollywood needs a win” — likely from creator-first formats, not legacy pipelines. [Like & Subscribe]

For better or worse, Hollywood needs to figure out when to abandon albums and embrace singles. The hits are being road-tested on phones before they ever earn a studio budget. For CMOs, platforms, and producers, the message is pretty clear — if you’re still waiting for pilot season while microdrama apps are A/B testing vertical soap operas at scale, you’re playing legacy chess in a TikTok chessboxing world. Protect ya neck.