TOGETHER WITH

It’s Friday and TikTok is amping up its comment section with voice notes and polls. Will rivals like YouTube follow its lead?

FOND FAREWELL

The farewell: After 12 years and more than 100 episodes, Amelia Dimoldenberg’s signature series is coming to an end. On Instagram, the 32-year-old Brit announced that an upcoming run of interviews will serve as the swan song for Chicken Shop Date.

With her viral column-turned-web series, Dimoldenberg transformed herself into a household name. She paired her flirty, deadpan interview style with high-profile guests like Andrew Garfield, Sabrina Carpenter, and even fellow fried chicken interviewer Sean Evans.

That format certainly hasn’t outlived its popularity. Chicken Shop Date was, after all, one of the shows YouTube hyped as part of a 2024 For Your Consideration push.

But Dimoldenberg is ready for a change. Her farewell post shows a chicken shop napkin, on which she wrote that “all good dates must come to an end.”

The future: Dimoldenberg’s next moves are hardly a mystery. She’s already put her interviewing skills to use on the Golden Globes red carpet and in the passenger’s seat of F1 vehicles, while her production company Dimz Inc. has ventured deeper into the creator economy. At the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, Adobe announced a creative skills program launched in tandem with Dimz Inc.

Dimoldenberg also harbors Hollywood ambitions. Four years after signing a representation deal with CAA, the creator has revealed that she is working on a scripted series for the BBC, which she described as “my version of Skins.”

MIPCOM Cannes 2026 is just one month away. From October 12–15, 10,600+ participants from 100+ countries will unite on the French Riviera to discover content, forge new partnerships, explore emerging technologies, and turn fresh ideas into IP.

3,300+ buyers are set to attend the entertainment industry’s #1 global marketplace, including ABC, Hulu, Al Jazeera, Amazon Prime Video, AMC Networks, Apple, Sky, ITV, Netflix, Paramount, RTL, Tencent Video, TF1, The Walt Disney Company, TV Azteca, Warner Bros. Discovery, Wowow, and ZDF.

This year, the creator economy will be at the center of it all.

Ready to put your business at the heart of the global entertainment industry?

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

CREATOR CASH

The impact: Roblox’s latest creator earnings stats are out, and they’re the platform’s biggest numbers yet.

In 2025, the platform paid out a total of $1.5 billion to game developers and makers of things like purchasable avatar accessories. That’s a significant jump from the $923 million it paid out in 2024.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is that U.S.-based creators are still making the lion’s share of revenue. Americans gobbled up $673 million of 2025’s total creator earnings, and the Roblox ecosystem supported the equivalent of 7,525 full-time jobs in the States (plus “nearly 12,000” globally).

What’s especially interesting is that 66% of Roblox’s U.S. creator payouts went to people living in “areas where the concentration of tech workers was lower than the national average,” the platform said.

The future: Roblox has seen significant growth in creator earnings over the last decade. From 2017 to 2025, the company generated a cumulative estimated GDP impact of $2.37 billion in the U.S. alone, it said.

Roblox clearly expects that its footprint—and creators’ moneymaking potential—will continue to swell. It’s investing in more developer tools like vibe coder Build, and is also running creator programs to keep sourcing and supporting fresh gamemakers.

All that being said, Roblox’s progress may be hindered by intense scrutiny from U.S. regulators and a growing crowd of child safety lawsuits. One recent suit was filed by the parents of a 13-year-old who committed suicide after allegedly being exposed to “harmful and violent influences” on Roblox. The platform moved for their suit to be dismissed, claiming the child (who signed up for an account when she was just eight years old) waived her right to legal action by agreeing to its TOS.

SKIBIDI RIZZ

The team: The company that owns the Skibidi Toilet IP has delivered an important update. As Invisible Narratives prepares a film adaptation of the franchise, it has announced a new creative team that will be responsible for future episodes of the mainline Skibidi series—and the roster is filled with longtime community members.

Virlance, the creator behind a popular Skibidi fan channel, will serve as showrunner, while 18-year-old Achi will shepherd lore as the franchise’s Lead Story Editor. FScript will bring his knowledge of the 3D engine Source to the project, and Strider (who was credited as the co-creator of Skibidi Toilet Episode 80) will take the lead on animation and sound design.

The context: Three years ago, Skibidi Toilet became the biggest thing on YouTube. For a time in 2023, DaFuq!?Boom! (the onetime YouTube home of Skibidi creator Alexey “Boom” Gerasimov), posted viewership numbers that have rarely been seen since.

Invisible Narratives, which turns viral fads into Hollywood franchises and counts Michael Bay among its creative advisors, moved quickly to capitalize on the Skibidi craze. After putting out a toy line inspired by the series, Invisible Narratives turned its attention to the big screen—but a rash of drama threatened to take the wind out of Skibidi’s sails.

The pace of new episodes on the official Skibidi YouTube channel had slowed to a crawl, and concerned fans were calling for a return to the old days, petitioning on social media to #BringBoomBack.

In response, Invisible Narratives discussed Boom’s decision to “step back” into an executive producer role. A year later, the studio still doesn’t have any firm plans to #BringBoomBack—but by onboarding key members of the Skibidi community, it’s doing the next best thing.

WATCH THIS 👀

The show: UTA Co-Founder Jeremy Zimmer has found himself without a full-time job for the first time in decades—so, he’s trying something new. At age 68, the Hollywood vet has launched a call-in talk show on Twitch.

877unmplyd comes from Zimmer, co-host Rachel Braun, and Adam Faze (the founder of digital studio Gymnasium). The show’s title corresponds to a phone number that viewers can call if they have career questions for Zimmer. Alongside Braun, the UTA vet is dispensing advice for the unemployed, drawing from his own career in the process.

Check out this clip for a taste of that hard-won industry wisdom.

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