Issue #50: The Middleman 💎

Issue 50
October 1st, 2026

Fifty issues. I didn't really plan to mark it, but it does make me look back at the early ones, and the thing I notice is how much of what I wrote about then was the platforms trying to get out of the way. Here's a marketplace, here's a media kit, go find each other. The platform was the room, and the deal was something that happened between two people standing in it.

This week I think that quietly flipped. In the span of about six days the three big video platforms each moved into a different part of the deal itself. One wants to help write your pitch. One wants to be the thing that pays you. One is listening to your streams to decide which brands you get shown to. None of that is sinister, and some of it is honestly better than what most creators have now. But it adds up to something new, which is that the platform isn't the room anymore. It's the middleman.

And the thing about a middleman is that the first question is always the same one. Who is paying them, and for what? I don't think that's a cynical question. It's just the one that tells you how to use them.

In this issue:

Let's dig in.

In one week, YouTube offered to write your pitch, TikTok offered to collect your invoice, and Twitch said it's reading your streams to decide which brands you're safe for.

Start with YouTube, because it's the biggest and because it technically happened the day before our last issue went out and I didn't get to it. At Made on YouTube on September 23, the company laid out a set of brand-deal and shopping tools that, read together, cover most of a deal from start to finish. Ask Studio will help you answer brand briefs, build proactive pitches and tailor your media kit (those are testing or coming soon, not live). Creator Partnerships is now available in 20 countries. A brand you're working with can get one-click access to your video's performance, and can add paid media behind it with something YouTube calls a creator partnerships boost. Dynamic brand segments, still in testing, let a sponsor slot into up to 20 of your long-form videos at once. And YouTube Shopping's affiliate program, which it says has 1.3 million creators, is heading to 35 countries by the end of the year.

We covered the original Creator Partnerships launch back in Issue #25, and I called it a matchmaker at the time. That was the discovery step. What shipped this month is the rest of the pipeline: the pitch, the proof, and the paid amplification. It's also already becoming the industry's shared plumbing. The day after the event, Later announced it had integrated YouTube's Creator Partnerships API, pulling first-party channel and audience data straight from YouTube, matching videos to deliverables automatically, and splitting organic views from paid ones. Later says it's live across more than 300 campaigns and 70 brands. So the proof of what your sponsorship did is increasingly YouTube's number, not your screenshot.

Then TikTok. At its LA Creators Summit on September 24, TikTok walked brands through TikTok One Pay: the advertiser pays through TikTok, TikTok handles everything from invoice to transfer, and the creator gets paid within 30 days of the video posting. TikTok says it charges creators no transaction fee or commission. Tubefilter pointed out that the usual terms in this business are net 60 or net 90. And if you read last week's issue, you'll remember the Indian creators waiting four to six months on money they'd already earned. A platform that just pays you in 30 days, for free, is a real improvement. I want to say that plainly before I say anything else about it.

At the same summit TikTok also talked up TikTok One Plus, an invite-only tier for creators who are 18+, based in the US or Mexico, over 100,000 followers and in good standing. Members get 15% more on Custom Collab work with no extra deliverables, and they're labeled "High-quality content creator" inside TikTok One's recommendations to brands.

Then Twitch. On September 29, Tubefilter picked up an interview where CEO Dan Clancy said Twitch transcribes streams to figure out "Is this appropriate for this brand?", and that it now uses AI to identify streamers who may not match a given brand. Streamers had some pretty reasonable questions. One who uses LGBTQIA+ tags said they'd already seen lower ad revenue and worried the screening would make that worse. A VTuber pointed out that you might never find out that a brand filtered you out, or why. Twitch hasn't said what the criteria are, or whether there's any way to appeal.

So here's the thing I keep coming back to. Historically, the middleman in a creator deal was a manager or an agent, and the arrangement was simple. They took a cut of your money, so they were paid to get you more of it. You could fire them. They worked for you.

The new middleman is paid by the other side. Free to you means funded by the brand's budget, and in YouTube's case the same tool that helps you close the deal also sells the brand a boost on your video. The platform is now writing your pitch, sitting on your performance data, holding the money, deciding who gets the "high-quality" label, and screening you for brand safety using criteria you can't see. I don't think any single one of those is a problem. I think the combination means the one party who knows your rate, your numbers, your payment history and your eligibility is also the one party you can't fire.

And I want to be fair here, because I think the lazy take on this is "platforms bad," and that's not what the evidence says. Thirty-day payment with no fee is better than what most agencies give you. First-party measurement is better than screenshots. An AI that drafts your reply to a brand brief at 11pm is genuinely useful if you don't have a manager, which is most people reading this. The point isn't to refuse the middleman. It's to know which parts of your business now live inside someone else's system, and to keep a copy of the parts that matter.

The bottom line: use all of it. Take the 30-day payment. Let YouTube draft the pitch and then rewrite it in your own words. But treat every one of these tools like an agent who also represents the buyer: helpful, fast, and not the only one who should know your numbers. The questions to ask before you opt into anything are pretty simple. Who is paying for this? What does it let them see? And if my account got restricted tomorrow, would I still have the contact, the contract and the proof? The pro-tip at the bottom is how to make sure the answer is yes.

Three data points that tell a bigger story.

The IAB surveyed 2,200 people across the US, UK, Australia, Mexico and India who'd used AI tools for shopping in the last three months, and Marketing Dive broke down the numbers. 65% of Gen Z and millennial respondents said they prefer AI recommendations that cite creators or influencers. But only 29% of that same group said those citations actually made them more likely to buy. Subject-matter experts, retailer information and brand content all ranked above creator reviews, across every generation. This is stated preference from a survey done in May, not observed sales, so I wouldn't lean on it too hard. What I'd take from it is the shape. AI assistants are becoming the newest middleman between your review and someone's purchase, and people like seeing you cited, but being cited isn't the same as being trusted to close. The creators who come out ahead here are probably the ones whose content reads like an expert's (specific, tested, comparative) rather than a vibe.

Net Influencer talked to six clipping agency founders about how the clipping economy actually works, and it's a middleman business in its purest form. A brand hands over footage and a brief, an agency turns it into a one-page rule sheet, thousands of independent fan pages cut and post clips, and nobody gets paid until a post clears a view threshold, anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 views depending on the agency, and then passes manual review. Pay is per thousand views, and most campaigns run from a few thousand dollars to the low tens of thousands. The risks are the ones you'd expect, and one number stands out: one agency, Clipster, says it has banned more than 20,000 creators for faking views. If you're a clipper, this is a real side income with very thin protections. If you're the creator whose footage is being clipped, it's a distribution channel you should be negotiating on purpose (who can edit it, which accounts can post it, whether it can become a paid ad) rather than discovering after the fact.

Here's the counterexample. RedBird Capital agreed to take a majority stake in Puck, the subscription media company, at a valuation of roughly $250 million. Puck has about 50,000 paying subscribers, and its model has always been that the writers get equity in the company plus a share of the subscription revenue their work brings in. Employees with vested equity get a mix of cash and continued ownership in the deal, which is expected to close in about a month. Puck's journalists aren't typical creators, and I don't want to pretend a $250 million exit is a template for anyone reading this on their phone. But it's a useful thing to hold up next to the Story of the Week. The same week three platforms moved into the middle of creator deals, here's a business where the talent owns part of the middle, and that ownership is what just turned into liquidity.

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

YouTube is expanding its Watch With feature so creators can hit "React live" on eligible long-form videos and livestreams and stream their reaction on their own channel. The reacting creator keeps the live ad revenue and fan funding from that stream. The original creator gets attribution, "added view credit" in YouTube Studio, and a setting to turn the whole thing off. YouTube hasn't said whether that view credit turns into any actual revenue.

Why this matters for creators: go find the Watch With setting in Studio when it shows up and make a deliberate call, rather than letting the default make it for you. If your videos are the kind people react to (commentary, news, big set-piece videos), reactions can be great discovery. They can also be a bigger creator monetizing your hour of work with a few minutes of talking over it. I'd leave it on if you're small and need the reach, and seriously think about it if you're big enough that the reactor needs you more than you need them. Either way, watch the Studio attribution numbers for a month and see if those views ever convert into subscribers. If they don't, that's your answer.

Sam and Colby announced that a collection of their Hell Week paranormal episodes is going to Netflix starting October 1, and told fans that "nothing else is changing." The deal is non-exclusive, so the content stays on YouTube. No economics were disclosed.

Why this matters for creators: we covered Netflix's creator deals back in Issue #41. What's worth noticing here is the shape of the deal. They licensed an event, a seasonal franchise with a clear beginning and end, not their channel, and they kept it non-exclusive. If you have a recurring series or an annual tradition, that's the unit a streamer can actually program, and "non-exclusive" is the word to ask for first. It's the difference between adding a distributor and swapping one middleman for another.

Spotify said its Partner Program is expanding to more than 35 additional markets later this fall, including Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Poland, Colombia, Chile and much of the Caribbean. Eligible podcasters get Premium video revenue, ad monetization, and sponsorship management tools where they keep 100% of sponsorship revenue. Spotify says payouts to enrolled shows are up more than a third since it loosened eligibility earlier this year.

Why this matters for creators: if you run a podcast in one of these markets, the thing to do before it goes live is get a video version of your show working, because that's where the Premium revenue is. And notice that of all the platform deal tools this week, this is the one where the sponsorship workflow is explicit that you keep all of it. That's a good default to compare the others against.

Keep a shadow ledger of every deal that runs through a platform.

If more of your deals are going to live inside TikTok One, YouTube Creator Partnerships or whatever Instagram ships next, the most useful habit you can build is a simple one. Keep your own copy. A spreadsheet is fine. One row per deal, and I'd track eight things: the brand, the actual person you talked to, their real email address (not just the in-app thread), the rate, the deliverables, what access or boost rights you granted, the date you were promised payment, and the date you actually got paid.

Then add two more columns for performance, and fill them in at 7 days and 30 days after posting. Export or screenshot the numbers from the platform when you do. The platform's first-party data is great until your account gets restricted, or the tool gets renamed, or the brand's access expires, and then it's gone. Your copy is the thing you bring to the next pitch, including pitches on other platforms that will never see YouTube's data.

The real email column matters more than it looks. In Issue #32 I wrote that the money is in the third deal with the same brand, not the first. If the only way you can reach that brand is through a platform inbox, the platform owns that relationship. After a deal goes well, send the contact a short note from your own email with a result and one idea for next time. That's the whole move.

Last thing. When a brand asks for partner access with a paid boost, that's paid media running on your content. Price it separately, the way you'd price whitelisting or usage rights, and put an end date on it. The platform made granting it one click. That doesn't mean it should be free.

That's all for this week, and that's fifty of these. Thanks for reading. The platforms all want to be in the middle of your deals now, so keep a copy of everything that runs through them. And if someone forwarded this to you, sign up to get your own issue every Thursday.