It’s Thursday and Neon is launching an unorthodox campaign to promote its new film. Volunteer to watch It Ends for 36 hours straight and you could end up with $500—or more.

MONEY MOVES

The investment: Unwell, the media company founded by Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper and her husband Matt Kaplan, has achieved a valuation of $500 million after receiving a strategic investment from WTSL.

Cooper made a splash in 2023 when she established The Unwell Network to build multimedia franchises around big-name creators. The 2025 launch of the Unwell Creative Agency leveraged Cooper’s deep understanding of the podcast industry, while shows like the Unwell Winter Games demonstrated her affinity for Gen Z culture.

Now, Unwell is gaining even more momentum. While WTSL (which is led by Patrick Whitesell) did not disclose the exact size of its investment, the half-billion-dollar valuation represents a significant uptick for Cooper’s net worth. Back in 2024, SiriusXM dropped $125 million on a deal that included exclusive content.

The context: Unwell’s growth can’t be denied, but that doesn’t mean it’s always been smooth sailing. Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported on the high amount of turnover at the company and described its offerings as a “sputtering slate of shows.”

Cooper herself is a big draw with a strong built-in audience (just ask NBC), but she still has a ways to go to prove that her acumen can be applied to other people’s programs. The investment from WTSL will help her—and Unwell—accomplish that goal. 

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

AI WAVE

The scraping: Twitch is officially scraping creator content to train Amazon‘s LLMs.

As of August 12, the platform auto-enrolls all channels to have their content scraped for training. To revoke that consent, creators have to go into their settings and use a toggle to opt out.

So, why did Twitch decide to make scraping opt-out instead of opt-in? CPO Mike Minton said the quiet part out loud during Twitch’s latest Patch Notes stream.

That “jaw-dropping” explanation garnered a visible wince from the exec’s stream cohost, Twitch Head of Community Mary Kish, but Minton appeared unfazed. He went on to defend Amazon’s decision by arguing that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have already scraped the entire internet to train their models.

Minton also gave vague answers to chatters’ concerns over whether Amazon might have previously scraped streamers’ content without telling anyone. “Twitch has not been training models,” he said. “I can’t speak to what Amazon is training or not training as it relates to any specific usage of content.”

The backlash: Kish, for her part, attempted damage control in the stream’s chat, where she assured commenters that “the opt out numbers will help us continue to reiterate that our community is not receptive of AI in any form. I’m sorry but I am reading your comments and do hear you.”

Backlash against Twitch’s AI training policy, however, extends beyond the Patch Notes chat. The current top post in the Feature Requests section of Twitch’s User Voice forum asks the platform to make scraping opt-in. As Aftermath first noted, that post has more than 13,000 upvotes and thousands of supportive comments, compared to ~250 votes for other high-traffic suggestions.

META MINDS

The rollout: After soft-launching its reimagined Creator Studio app earlier in the summer, Facebook is giving that dashboard a full rollout.

Creator Studio is separate from the Facebook platform and delivers AI-powered insights and engagement stats, which creators can synthesize as they plan forthcoming posts and optimize their media strategies.

The hub shares its name with the Creator Studio that Facebook launched in 2020 and sunsetted three years later. Unlike that suite, which arrived before the contemporary AI boom, the new Creator Studio includes an AI assistant designed to suss out trending strategies and topics.

The first version of the relaunched app arrived in June, when Meta partnered with a group of Facebook creators to test its technology. A recent update reveals the results of that initial experiment. Food and wellness creator Mymanabites, for instance, said she gained 4,000 followers from a single post after using a format recommended by Creator Studio, while family creator Michael Tushouse claimed to more than double his earnings after following Creator Studio’s advice.

The context: Those early users may love the new product, but the rest of Meta’s creator community could take some convincing. Mark Zuckerberg’s indulgent essay on artificial intelligence, titled “The Future Is For Everyone,” has been savaged by AI skeptics. The Verge called Zuck’s vision “an AI future of sleek, streamlined, and totally empty relationships.”

Meta is hoping that it can change prevailing narratives by making AI work better. Now, we’ll find out how the general public feels about the ballyhooed relaunch.

WATCH THIS 👀

The AI policy: In a recent apology post, Hank Green admitted that he’d been using LLMs to a degree that “is not healthy for me or good for the world.”

The creator ultimately decided to pause production on his personal channel, since part of the reason for his AI usage was the feeling that he needs to be “doing more and more and more and more.” That hiatus is still ongoing, but Green has since revealed his new personal AI policy in a video posted to the vlogbrothers channel.

That policy boils down to a few key rules, including…

What we’re wondering now is whether more creators will adhere to the same kind of transparency. At the highest level, people who advise YouTubers are telling them to implement AI into their workflows. But unless a creator is sponsored by an AI company, they probably aren’t disclosing their AI usage.

As AI-powered workflows become more common, is it time for creators to begin cluing viewers into how and when they use artificial intelligence?

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