Issue #51: Term Sheet 💎

Issue 51
October 15th, 2026

First, you may have noticed (hopefully you noticed! 😃) there was no issue last week. I welcomed a new baby to my family, so things have been a little hectic around here (in the best way). But we're back this week, and there is a ton to catch up on.

For most of the time I've been writing this, a creator deal had one shape. A brand had a budget, you had a rate card, and the negotiation was basically about the number. Maybe usage rights if you were lucky enough to have someone who knew to ask.

I was reading through this week's news and I kept noticing that the number wasn't really the story anymore. Druski took a stake in a company. A podcast network in the UK launched a whole division to build media businesses around single creators. A London startup raised money to co-found apps with creators. Morning Brew bought a creator's newsletter, IP and all. And a very big streamer found out the hard way that the most important thing in his contract wasn't the money at all.

So I think the useful frame this week is that creators aren't being handed rate cards anymore, at least not the ones with leverage. They're being handed term sheets. And term sheets are a different kind of document. The number on the front matters a lot less than what's buried on page four.

In this issue:

Let's dig in.

The menu of creator deals got a lot longer this week, and the most important line in each one isn't the price.

Start with Druski. On October 12 he announced an equity stake and a multi-year partnership with Gopuff, the instant delivery company. Druski brings his audience, his ideas and his IP (including his Coulda Been Records and 4Lifers Entertainment properties), and Gopuff builds and distributes exclusive products around them. Gopuff's co-CEO called it "a true creative and commercial partnership." The size of the stake wasn't disclosed, and neither was anything else about the terms beyond "multi-year."

That deal landed the same week Digiday wrote up what top creators were saying at Advertising Week, and the theme was pretty consistent: fewer brands, deeper relationships. Alix Earle said she'd rather work with "five or six brands than 100 every year," and that she's weighing equity with the ones she keeps and working on two deals that look more like joint ventures. Jordan Howlett, who became chief content officer at Blenders Eyewear earlier this year, apparently ignored the brand's first approach because he wasn't interested in another transactional deal. Now he has an office there and a product line on the way.

Then the deals that aren't brand deals at all. On October 12, Goalhanger (the company behind The Rest Is History and The Rest Is Politics) launched Goalhanger X, which it describes as "a new model for building complete media ecosystems around exceptional creators." The first one is Always On with Marina Hyde, who just left The Guardian after more than 25 years. It launches free on Substack with video and social from day one, and a paid tier is planned. Goalhanger provides the production, distribution, audience and commercial infrastructure, and per Net Influencer Hyde keeps editorial control. What nobody said is who owns what. The press release never mentions ownership, equity or a revenue split.

Two days later, a London startup called Affinity Labs raised a $2 million pre-seed to co-found software products with creators. It's launched four apps so far, including an interior design app with Olivia Bowen, and says it wants to build more than 200 creator-led software brands by 2030. Its CEO called creators "the most underleveraged founders in the world." Again, no word on how the ownership gets split.

And a couple more from earlier in the month that fill out the menu. An Australian studio called Lost co-founds YouTube-first media companies with athletes instead of charging them a retainer: it fronts all the production and operating costs, recovers those costs from the first revenue, and then splits the profit. Morning Brew went the other direction and bought 100% of Express Checkout's IP in an all-cash deal, with both founders joining full-time.

Put those next to things we've already covered here, like work-for-hire footage deals (Issue #46) and creator IP financing like CreatorFi (Issue #47), and you get something like a real menu. You can take a fee. You can sell your output. You can borrow against your future. You can co-found something and give up a slice. Or you can sell the whole thing and take a job. Those are genuinely different bargains, and I think the honest reason this is happening is that the biggest creators figured out that a sponsorship fee is the worst-priced version of what they actually bring.

Which brings me to Jack Doherty. On October 10 he posted that he'd signed a contract with the crypto casino Shuffle and admitted he "didn't read the contract fully." It turns out it bars him from posting on social media for six months. He said he thought that part was a joke. Shuffle's founder confirmed it's real, said it was money well spent to get Doherty off the internet, and said the company would "stay strong" while Doherty's lawyers try to get out of it. No money figures have come out.

It's an extreme case, and it's a little funny, but I don't think it's really a story about one guy. It's the same lesson as everything else on the menu, just turned up to the max. Once your deal is more than "post this, get paid that," the thing that decides whether it was a good deal is almost never the headline number. It's what you owe, for how long, what you can't do, and what happens when it ends. Doherty's headline number might have been great. It doesn't matter.

And I want to be fair to the equity side, because I think the lazy take is "equity is a scam" and that's not right either. Stefani Stamatiou, a CEO quoted in the Digiday piece, said it pretty well: "Equity shouldn't become the new endorsement fee." Her pitch is sweat equity, where you earn the stake by doing real strategic or operating work, the way Howlett is at Blenders. That's a real thing and it can be worth a lot more than any fee. A stake handed over instead of cash, in a company you have no influence over, with no disclosed size and no way out... that's a much worse version of the same headline.

The bottom line: most people reading this aren't getting equity offers from Gopuff, and that's fine. But the shape of these deals trickles down fast. "Long-term partnership," "co-founder," "we'll front the costs" and "we handle everything" are all going to start showing up in pitches to mid-size creators, usually with less money and more paperwork attached. The question to train yourself to ask isn't "what's the rate?" It's "what am I giving up, for how long, and what do I keep if this ends?" There's a one-page way to do that at the bottom.

Three data points that tell a bigger story.

YouTube published a report on October 12 built on a survey of more than 20,000 creators across all 27 EU member states. 83% said recommendation algorithms are vital to their growth and revenue, and 71% said reduced visibility would directly threaten their livelihoods. 65% said they lack access to public grants, and 65% of professional creators said they don't have dedicated studio space. Worth saying plainly: this is YouTube's own report, and Tubefilter framed it as YouTube making its case for a better deal in Europe (it also claims more than €8.4 billion in EU GDP for 2025). But I don't think that makes the 71% wrong. It's the clearest number I've seen this year on why the Story of the Week is happening. If the thing your income depends on is an algorithm you don't control, then owning something (a product, a list, a piece of a company) is the obvious hedge.

At Advertising Week, Disney's VP of creator content and partnerships told Marketing Dive that they're "getting closer to like 40-plus percent of our assets in any media campaign are creator-led," up from probably under 10% five years ago. Chili's said all of its influencer content now "funnels into paid," and that a creator's in-car mukbang performed "so much better" than the spot it spent ages making. Alaska Airlines said it finds "way more budgeting efficiencies by contracting creators long term." Read those three together and you get the brand-side version of this week's theme. Your content isn't a post anymore, it's a media asset they run in paid. That's good news for long-term deals. It also means usage terms are where the money is, and a long-term contract that's cheaper per post can easily be cheaper because it quietly includes a lot more usage.

Digiday dug into agency fees in creator deals and the numbers are pretty uncomfortable. The consultancy TrinityP3 argues a bundled deal can leave as little as 35% of the budget for talent, versus as much as 60% when the same work is billed line by line. That's a modeled scenario, not an industry average, so don't quote it as fact. But it lines up with the ANA's figures from earlier this year: agencies take 30% of influencer spend on average, and only 39% of agreements are transparent to the marketer. And when a consultant polled members of the UK advertiser body ISBA about their own creator agency fees, 37% said they simply weren't sure how transparent they were. If the brands can't see where the money goes, you definitely can't. It's one more reason the biggest creators are trying to deal directly, and for a stake.

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

Pinterest is testing a feature that lets brands promote Pins made by creators they already work with through an affiliate or creator program, even if that particular Pin isn't tagged as sponsored. Creators get an email when it happens, and can switch off advertiser promotion of their content in account settings. Pinterest says the goal is to help creators "monetize their content," but there's nothing in the announcement about creators getting paid for the boost.

Why this matters for creators: if you're in any brand's affiliate program on Pinterest, go check that setting this week, and decide on purpose. A boosted Pin with your affiliate link on it might be a great deal for you (more clicks, more commission). But it's still paid media running on your work, and in any normal contract that's a separate line item. If a brand you work with starts boosting your stuff, that's a good moment to ask them for a proper paid usage rate, not a reason to quietly opt out.

At Advertising Week, Substack announced three sponsorship formats. Upgrade: a brand pays for a free month of your paid tier for your free subscribers. Unlock: a brand sponsors one of your paid posts so anyone can read it, and "the publisher gets paid for their work." Masthead: a brand commissions a group of writers for a themed collection, kind of like a digital zine. Brands in testing include Balenciaga, Uber and T-Mobile. Substack's own words are "we're still early," and it's limited to small groups of bestsellers for now.

Why this matters for creators: Upgrade is the clever one, because it's a sponsorship that's also a free trial of your paid tier, paid for by someone else. If you run a paid newsletter, the thing to track before anyone offers you one is your free-to-paid conversion after a trial month. That's the number that tells you what an Upgrade sponsorship is actually worth to you beyond the fee, and it's a much stronger thing to bring into a pitch than your open rate.

Meta rolled out "Your algorithm" on Facebook for Feed and Reels. It's in the three-dot menu on every post. People can add topics in their own words, tap Interested or Not interested and then explain why, and Meta says recommendations adapt within the same session. It's part of a rollout across Meta's apps, and no markets or timelines were given.

Why this matters for creators: this tilts discovery a little toward people who can describe what they want, which means it tilts toward creators whose niche is easy to describe. If someone typed the thing you make into a box, would your content obviously match it? If your captions and first few seconds don't say what the video is about in normal words, now's a good time to fix that. And I'd be careful not to overreact. Most people will never open this menu. But the ones who do are telling Facebook exactly what they want, which is about the best audience you can get.

Write your own term sheet before anyone hands you one.

The creators doing equity deals this week have lawyers and managers. Most people don't, and the deals coming to mid-size creators over the next year are going to borrow the language ("partnership," "co-founder," "we'll front the costs") without the bargaining power. So here's a habit I'd build: before you sign anything that's more than a straight fee, fill out one page in your own words. If you can't fill it out from what they've sent you, that's your list of questions.

What do I actually get? Cash, a stake, a revenue share, or some mix. If it's a stake, a stake in what? A share of Gopuff and a share of one product line built around you are very different things. Get the percentage and what it's a percentage of in writing.

What gets paid back before I see anything? This is the one people miss. Lost's model is honestly pretty fair on paper (they front the costs, they get them back from the first revenue, then you split profit). But "costs" can mean a lot of things. Ask what counts, whether there's a cap, and whether you get to see the books.

What do I owe, and what can't I do? Posting obligations, exclusivity, approval rights, and anything that limits when or where you can post. Jack Doherty's whole problem fits on this one line. Read every clause that starts with "Creator shall not." If anything restricts your own channels, it should be short, specific, and priced.

How does it end, and what do I keep? How long it runs, how either side gets out, and who owns the IP, the product, and the audience data afterward. Morning Brew bought 100% of Express Checkout's IP, which was obviously the deal both sides wanted. Just make sure that if you're selling the whole thing, you know you are.

That's it. Four questions, one page. It takes about fifteen minutes, and it's the difference between reading the term sheet and finding out what was in it six months later.

That's all for this week. The rate card isn't going anywhere, but the deals worth having increasingly come with a term sheet, so read page four. And if someone forwarded this to you, sign up to get your own issue every Thursday.