TOGETHER WITH

It’s Friday, and Best Buy is bringing the tech to TikTok Shop—nearly 10,000 products worth of it.

MACRO MICRO

The serialization: At its latest Made on YouTube event, Google’s video platform revealed microdrama views on TV screens increased by over 90% year-over-year during the first half of 2026. Then it unveiled “Shorts Series”—a feature that lets creators organize their Shorts into TV-style seasons for maximum bingeability.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because YouTube introduced something similar for long-form content (aka Shows) back in August 2025.

Both Shows and Shorts Series are engineered to keep viewers hooked—and with microdramas, that task is even easier. Viewers are asked to tune in for clips that are only a couple minutes and set to autoplay, making it very easy to say “just one more.” Plus, microdramas often sprawl across many episodes, adding a lot of TV watch hours to YouTube’s wallet.

The context: On a broader industry scale, Digiday reports that advertisers are looking at microdramas as a method of “capturing shopper attention in a fragmented digital ecosystem.”

Geneva Wasserman (EVP and Head of Entertainment, IP Strategy, and Financing at dentsu) told Digiday that a microseries getting 200,000 views and driving $2 million in earned media is considered higher value than a series that gets 500,000 views but no chatter.

But make no mistake; ads run against microdramas are getting views. Microdrama apps are running more ads than apps in any other category, and some brands are even going beyond placements to produce their own shows. Bob’s Discount Furniture, for instance, said its branded microseries Till Decor Do Us Part pushed nearly $9 million in attributable sales.

It’s clear both platforms and brands are focusing in on serialized short-form, hoping it will drive the most important metric of all in our current culture economy—a few precious seconds of undivided attention.

MIPCOM Cannes 2026 is just weeks away. From October 12–15, the world's largest media market will bring studios, platforms, distributors, creators, brands, and technology companies from 100+ countries to the French Riviera.

MIPCOM Cannes is where deals are made, partnerships take shape, and new content reaches global audiences.

This year, Dhar Mann will take center stage as MIPCOM Cannes’ first-ever pre-opening Headliner.

Reaching over 170M followers and nearly 300M views every week, Dhar Mann has built one of the world’s largest creator-led businesses. Named Forbes’ #2 Top Creator for three years running, a Rolling Stone Top Creator 2026, and a member of TIME100’s inaugural Creators list, Mann has built large-scale partnerships with brands including Adobe, the NFL, Microsoft, and Gap Inc.

The Walt Disney Company recently announced a new original content deal with Mann, and Dhar Mann Studios is also partnering with FOX Entertainment on a landmark multi-year global content and distribution deal.

At MIPCOM Cannes, Mann will unveil the keys to that success in a special session featuring Dhar Mann Studios CEO Sean Atkins. Will you be in the room where it happens? 

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

CREATOR COMMOTION

The deal: Sam and Colby are bringing Hell Week to Netflix in 2026.

The paranormal investigators (aka Sam Golbach and Colby Brock) are regarded as YouTube’s premier explorers of spooky locales. The culmination of their investigations comes during Hell Week, an annual October tradition encompassing multiple feature-length documentaries—many of which attract tens of millions of YouTube views.

The success of Hell Week has led to a steady expansion of the project. Original content was part of the equation by 2019, and in 2022, Sam and Colby released seven documentaries in 14 days. A year later, Cinemark showed up as a theatrical partner for Hell Week. A successful series of movie screenings led to an extended run in 2024, when approximately 350 theaters welcomed Sam and Colby fans.

Fast forward to 2026, and the duo’s Netflix presence will include “a collection of their spooky episodes” set to drop at the start of October.

The context: Netflix has signed a slew of creator deals in recent months, but those agreements don’t usually involve exclusivity. That’s the case here as well; in an Instagram post, Sam and Colby reassured fans that they can “still watch wherever you have been but NOW we get to post to Netflix too.”

Even if Sam and Colby continue posting on YouTube, however, the duo’s deal with Netflix shows that the bidding war for creator content is still in full swing. Despite YouTube’s efforts to dissuade creators from partnering with Netflix by offering them seven-digit compensation packages, the streaming service recently added YouTube favorites like The Besties and ChuChu TV to its lineup.

Now, Sam and Colby are the latest creators who will share their videos across YouTube and Netflix.

TECH TIME

The wearables: Meta’s upcoming VR Glasses will come with a plethora of entertainment and sports apps—and a $1,300 price tag.

Prime Video, YouTube, Peacock, HBO Max, Paramount+, DIRECTV, AMC+, Crunchyroll, Plex, and Tubi will all be available to watch on Meta VR Glasses when they debut next spring. The device will also carry a competitive lineup of sports channels, including NBA, MLB, ESPN, NBC Sports, TNT Sports, and UFC.

The Meta VR Glasses borrow details from several major players in the wearables space. After partnering with Ray-Ban parent company EssilorLuxottica SA for its smart glasses line, Meta learned how to design fashionable wearables, and it is bringing that aesthetic sense to its upcoming product. A sleek look and deep content lineup will allow the Meta VR Glasses to keep pace with the Apple Vision Pro line, and the presence of a detached “puck”—which allows the glasses themselves to be lighter—may be inspired by ByteDance’s Pico line.

The competition: By offering an enticing alternative to other VR headsets, Meta will (theoretically) be able to justify its hefty price tag. The true competitor for the Meta VR Glasses, however, might be a free video game published in 2006. Roblox is the primary vehicle through which consumers experience the metaverse, whether they realize it or not.

If Meta aims to rival Roblox in the realm of immersive entertainment, it’ll need to offer wearers more than a collection of third-party apps. In theory, the tech giant’s partnership with James Cameron will eventually supply its wearables division with the original content it needs to build substantial hype and demand.

And in the meantime, consumers can get an early look at Meta’s upcoming product.

WATCH THIS 👀

The doc: An upcoming documentary about Elon Musk has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes—and a run time of nearly four hours. A trailer for the Alex Gibney-directed film (which is succinctly titled Musk) dropped on YouTube this week, and blurbs featured in that teaser hint at a gripping watch.

The Hollywood Reporter compared the film to “a conspiracy thriller,” while The Playlist dubbed it “an enrapturing evisceration.” Musk himself, meanwhile, has declared the doc “a hit piece.”

Check out Musk in theaters this October to decide for yourself.

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Today's newsletter is from: Emily Burton, Drew Baldwin, Sam Gutelle, and Josh Cohen.