It's Thursday and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson is in hot water after admitting that he “often” consults ChatGPT for a “second opinion” when making decisions.

Today’s News

THE SPORTS BIZ

Want to know why ESPN hired Katie Feeney? Count the views.

The new hire: Earlier this week, ESPN announced the hiring of TikTok sensation Katie Feeney. The sports consultant’s role at The Worldwide Leader in Sports will involve social media content in the “sports and lifestyle” categories, as well as contributions to series like College Gameday and Monday Night Countdown.

The deal is the latest milestone in Feeney’s rapid rise to the top of the sports broadcasting world. While studying that subject in college, the now-22-year-old began posting on TikTok and soon amassed over 7 million followers. It wasn’t long before she secured a sideline gig with the Washington Commanders and collabs with major sports leagues like the MLB.

Now, Feeney will join a growing number of ESPN contributors who cut their teeth in the world of short-form video. One of the network’s employees is Omar Raja, who parlayed his founding role in the House of Highlights brand into a sports reporting gig. 

The motivation: ESPN isn’t just onboarding creators like Feeney in order to secure a bigger bite of the short-form pie. Like YouTube—which snapped up the rights to the NFL Sunday Ticket package in December 2022—Disney-owned ESPN is set to broadcast more gridiron football than ever before. A blockbuster media deal will give the NFL a 10% stake in ESPN in exchange for coveted assets like NFL RedZone.

YouTube’s plan to advertise its own NFL package involved a lot of creator content, some of which came from Feeney. ESPN would be wise to take a similar approach to its new broadcast slate—and now, it has the creator starpower to execute that strategy.

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• French Prime Minister François Bayrou has launched a YouTube series in order to explain the reasoning behind his budget cuts. (Tubefilter)
  
  

• Instagram’s latest round of copycat tools includes a TikTok-style repost feature and an opt-in location map reminiscent of Snap Maps. (The Verge)
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• Disney CEO Bob Iger and CFO Hugh Johnston announced earlier this week that the media giant will no longer release streaming subscriber numbers. (The Verge)
  

• Google says “total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year” despite reports that AI overviews are putting a damper on traffic. (Google)

GAME ON

A new Roblox game has over 500K interested players—and it’s not even out yet

The context: It’s no secret that Roblox has become one of the top gaming platforms for Gen Z and A players, with indie developers amassing dedicated fanbases that follow them from title to title. In recent months, Roblox-focused studios like DoBig and Voldex have capitalized on that thriving ecosystem with multimillion-dollar acquisitions of promising games.

Now, yet another indie-developed Roblox game is driving hype across multiple platforms—and it hasn’t even been released yet.

The game: The upcoming game in question (aka Soccer: Zero) comes from Chrollo, who’s made top sports games Basketball: Zero and Tennis: Zero. Those titles regularly have ~30K and ~5K concurrent players, respectively. (To put that in context, major AAA game Apex Legends claims ~65K concurrent players on Steam.)

According to Ben Sarraille (who co-founded Roblox-focused influencer management/marketing company Makeshift), much of Chrollo’s success comes down to how he’s leveraged YouTube and Discord to build “a loyal, portable audience […] so he isn’t just relying on Roblox’s discovery system.”  Like other video game-related sites (including Twitch), Roblox can’t effectively promote everything that’s good to potential fans—so Chrollo has turned to other platforms to build his audience. 

The dev has accumulated ~735K subscribers on YouTube by posting livestreams and videos about his development process. Over on Discord, his server has attracted another 1.5 million members. That audience isn’t just impressive in size, either. It’s also highly engaged. The first trailer for Soccer: Zero, for instance, has scored nearly 600K YouTube views in just 12 days.

It’s rare to see this kind of hype for games that don’t have AAA marketing budgets behind them—a further sign that Roblox is shaping up to be the game industry’s equivalent of the YouTube/Hollywood relationship.

INDUSTRY HEADLINES

1 Billion Followers Summit brought 15K attendees to Dubai in 2025. What’s next?

The big event: The third annual 1 Billion Followers Summit was originally expected to bring around 5,000 attendees to the Museum of the Future in the Emirates Towers. Instead, 15,000 creators, execs, entrepreneurs, and other digital pioneers ended up gathering for the January 2025 event.

Over three days, those attendees explored 350 different sessions, panels, and workshops from 420 speakers. The summit also awarded a $1 million prize with the theme of “Content for Good” (which went to British creator and HelpBnk founder Simon Squibb) and divvied up $13.6 million among participants in a Shark Tank-esque startup competition called “1 Billion Pitches.”

Finally, the summit’s organizers unveiled Creators HQ: a creator makerspace that aims to bring 10,000 more creators to live and work in Dubai. The community’s Founding Members include top stars like Dhar Mann, Supercar Blondie, and Yes Theory, who (along with other paying members) receive community, technical, legal, and production assistance if they’re willing to relocate at least part-time to Dubai. All members also get perks like Golden Visa assistance, relocation support, and access to 300+ biz dev events per year.

Both Creators HQ and 1 Billion Followers Summit are financially supported by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister and Vice President of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, who last year announced a $40.8 million fund dedicated to promoting content creation.

The future: Organizers are currently gearing up for 1 Billion Followers Summit 2026, which will take place from Jan 9-11 at the Museum of the Future and the Dubai International Financial Centre. Headlining speakers so far include Tucker Carlson, Zach King, Jay Shetty, Airrack, Supercar Blondie, and Maye Musk.

Keep an eye on the Tubefilter website to stay updated as more details about the summit come rolling in.

FYI: 1 Billion Followers Summit is a Tubefilter partner.

WATCH THIS

20 Years of YouTube: In 2019, MatPat heralded the fall of MCNs

In February 2025, YouTube turned 20. The video site has gone through a lot over the past two decades, including an acquisition, an earnings glow-up, and multiple generations of star creators. In our 20 Years of YouTube series, we’ll examine the uploads, trends, and influencers that have defined the world’s favorite video site — one year at a time. Click here for a full archive of the series.

The fall of MCNs: In 2018, Matthew Patrick surpassed 10 million subscribers on his Game Theorists YouTube channel and celebrated the birth of his first child. But despite those milestones, MatPat described the year as “the hardest” of his life in a video posted in January 2019.

Two months earlier, Defy Media had abruptly closed its doors, leaving dozens of creators in a lurch—including MatPat. Defy had previously been one of the leading multi-channel networks on YouTube, but its deteriorating financial state ultimately led to its demise. According to a statement that accompanied its shutdown, the MCN could not survive adverse “market conditions.”

MatPat saw the situation differently. To him and many others, Defy had harvested AdSense revenue in exchange for dubious claims to enhance creator earnings—and it owed creators $1.7 million as a result.

The collapse of a company like Defy and the public disillusionment of stars like MatPat convinced many creators they couldn’t rely on middlemen. Since then, several MCNs have faded into obscurity, while others adapted to offer real value (or had been doing so all along). But the legacy of Defy’s downfall endures: a deep-rooted belief in creator independence.

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