It’s Monday, and AI content creators have a new target audience: unconscious people. “Videos to sleep to” is a growing niche, populated largely by ASMR, soundscapes, white noise, and low-key Let’s Plays.

MOVERS & SHAKERS

The labs: Months before Manchester City striker Erling Haaland went megaviral during the 2026 World Cup, WME brought him into its Creator Labs to help launch his YouTube channel and monetize it with brand sponsorships.

Haven’t heard of Creator Labs? That’s because WME has just unveiled it.

Per The Hollywood Reporter, this new arm of WME’s Digital Division will handle virtually every aspect of social channel launches and management for clients. WME says it participates in the very early ideation phase for a channel, and once the channel is live, it offers production services, video posting, and syndicated distribution, plus the aforementioned sponsorship-securing.

The context: WME wants to take rising stars on its roster of celebrities and establish them as YouTube successes, without making those clients build their own full-fledged digital media companies. The venture will be as low-lift as possible for clients who don’t want YouTube to be their careers, but still want to have a presence online.

Having Haaland as proof-in-the-pudding is an impressive start for Creator Labs, and we won’t be surprised if sports is one of the division’s main focuses, considering WME represents hundreds of athletes in major sports leagues and disciplines.

And, since YouTube is hungry for sports rights, if WME can repeat what it did with Haaland and tie its athletes’ channels to YouTube’s digital-aired games and tournaments, it just might ride at the top of the ever-swelling social sports wave.

THE BIZ

The investments: According to cofounder Sam Lessin, Slow Ventures is “past the moment of mass-market creators, like Beast Industries.” Instead, the exec told Adweek that “what we invest in are cults.”

Slow Ventures added that, over the past year, it’s backed Gen Z career advice giver Erin McGoff, textile manufacturing expert Will Lasry, and commercial fisherman Kyle Lee, all of whom have strong social media presences, but don’t view online stardom as the end goal.

McGoff got $1.5 million, Lasry got $2.5 million, and Slow Ventures said Lee’s total was between $1 million and $3 million.

The cash came from the company’s $64 million fund, announced in February 2025 with the explicit purpose of financially supporting “creators with ambitions to build companies tailor-made for their passionate communities.” Slow Ventures has also used the fund to back Diary of a CEO creator Steven Bartlett, physiotherapist Tayla Cannon, woodworker Jonathan Katz-Moses, and car channel VINwiki.

The firm plans to dispatch the rest of its $64 million over the next two to three years.

The strategy: To Adweek, Slow Ventures Partner Megan Lightcap explained that the firm’s investment MO is to put money into a creator’s holding company rather than a specific product. Its stake is generally below 15 or 20%, she said, and only in the creator’s owned portion. Slow Ventures also doesn’t take revenue shares, Lightcap said.

That structure helps encourage other companies to continue investing in Slow Ventures’ creators, since they’ll get their full portion of any signed deal.

As for how the firm chooses creators, Lessin described McGoff, Lasry, and Lee as central “nodes” in their niches that treat gathering digital audiences as “a means to a broader commercial end, rather than the end itself,” Adweek writes.

CREATOR TOOLKIT

The expansion: In 2023, Photoshop developer Adobe jumped into generative AI with its launch of Firefly. Since then, Firefly has evolved into an all-in-one creative AI studio, where users can create, edit, and enhance images, video, and audio with professional tools and AI models from Adobe, Google, OpenAI, Runway, Kling AI, Luma AI, and more.

Now, Adobe is pushing Firefly’s sound capabilities further.

A new suite of audio tools gives users access to music, voiceovers, and sound effects—all of which are “commercially safe” (per Adobe). That last bit is important, because video creators face frequent issues with music licensing, and often rely on royalty-free tracks to ensure their videos won’t be copyright claimed.

Among Firefly’s expanded capabilities are…

Creators have already explored Firefly’s new capabilities. Fashion, beauty, and lifestyle influencer Esther Rehema, for instance, says “being able to find music that is safe for commercial use and fits my content is such a game changer.”

The AI Assistant: Along with adding audio capabilities, Adobe is rolling out free access to Firefly AI Assistant, a text prompt-based agent that it says acts as a creative partner walking users through their projects.

Adobe introduced AI Assistant earlier this year, and says to date, two of its most popular tools are Create Storyboard and Create Brand Kit.

The free version of Firefly AI Assistant allows a limited number of daily generations. Upgrading to a subscription with 2,000+ generative credits/month starts at $9.99/mo.

FYI: Adobe is a Tubefilter partner.

CREATOR UPLOAD 🎙️

The episode: On the latest installment of Creator Upload, hosts Josh Cohen and Lauren Schnipper recap their trip to Dallas for VidSummit—and the show’s first proper live event.

Afterward, the duo dives into Live Nation’s backing of Creator Nation and why the Oscars’ pivot to YouTube represents a massive shift for the future of global television.

Tune into the episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify for a full breakdown.

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