Issue #47: Bigger Than You 💎

Issue 47
September 10th, 2026

I know Skibidi Toilet the way most adults over thirty know Skibidi Toilet, which is secondhand, against my will, and with no real understanding of why. It is a series of short animations about toilets with heads in them. It has billions of views. For about two years it was arguably the single most culturally dominant thing on the internet that nobody in my age bracket could explain.

Last week it got a new creative team, and the creator who made it is not on it.

That story got covered as a fandom drama, and it is one. But I have been chewing on it all week because I think it is actually the clearest illustration I have seen of the thing every creator with a recurring format is walking toward without noticing. Skibidi Toilet is no longer a channel. It is a franchise, with a showrunner and an animation director and a story editor, and it runs whether or not the person who invented it shows up. That transition is what makes creator work financeable. It is also what makes the creator optional.

And then, on the very same day, in what I promise is a coincidence, one of the biggest creators on YouTube announced he is financing a theatrical animated feature out of his own comic, with his own money, through his own production company. Same day. Same question. Opposite answer.

In this issue:

Let's dig in.

Skibidi Toilet's new creative team does not include the person who created Skibidi Toilet, and the paperwork that made that possible is three years old.

On September 3, Invisible Narratives announced the creative team that will run future Skibidi Toilet episodes. Four people, all of whom came up inside the fan community that grew around the series. Virlance, who made The Skibidi Wars and his own original series VOIDSTORM, is showrunner. Strider, who animated episode 80, directs animation and sound. FScript is producer and technical director. Achi, who is eighteen and self taught, is lead story editor.

That is a real writers room. Those are real credits. For four fan animators, this is a genuinely great outcome and I do not want to be cynical about it.

The part that got everyone's attention is that Alexey Gerasimov, who created the series, is not on the team. Invisible Narratives says he holds an executive producer title and is "not currently participating in the development or production of new Skibidi Toilet YouTube episodes," and that the door is open for him to come back.

Here is the sequence that actually matters, and it is not from this week. It is from 2023.

In October 2023, Gerasimov assigned the rights to Skibidi Toilet to Invisible Narratives, a studio founded by former Paramount executive Adam Goodman. Aftermath's reporting describes that first arrangement as deliberately revocable, meaning he could take it back. In May 2025 he made it permanent, and in exchange got the executive producer title, a first look deal, and directing opportunities during a transition year. In October 2025 the first episode not made by him went out, the fandom hated it, and #BringBackBoom trended.

So read the current state of it. Invisible Narratives says Gerasimov assigned the principal copyrights and the trademarks. It also says the assignment included exclusive rights to his YouTube channel.

I want to sit on that last one, because I think it is the single most instructive detail in the story and it went by in one clause. Most creators, if they imagine signing an IP deal at all, imagine licensing the characters. The thing they picture keeping is the channel, because the channel feels like the self. It is the address. It is where the subscribers live. It is the thing you would rebuild from if everything else went wrong. In this deal the channel went with the characters.

Now, to be fair about it, this was not a bad deal in the obvious way. Invisible Narratives says Gerasimov "has earned more from Skibidi Toilet than most people see in a lifetime," and the specifics are confidential, so nobody outside it can score the trade. He was a young animator with a viral hit and no infrastructure, and a studio with actual money offered to turn it into a franchise. The first version was revocable, which is genuinely more creator friendly than most of what gets signed. He then chose to make it permanent. That is a real choice by an adult, not a trap.

But look at what the two sides of the trade actually were. He handed over the thing that could outlive him, and got a title, a transition year, and money. Invisible Narratives got an asset that keeps producing after the founder leaves, which is the only kind of asset a studio can put a feature film and a CAA signing behind. The whole point, from their side, was separability. Not as a betrayal. As the deal.

And separability works. That is the uncomfortable part. Four talented people are making a living on this franchise right now, and there is a movie in development, and none of that happens if the property is welded to one person's ability and willingness to keep animating toilets. The reason a studio pays real money for creator IP is precisely that it will survive the creator getting bored, or burned out, or hit by a bus, or just wanting to do something else at thirty. You cannot ask for the check and also demand the thing stay inseparable from you. Those are the same property, viewed from opposite ends.

Which brings me to the other thing that happened this week.

On September 3, Charlie White, who most people know as MoistCr1TiKaL, put out a teaser for Godslap, a hand drawn animated feature based on a comic he wrote, targeting theaters in 2028. It is being made at Powerhouse Animation in Austin, produced by Lyrical Animation together with White's own Meatier Productions. He pitched the idea back in 2018 and it stalled on cost. This time, he is financing it himself.

That is the same structural move as the Skibidi deal, run in the other direction. White is also building something separable from his channel, a property with characters and a world that could theoretically run without him. He is just paying for it instead of selling it, which means when it works he owns it, and when it does not he ate the loss personally. He had to be rich enough to choose that. Most people are not.

So I do not think the lesson here is "never sign your IP away," which is easy to say and is advice for people who already have money. The two stories only make sense together, and what they bracket is a spectrum, with the same axis running through both: how much of the upside you keep is a function of how much of the risk you can afford to carry, and the paperwork is where that ratio gets set.

The bottom line: the moment your work becomes a format instead of a feed, a recurring character, a repeatable premise, a world, you have made something that can be owned separately from you, and somebody is eventually going to offer to own it. That offer is not automatically a bad thing, and treating every one of them as predatory will keep you small. But understand what is actually being bought. It is not your creativity and it is not your audience. It is the part of the thing that keeps working after you stop. So the questions that matter are not about the fee. They are about reversion (if it stops working, does it ever come back to you), about scope (does the channel go with the characters), and about whether the first version is revocable, because Gerasimov's was, and the window where that was true was the most valuable thing he had. There is a rights inventory at the bottom. It takes about twenty minutes and almost nobody does it before they need it.

Three data points that tell a bigger story.

Back in Home Field we covered YouTube's August 24 switch to counting a public view from the first frame of playback, and I said your numbers were about to go up without you getting better. Now there is a measurement. Agentio looked at more than 75,000 creator videos after the change and found 549 million public views against 330 million engaged views, an engaged rate of about 60%, with micro channels down around 54%, as Tubefilter reported. Worth noting Agentio sells creator advertising, so they have a commercial interest in advertisers trusting engaged views over public ones, and you should weight it accordingly. But the direction is not really in dispute and the size of the gap is the useful part: roughly 40% of the number now displayed under your video is autoplay and drive by. This connects to the franchise question more than it looks like it does. If you are ever going to be valued as an asset rather than paid as a freelancer, somebody is going to run diligence on your numbers, and the first thing a buyer does is throw out the vanity metric and find the one that behaves like an audience. Start quoting the engaged number yourself now, while it is a credibility move rather than something you got caught on.

CreatorFi announced $45 million in combined debt and equity on September 2, lending against recurring creator revenue and IP backed cash flows. The equity was led by EV3, the debt by VerisFi Capital. One honest caveat, because a lot of the coverage blurred it: a further $100 million of capacity was announced but has not been raised, so the real number today is the 45. What makes this interesting next to the Skibidi story is the shape of the product rather than the size of it. Assigning your copyrights to a studio and borrowing against your copyrights are wildly different transactions that solve the same problem, which is that building a franchise costs more than a channel earns while you are building it. White solved it by being wealthy. Gerasimov solved it by selling. Debt is the boring third option that has been missing, and it is what has historically let people in music and film keep ownership through the expensive part. Now the caution, and I want to be straight about it: the announcement discloses no terms at all. No rate, no check size, no revenue share. Secondary write ups describe repayment as a cut of ongoing platform earnings plus obligations to produce new IP on a schedule, which if accurate is a good deal closer to selling a slice of your future than the word 'loan' makes it sound. So treat this as a real and genuinely useful third option that has arrived, and treat the specific terms as the entire question. Ask what percentage, for how long, and what happens if you stop posting.

A Censuswide survey of 1,000 US and UK brand side marketing and procurement decision makers found that 45% said their organization had mispriced a creator partnership, reported by Digiday. The more useful finding is the disagreement underneath it. Practitioners in the piece do not think benchmarking calculators can fix this, because the calculators price reach and the actual variance lives in rights, exclusivity and usage. Which is the same gap we hit in Work for Hire last week with Chipotle's footage, and the same gap sitting under the Skibidi deal, just at a different scale. Nearly half the buyers are telling you, on the record, that they got the number wrong. That is not a reason to feel bad about your rate card. It is permission to stop treating the brand's first offer as an informed estimate of what the thing is worth, because by their own admission, about half the time it isn't one.

What the platforms shipped this week and why you should care.

YouTube announced on September 3 that what used to be called paid product placement is now "branded content," and that creators who declare it can set age and geographic limits on that content. There is an updated viewer facing label, and over the coming months YouTube plans to roll out automated detection of undisclosed branded content on new uploads. Creators remain responsible for compliance.

Why this matters for creators: The audience controls are a real gift and almost nobody will use them, so use them. If a sponsor is only licensed in certain countries, or the product is age restricted, you can now scope the declared content instead of hoping. The automated detection is the part to actually prepare for. Once a classifier is looking at every new upload for undeclared sponsorships, the failure mode stops being "somebody reported me" and becomes "the system flagged me," which happens at a completely different rate. Go back through your last twenty videos this week and check that anything with a gifted product, an affiliate link, or a comped trip is actually declared. Retroactive tidiness is cheap right now and gets expensive the moment enforcement is automatic.

X confirmed that US payouts for Original Content Rewards and creator subscriptions now run through X Money rather than Stripe. Creators outside the US stay on Stripe for now. Separately, X said it was investigating a wave of mass password reset attempts after X Money became widely available, and said it had found no evidence of successful breaches so far.

Why this matters for creators: Those two stories are the same story. The instant your payout rail lives inside your social account, your account password becomes your bank password, and the people who take over accounts for a living update their priorities accordingly. If you earn anything on X, turn on an authenticator app today, and specifically move off SMS two factor, which is the one that loses to a SIM swap. Also worth knowing where you now stand legally: Stripe was a regulated payment processor sitting between you and the platform, and consolidating that in house removes an intermediary you could escalate to independently when something went wrong with your money.

TikTok announced voice comments of up to one minute, creator added comment polls with up to five options, nine photo carousel comments, and Live Photo comments. Polls and Live Photo comments are globally available now, with voice and carousel comments rolling out globally over the next month.

Why this matters for creators: The poll is the only one of these with obvious near term value, and it is not for engagement bait. Pin a poll on a video and you have a free, fast, reasonably large sample of your actual audience, which is the cheapest research instrument you have ever been handed on that platform. Use it to test the thing you were going to guess at: which format they want more of, which of two product categories they would actually take a recommendation on, what they would pay for. That answer is worth real money in your next brand conversation, because "I asked 4,000 of my viewers and 61% said X" is evidence, and almost nobody shows up to a pitch with evidence.

Do the rights inventory before somebody offers you money, not after.

The Skibidi story is not really about a bad contract. It is about the fact that almost nobody can answer basic questions about their own rights until the moment those questions become expensive, and by then you are answering them across a table from a person who has done this a hundred times and you have done it never.

So here is the twenty minute version. Open a blank document and write down four things.

First, list everything you have made that could exist without you. Recurring characters, named formats, a segment title, a world, a catchphrase people quote. Anything a stranger could continue. This is the list of things that are actually ownable. Most creators have more on it than they expect, and have never once thought about them as separate assets from the channel.

Second, for each one, write down who else currently has any claim on it. Not "I think nobody." Actually check. Go find any agreement you signed with a network, a management company, a merch partner, a publisher, an app that ran a branded series with you. Search those documents for the words "assign," "work made for hire," "exclusive," and "in perpetuity." Those four terms carry most of the weight in most creator contracts and they are usually in a section nobody read because it was after the payment terms.

Third, and this is the Skibidi specific one, check whether any agreement you have touches your accounts as distinct from your content. A deal can license your characters and separately take rights in the channel they live on, and those clauses often sit in different paragraphs. If you cannot tell, that is the question to send your lawyer, and it is a cheap question to ask.

Fourth, write down what reuse rights you have granted, because this is where it quietly compounds. Fresh legal analysis out of India this month makes the point cleanly: paying you to create a post does not automatically buy the right to run it as a paid ad, whitelist it, put it on television, or train a model on it. Those are separate grants that depend on what the contract says. If your standard deal is a handshake and an invoice, the answer to "can they run this as an ad for two years" is whatever they decide it is.

Then, when an offer does come, the one thing to negotiate hardest is not the number. It is reversion. Gerasimov's first assignment was revocable, and that was worth more than any single line item in it, because a revocable deal is a test and a permanent one is a sale. Ask for a term instead of perpetuity. Ask what happens if they stop producing. Investor Jaclyn Johnson, writing this month about creator equity deals, makes the same point from the money side: specify content, IP, likeness and post relationship rights up front, and understand that illiquid upside is not the same as being paid.

None of this requires a lawyer to start. It requires knowing what you own, which is a document you can write this afternoon and will never regret having.

That's all for this week. Go make a list of the things you've built that could keep running without you, then go find out who has a claim on them. And if someone forwarded this to you, sign up to get your own issue every Thursday.