The Hawk Tuah Explosion feat. Tonner Jackson, CEO of Course Studio

Welcome to Creator Upload, your creator economy podcast. I'm Joshua Cohen here with Tonner Jackson. Tonner Jackson, thank you so much for jumping in for Lauren Schnipper, who is out doing, I don't know, she had errands to run, planes to catch, people to see. We have Tonner Jackson here as a guest host today. He is the CEO and founder of Core Studio. Tonner, I'm really interested to talk to you more about what you're up to at Core Studio, but just Give us a little elevator pitch right now.

For sure. Yeah, our mission is to partner with knowledge creators to help them launch different software products.

Very cool. And you've been up to a lot of cool stuff with a lot of cool creators that I want to get into. But first, it's glad for me to be back. Hope Phil Ranta was a good replacement for me last week. I was out on the Jersey Shore getting sunburnt with my family and back at it now with a lot of news. So first up, Tonner, there's some big news in kind of the kids space. YouTube and just in influencers at large this week. The people are always worried about the kids these days, and that's been exemplified by different kind of fiascos and disasters we've had over the years in relation to online video, social media, and children. Some of the biggest that have affected our world was this Elsagate scandal that happened in YouTube in the 2010s, where there was all this programming that started to get pretty explicit where people were dressing up as Spider-Man and Elsa, making this content that was ostensibly for kids. But when you looked at it a little bit more closely, it was kind of rude, crude, and vile. That created a little bit of a, oh my God, what are we going to do? Advertisers are going to leave moment for YouTube that they rectified quickly. Google and YouTube also paid a record $170 million for alleged violations of the Children's Privacy Law back in 2019. The FTC and the New York Attorney General alleged that YouTube channels collected kids' personal information without parental consent. They've since gotten their act together. But the latest news that affects kids and our industry is the fact that the great state of Illinois has passed a child protection law that is really gonna benefit children that appear in online video. So the law took effect on July 1st. It has a few different provisions. The key provisions are: it requires parenting influencers to set aside 15% of their gross earnings for children who appear in 30% or more of their content. The earnings must be placed in a trust fund that children can access at the age of 18 years old. And at 18, children can request the deletion of videos in which they appear. Illinois is the first state to introduce such comprehensive regulations specifically targeting parenting influencers and the earnings of child participants in social media. Washington was musing over a bill late last year. Illinois also had a different bill that was just targeting child labor at large, of which there were certain components that affected influencers, but this one is specifically targeted towards parenting influencers and the children that appear in the videos. So, and there's precedent for this. While there's no federal law, surprisingly, that protects child actors, there are different state laws. So in 1938, California was the first to enact this when a 23-year-old named Jackie Coogan who had starred in movies like Charlie Chaplin's The Kid and more, had racked up hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars throughout his young career. Eventually became old enough to access those funds and realized that his parents had taken everything. He sued and won, and in response, California passed this law called the Coogan Law to protect children going through similar situations. Today, there's a revised version that requires 15% of a child entertainer's earnings to go into a trust.

And that's in the state of California that exists today, the 15%.

15% exists in the state of California, but it's specifically around child actors. Like most kind of laws, like SAG-AFTRA, different kinds of unions have needed to adopt and expand their scope to encompass this newfangled digital media, social video, online video landscape. These laws are finally catching up too. So Illinois is the state that the first, presumably there's gonna be a lot more that will come after this. But Tonner, what do you think about all this?

Listen, I'm a Canadian. A lot of your audience, I'm sure, is Americans, but many of your audience is probably familiar with Justin Trudeau. His father was a very famous Canadian prime minister who had this quote that it should not be the job of the state to meddle in the affairs of private homes. And he was actually mostly talking about, uh, interfering in like the sort of sexual activity of parents. But I think in some ways this was my initial reaction to this. This kind of felt like a half measure. I recognize that there is like notable disgruntled kids who've gotten to adulthood and feel like they've been mistreated by their parents, but to me it just feels like the kid has to report it. The volume of kids who are mistreated is very small from my view, and this feels like it's going to be a bigger bureaucracy than it is going to be actually valuable for kids. So, and it's funny you brought up the California thing. Like my view is, was that if a state had license to do something like this, I think it should be California 'cause they've been dealing with this for so much longer than certainly Illinois. They've been dealing with kids who've made a lot of dough who are managed by their parents. And so from my view, like, it just doesn't feel like it's meaningful enough for, again, like how much sort of regulation we'll need to actually make this a useful thing. So anyways, I'm interested in your take.

So I hear what you're saying where this isn't gonna solve everything. Like how is this going to be enforced? Who's gonna monitor all of these things? So I think that the monitoring is one issue where there's gonna be no feasible area of the Illinois government or any other state or government agency that passes these kinds of similar bills, they're, they're not gonna be able to do any kind of monitoring of these situations. I think they're here for enforcement and being able to go after bad actors in this space. And there have been a ton of bad actors. Daddy of Five was this channel known for controversial prank videos involving their children. It led to accusations of emotional and physical abuse. The outcome was they lost custody of two children and faced criminal charges. The channel was eventually shut down. That's one of a handful of more high-profile cases where there was some abusive activity taking place that was outwardly visible to audiences on camera. So I, I think that there have been just these egregious instances in this parent-influencer ecosystem that have drawn more attention to this, that have then led to laws like this where, yeah, it's not gonna become enforceable easily. I think this is going to provide a guideline and roadmap for people to follow because without it, they're just left to their own devices. What we're seeing now too is a growing number of child influencers who had basically no agency in being a child influencer, were basically having cameras shoved in front of their faces and told by their parents to do certain things or act a certain way to get more views and clicks, that now at least when they turn a certain age, have kind of some legal framework within which to operate to kind of receive some retribution. And I, I think that what this is, is just giving the industry some guidelines and guardrails about which to follow in order to be good actors within it. Hopefully, one, it's going to benefit the children that are participating in these videos. And two, I think alleviate some of these concerns that people might have about children who are influencers. Like, there's always questions about whether or not these massive child stars like Ryan from Ryan's Toy Reviews—

I was gonna bring that up. Yeah, he's a good one.

Are they okay? And are their parents operating within the bounds of some level of reason? And are kind of incentives aligned here? But talking with a bunch of parents of these child stars who are operating in a kind of respectful way, it's a constant struggle for them. And I think having more laws and regulations like this actually helps them be better at navigating this ecosystem and deciding what's best to do for their kids.

So I largely agree. So I think there's separate things here. I think one, there's like all the egregious shit that I think some notable parenting influencers have done The Ruby Frankies, another good example where like, was like, had a lot of content that was like clearly objectionable. I think I do agree that we do need maybe new laws and regulation to address some of these. I think there's a separate thing, which is like, it's the monetization of the content, which I think this bill is mostly addressing. I think my nervousness with this is like human beings have always had agency over their kids. They dictate everything they do until a kid's 18, 16, they don't have capacity. They can't make decisions for themselves. I suppose I'm just generally nervous about creating constraints for what parents do. Although I do like the idea of this maybe being the first bowling pin of saying, "Hey, listen, we're in a brand new era." The consequence of the scale at which the attention these kids are getting, we don't really know the psychological impact of that. At least having some sort of very clear remuneration for that, I guess I'm kind of supportive of. I don't think this is addressing the bigger issue we have with maybe some of those psychological issues or things that, again, like Ruby Frankie has been prosecuted for and others.

Yeah, kids these days who are acting in this environment with influential families is different than kids acting on television 20, 30, 40 years ago. So there are some benefits to that in that kids aren't generally filming as much. They're generally filming from home. Ryan and people like him still attend the public schools in the hometown of where they live that are within walking distance from their house.

That's a good point. That's a really good point.

And they're able to maintain some semblance of actual, real family life at home that looks like other kids' family lives at home. They just happen to film maybe 1 or 2 days a week. That's different from kids being on set, being away from their families, being around tens, dozens, hundreds of strangers a day, not going to school because they were on set, meeting tutors on set because they weren't going to school. So it's just a different kind of framework within which these kids are operating these days. And, and there are definitely some positives to it, but also there's this kind of like lack of oversight and regulation because that environment that established all those rules and regulations for the kids who are operating in this Hollywood ecosystem provided some kind of general oversight, presumably, over these kids on a day-to-day basis.

That's a good point.

Where that's lacking, there's not some overseer looking at how these kids are being treated at home every single day.

Yeah, that's a good point. So I agree with that. I suppose, again, I used that word half measure before. It's because I see this as viewing a— it's a monetary thing, not a guiding parents on how to help their kids—

Totally.

—raise psychologically responsible adults and kids. Because we kind of have a mechanism for wealth transfer already. It's called an inheritance. You know what I mean? The kids are going to get that money indirectly unless— I guess there have been some folks who are kind of flippant, cavalier, and maybe they're not leaving their kids anything. But again, I think that's a minority. Anyways, it's an interesting topic. Like, and I'm actually like, I don't know if you heard of, I think it's Jonathan Haidt recently wrote this book called "The Anxious Generation." Totally. And he's created a lot of buzz about like, we need to think about Gen Z differently. The kids that grew up communicating to their friends via these social channels are different kind of psychological beasts than we've ever had before. So from that vantage, I am supportive of lawmakers trying to create more modern frameworks. I suppose this one I'm just, I'm a little bit unclear on. So anyways, we'll see.

We gotta start somewhere.

Yeah, first bowling pin.

So speaking of the kids these days, they're crazy about the Hoktua Girl, and perhaps rightly so. It's what I want to talk to you about. Mainstream media seems to be entranced by her too. But so who is she? For those who don't know, Hoktua Girl is Hailey Welch, and Hailey Welch was in downtown Nashville and was interviewed by these two other creators Tim Dickerson and Darius Morrow. They have this YouTube show, Tim and D TV, where they go late night after bars with a camera and a microphone and get people to say wild stuff. Mostly sexually-oriented wild stuff. And so they interviewed Haley Welch. They asked her what her favorite kind of, like, go-to sex act was, and she said "Hak tua." And this is a quote from the New York Times: "Hak tua is an onomatopoeia for the sound Ms. Welch made to simulate a sex act in a video captured by Mr. Dickerson and Ms. Marlowe that has since been viewed millions of times." Through dozens of reaction videos and almost instantaneous merchandising push— there's like these Hak Tua 24 campaign t-shirts. Also, by the way, when I was on the Jersey Shore, tons of Hak Tua merch. Unlicensed Hak Tua merch, but tons of Hak Tua merch. The phrase has launched itself into the public consciousness. What I think is super interesting about this, though, is one, how big it's gotten and how much social media attention it's received. So the Tim and Dee TV channel isn't that big. I mean, it has 41,000 subscribers on YouTube right now. They have 180,000 followers on Instagram. They only received an additional 14,000 or so subscribers from this, maybe, maybe like 20,000 subscribers total. Since the Hoktua, uh, video was released.

That's crazy, man.

So it's not like their channel all of a sudden blew up, though the Hoktua girl did. So it's interesting that the channels behind this that kind of launched her and discovered her have not blown up, and the creators of that channel are kind of a little bit upset about that. So in the— in an interview with the New York Times, Marlo said, "At the end of the day, nobody would know who she was if we didn't bring it to light and post it. A lot of the audience who hadn't seen us before think we grew off this one clip. People were treating it like we're nobodies and didn't already have a platform." Yeah, yeah. And so they're a little salty about the attention this girl has gotten and not the attention their show has gotten. And I think that it's also just interesting how much attention she has gotten. I think it's for a few different reasons, the most notable of which there's not that many viral videos these days. It used to be on Vine, on Twitter and more. There was some new kind of viral moment that kind of captured the internet's attention and everybody circled around every day, every— at least every couple of weeks. And now these watercooler moments of the internet are happening less and less. I think that's just because of the fractured nature of our viewing experiences and how the algorithms are tailored to each individual audience. The last big one we had of this was Reesa Teesa, who was the "who the fuck did I marry" woman who basically talked about her failed marriage through dozens of clips, hours of footage on TikTok, and then got signed by CAA because of it and at least did a couple of brand deals. Hug to a Girl hasn't yet capitalized on that to the same capacity, but I think they fall into the same ballpark where however it happened, these two kind of shot up over the clouds into the stratosphere and just captured the attention of more people. And there's less of these things happening again because of the fractured nature, I think, of our viewing experiences now. So whenever someone does it, it becomes like big media fanfare and attention. Totally, man. Yeah. Tonner, what do you think?

It's freaking mysterious, man. It is mysterious. Going back to— is his name Marlon? Sorry, what was the individual, the team that captured the video?

Tim Dickerson and Darius Marlowe. Darius Marlowe.

Yeah. Listen, like, I get why they'd be upset about this, but I'm heading to Baltimore tomorrow. And to quote Omar from The Wire, it's all in the game. Like, I see this. We work with Colin and Samir and like, I'll find clips of their videos that are way more viewed than their YouTube channel or their their Twitter or whatever. And a part of me looks at that and says, "Man, that's upsetting to me because they're not capturing as much of the value as maybe they're creating." But I think this is whether it's a feature or a bug of the internet, it kind of is what it is. And it makes you kind of wonder if they had done something to merchandise this or put a watermark over it that made it more obvious who they were, it maybe wouldn't have had the virality it had. So anyways, I'm kind of sympathetic to them, but kind of not. I mean, The fact that you and I and others are even speaking to them whatsoever is because they did this thing. In the absence of that, nobody's talking about them. You know what I mean? So anyways, I'm curious, are you sympathetic with this take there? Like, I'm curious how you feel about it.

I get salty about that too. Like, when I write something or say something super interesting on stage and then it gets quoted days, weeks, months, years after without any accreditation. Yeah, I kind of feel it, but you learn that that's to your point, part of the game. Yeah, totally.

I, I think it is like, it's like, it's kind of what makes the internet unique, you know? It's like, I think, listen, this might be a, a misappropriation, but I think Tim Ferriss, I think he said give away 99% of your idea, your best ideas for free. The, the, the notion that something can go viral is worth the benefit, even if you're, you're maybe not always getting, getting attributed to it. So anyways, I think that's, that's maybe a separate conversation.

And then why do you think she's gotten so popular? Like, why do you think this was the one?

Dude, it is insanely mysterious. Like, I think this, you know what's funny? I bet you this is in the Harvard Business Review in like 10 years, like people talking about this moment. So I have a couple things. I think the first is that I think she is insanely charismatic. You know what I mean? Like, I think she captures kind of this kind of like Americana Southern ethos. Like her voice is interesting. You know what I mean? I love accents. She has a great accent. Yeah. Obviously she's like attractive girl. Listen, like every like couple years there's like, there's some sort of like viral moment around something sexual that's taboo, that kind of pushes the envelope of like, it gets very close to the line of being inappropriate, but just, it's just shy enough where I think it's something everybody can kind of enjoy, laugh at. And I think she just kind of did a, and I don't think this was deliberate. I don't think she was strategic about this. I think she's just speaking off the cuff. She just kind of found that, you know?

Yeah, and then maybe it shifts our Overton window about what's acceptable now. Totally, exactly. To speak about in sexual culture.

That's a really good point. And I think there's a ton of creators we've worked with, I'm not going to equate Esther Perel to this individual, but Esther got really famous for writing an op-ed, kind of a contrarian take about Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton that vaulted her into this position where she could help a lot of people talking about things that were taboo, the media weren't talking about. Again, I don't want to equate Hot Tour Girl to that because I don't think there's a philosophical underpinning behind what she's doing. But I think she's charismatic. I think she's hot. I think she's like, definitely got lucky with the moment. And honestly, like, I think there's an interesting question. Will she turn this into a more meaningful career? I don't think so. But I do think that she has some talent. I'm curious your take.

I think she should get the bag while she can. Yeah, totally.

Make hay while the sun shines.

I think it's going to be interesting to see what brands want to associate with her given the sexual nature of her rise to internet fame. I'm excited to see the ones that do. I think it could be a really good look and people would really get a kick out of it. So Haley Welch, I mean, go get it while you can. Yeah. And thank you for opening the aperture of what is considered socially acceptable to talk about.

Just one other thing I'll say on this too, like, I think it's kind of interesting is like, I think Alex Earl, I believe he's hosting a segment for NBC and NBC is kind of recognizing like, hey, the female audience for the Olympics is high. They want to hear from. A kind of millennial. What's interesting about her is like, I think she, she could be a face for a brand that is looking to have a deeper connection with an audience. The jury is still out on how compelling she is as a creator, as an influencer, as someone who can communicate consistently and engage an audience. I think she should make Hey While the Sun Shines, to your point, but I suppose I have a sliver of optimism that there could be a path to her similar where she could start a career in a similar way, maybe to Alex's role, maybe to a lesser extent.

So super interesting. We'll see what she does. I'm stoked to tune in. And then no Creator on the Rise for this week because Tonner, I want to take up the time to talk to you about what you're up to at Core Studio. Tell us how you're viewing the industry, what you're working on that excites you.

Let us know what's up. Yeah, for sure. So you and I were both just at VidCon, and one thing I kind of get encouraged by, or maybe it's a double-edged sword, when we are at a place like VidCon is very few folks are doing what we're doing. Our focus is is kind of on the knowledge creator side. We work with folks who built large audiences around an insight that they have, a recurring insight, or, or education would be another way to frame that. Um, whereas we, we very deliberately do not work with folks that I would consider who are more entertainment oriented. So when we add VidCon and other places, there's a lot of agencies and businesses who help creators launch merch. Mm-hmm. And other physical goods, cereals, et cetera. Um, I think what, what, what makes us unique is we are largely oriented around folks who again, deliver insight and we are very often a strategic partner in helping them think about what is a digital product that we create, how can we deliver insight and sell insight in a way that is not, uh, sort of addressed by social media platforms. Um, so, so some examples, we work with a large parenting influencer named Dr. Becky who has a, a membership called Good Inside. And the value proposition there is that it's a trusted sort of research back from a PhD in psychology to help parents navigate all of the different transition states of having a child from tantrums to potty training through to sleep. I mean, there's so many moments that are stressful for a parent, and creating a pro— we created a product around that, a web app, and very soon a mobile app that kind of meets a parent where they're at in those difficult moments, as opposed to in the middle of the night Googling an issue they might have. You open up this app and do that. So zooming out a little bit more, I think there is a lot of opportunities like Becky has captured for, again, what I consider knowledge creators, where there are products that they can sell that are not merch, they're software or course-based or membership-based. And I think we've become a very good strategic partner to help these creators identify what those are. So strategically, I think that's a big value that we have. And then from an execution vantage, we are mostly designers and engineers who build really good products and really care about the quality of those products and will help creators build those.

So you have an interesting purview into the ecosystem where you can see maybe what audiences might like or want. From a specific knowledge creator just based on your kind of experience with working with some others and seeing what works and what doesn't, and then executing, developing, designing, building that idea out into some type of app, course, other like kind of non-merch solution for the audience. Exactly. Is really where you excel.

Yeah, exactly. I think what's compelling about that is that like these are zero marginal cost products. They have the economics of software, right? Of course, is like why it's such a good product for a ton of creators. After you make an initial investment to stand it up and make something that what we call creates sort of transformation for a student, helps them get an outcome that they wouldn't be able to get otherwise, you can sell that infinitely for zero cost. You're very close to zero cost for you. So what's common for us is somebody to come to us and say, "Hey, I have a hypothesis for a course or a membership I want to launch." We'll launch that, generate some cash flows from that, and then maybe make a bigger swing at something more maybe ambitious. Could be a mobile app that does something quite unique or a web app. There's really no constraint on what that thing is. Yeah. Um, it really depends on who the creator is. And the second thing that I don't think people maybe appreciate of is the category. Parenting is a great category. We just launched a product with Ryan Serhant in the real estate space. It's a great category. There's a lot of wallet share there. There's a lot of realtors who are looking to get an incremental edge on their competitors and they're willing to pay for that. So category matters a ton for us.

So tell us what it's like, for instance, with Dr. Becky, like what has your kind of relationship with her been like?

For sure. Yeah. So I met Becky in December 2020, I think. So this is almost 4 years ago, which is bananas. I think she had around 80,000, 90,000 followers on Instagram. What was very clear to me though, after meeting her is there's especially, she has the juice, the engagement on her post, independent of the size of the audience was just so insanely engaged. She's extraordinarily insightful and her ability to deliver insight quickly is high. The second thing I think that still makes her very differentiated is she can record a very valuable 30-minute course in one take, looking at her phone in her daughter's bedroom. So the velocity that she can make insightful content is very, very unique. I encourage anyone to follow her. So when I first met Becky, we kind of had a hypothesis for launching asynchronous courses, just regular courses. And she was very good at handling that effectively. Me and my team managed just setting that up in a very simple platform called Thinkific. But after the commercial success for that was so obvious, after sort of huddling as a group, we recognized that there was a subscription opportunity. There was an opportunity for parents to pay something monthly, quarterly, annually, and we launched something called the Good Inside membership. And what differentiates that from just kind of a course is that there's a couple things. The first is that we segment content based on how much time a parent has. So if you have 30 seconds, if you have 10 minutes, or if you have a week-long sort of desire to sleep train your kid, there's content that's going to meet you where you're at in terms of how much time you have and situationally where you might be in your life. There's a community where parents can interact with each other. They can interact by region, they can interact by sort of age of their child. A lot of parents are really lonely. I think the notion of like postpartum is exaggerated in the internet era. And so having a digital place where parents can meet is I, I think valuable. And there's just so much new content. She's constantly creating new content that helps parents navigate topical issues. Of the day, whatever that might be, whether it's a Palestine-Israel thing, et cetera. So anyways, we launched that 3 years ago from zero. It's now north of 50,000 customers. They have parents, I think, in every, almost every country in the world. She launched a bestselling book during that from like kind of, I don't think there was a business when we started. They have around 30, 40, maybe even close to 50 employees now. It's just been an enormous creator success that I don't think a lot of people are aware of. Mm-hmm. And it's been like, I used to work in the venture capital space. It's been like a venture success story. Anyways, it's been just, it's honestly been delightful to watch them be, you know, be a small, small part.

That's amazing. Congrats on the success there. And so I think what basically what I'm hearing your kind of roadmap is, is find a knowledge-based creator that has a super engaged audience. I mean, 80,000 followers, nothing to sneeze at, but not huge when you first started working with her and not some massive creator with tens of millions of followers getting hundreds of thousands or millions of views on videos or posts and seeing someone that is interested in the subject matter whose audience is interested in them talking about the subject matter. Testing it out with some type of course, and then it's off to the races from there. For sure.

And so there, there's an additional variable that I'll talk through, and Ryan Serhant's a good example of this. Like if you meet Ryan, for, for those folks that are not aware, he just, he actually just had a Netflix show come out called Owning Manhattan. What's unique about Ryan and is important for us to work with these folks, so sometimes we'll make investments in these businesses, we'll do royalties. Mm-hmm. And what tips this over for us, what gives us conviction to work with someone is like, yeah, will they run through a wall to make this a real business? You know? And Ryan will tell you like Ryan runs through walls. I think he just had a, like he just, He just tweeted out his like daily schedule. It's like from like 4:00 AM till 9:00 PM. He's like doing shit all the time. Yeah. Listen, these folks are niche, but he cares about making that as big of a business as he can. That's, that's another thing that I think is almost a prerequisite for us to be a really valuable partner. It's still starting a business. Businesses are hard regardless of what kind of business it is.

Totally. And the benefit with these creators is that you get the marketing for free. Exactly. Yeah. Tonner, we could talk about this all day. I really love hearing from you and what you're doing with creators. Want to talk to you more as you work with more creators and launch more cool things with more cool creators. Really appreciate you coming on the podcast. Where can people find you? Uh, I'm not super active on social.

That might be changing sometime in the near future, but I'm at @tonner on Twitter. I got a tight handle, first name handle. Tonner@course.studio. Definitely happy to interact on email. Um, but yeah, those are, those are probably the two best places. Awesome.

Well, thank you so much. Really appreciate you coming on. Thanks, John. So some quick uploads, downloads from me this week. Upload, I think increasing the Overton window about what's acceptable in public sexual discourse. I love that for us. Love that for Tim Dickerson and DRS Marlowe's future. Also Hailey Welch's. Usually I don't like those late kind of person on the street interviews with drunk individuals because they seem exploitative. I still feel kind of a certain way about it, but maybe this will have some positive benefits for society at large. And then quick download. So Night, the media company founded by Reed Duscher, who was formerly MrBeast's manager, has parted ways with Night Studios leadership. That Night Studios leadership team was led by Alex Piper and its VP of development, Jared Jacobs. Alex was a longtime development exec over at Fox before he joined YouTube on its Originals team, working on a bunch of the Originals over there. After YouTube basically shut that team down, he went over to Night Studios to create a, quote, multiplatform, multigenre independent content studio, end quote, that would partner with established digital talent to use their IP as a proof of concept and launching pad for premium ideas. Basically take all of this premium online talent that Knight had, develop new potential ideas with them that then Alex and company could shop around to the Amazons, Netflix, Hulus, and more of the world to get a different take or more premium version of these people's products onto more traditional streaming platforms. That idea didn't take off how anyone expected. Reed wrote on a post on LinkedIn, in 2022, we started the production studio with the goal of helping creators develop premium content for streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon. However, after a couple years, it has not materialized as we had hoped, despite our best efforts. Therefore, we are making some changes to the team and direction. Reed said there's a couple learnings from this experience. One is, beside the MrBeast and Amazon project, streamers are still getting their heads around the power of creators to tell stories and move audiences. And also, most top creators no longer view premium distribution deals as the ultimate goal. I feel like this hasn't been the case for a while. Well, we agree. We also see a powerful opportunity to extend brands and open new revenue streams on platforms beyond YouTube, TikTok, etc. So Reed is now going to lead the Night Studios team. He seems to be cautiously bullish and optimistic about bringing these creators from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc. onto these other platforms. We'll see how that goes. It's a really good idea in theory. I think it's going to take a lot more in order for it to happen in any meaningful capacity. Jimmy Donaldson has his $100 million Amazon deal. That's in a league of its own. I don't think should be indicative of what creators are going to do in the near future, if at all. I think what needs to happen is development execs at these different networks and platforms really have to age out, and the younger kids who grew up with these creators and really love and appreciate and respect them and realize the audiences that they can draw in, need to get into positions of power in order to greenlight some of these deals, or the rapid decline of television viewership needs to just continue to happen at its own pace. And maybe the development execs in positions of power at these places will come hip to the idea that they gotta try something else. That's it for Creator Upload this week. I think we did it. Thank you again to Tonner Jackson. Go check him out at course.studio. Really interesting. Beautiful work that they do over there. If you're a knowledge-based creator looking to expand your business in a meaningful capacity, definitely get in touch with Tonner and see what the possibilities are. Assuming there's nothing big on Broadway next week, we'll be back with Lauren Schnipper. We'll see you then on Creator Upload. Today's show was produced by Lauren Schnipper, Joshua Cohen— hey, that's me— and Adam Connor. It's edited by Jason Kang, and original music is by London Bridge. Check him out on Instagram at London Bridge Music. Make sure you subscribe to Creator Upload wherever you listen to podcasts. While you're there, give us a rating, leave us a comment, hit us up at info@creatorupload.com. We love hearing from you. It's my favorite thing to read the emails. If you like our show, please recommend it to a friend. If you love it, just recommend it to everybody. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.