It’s Thursday and Excel content creators are wowing fans with their spreadsheet speedrunning skills. Are you proficient enough to keep up?

HEATED RIVALRY

The counterattack: After over a year of Netflix treating YouTube like its own personal “farm league” and poaching top creators, the biggest video platform in the world is fighting back.

Per Bloomberg, YouTube is offering millions of dollars to top creators if they agree to upload their videos exclusively to its site—a move it hopes will convince high-view-volume creators to turn their noses up at Netflix.

In some cases, YouTube is promising creators guaranteed portions of revenue from major platform-wide brand deals it brokers. In other cases, it’s offered to personally finance their productions—a very interesting proposal considering that YouTube bowed out of original, house-funded programming years ago.

Sources familiar with the matter said YouTube is also retaliating against creators who have signed deals with Netflix by excluding them from marketing campaigns and events, and denying them a share of proceeds from the aforementioned platform brand deals.

YouTube has reportedly told creators that taking Netflix deals and cross-posting content “conveys the idea that channels are deprioritizing [YouTube] as their primary outlet” (per Bloomberg).

The Netflix deals: Some YouTubers have already elected not to work with Netflix. Unlike YouTube, where creators are in control of their own publication schedules and can hit ‘upload’ the second they finish a video, Netflix wants creators to deliver finished videos in advance, and asks them to remove some brand sponsorships.

There’s also the fact that some of the streaming service’s podcast deals, like those with Barstool Sports and The Ringer (and probably its $100 million deal with Jay Shetty), contain a clause that limits the number of show clips creators can post on YouTube.

As those deals demonstrate, however, some top creators are teaming up with Netflix. The streaming service is increasingly getting involved on the production side of new content, including through the development of original series with Salish Matter and Alan Chikin Chow.

POLL 📝

Once more for the readers in the back: if you haven’t filled out this poll yet, we’d love to hear from you. (And apologies if you’ve already seen it!)

MONEY MOVES

The rumors: What if you could buy something on TikTok Shop and pay for it without relying on any third-party services? TikTok might be making that fantasy into a reality.

Bloomberg has reported that TikTok is planning to support direct payments through its TikTok Pay service. The report cites “code hidden in the current version of TikTok’s US iPhone app,” which alludes to a “tap to accept” feature that would be incorporated into TikTok’s DMs.

A TikTok spokesperson told Bloomberg that a feature of that nature is not currently being tested, so if TikTok is working on direct payments, then development is still in the early stages. TikTok Pay, which would power the rumored feature, is currently available in Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand.

The context: The continued growth of TikTok Shop (which is expected to generate more than $100 billion of GMV during the 2026 calendar year) gives TikTok a good reason to develop new financial services. Expanding TikTok Pay internationally would give TikTok more control over transactions routed through its ecommerce hub—not to mention the ability to realize other aspirations related to financial services.

TikTok already applied for two interesting licenses earlier this year. One, a “direct credit company” license, would ostensibly turn the platform into a virtual bank. The other would allow TikTok to operate as an “electronic money issuer,” similar to services like Venmo.

The rumored direct payment feature could very well be linked to that second license, since the referenced code includes an allusion to comments that could be appended to individual transactions.

MOVIE BIZ

The horror film: After chatting with Markiplier in January about his self-financed box office horror hit Iron Lung, our team hoped more and more YouTubers would begin using their cash (and cachet) to bring passion projects to life. Now, that’s exactly what’s happening.

YouTubers Jacksepticeye (aka Seán McLoughlin) and Alanah Pearce are on the team for Godmother, an indie horror film that follows a woman whose romantic getaway takes a Rosemary’s Baby turn.

Pearce, a YouTuber, video game writer, and journalist, co-wrote the film with its creator and director John Veron. Veron started working on Godmother after realizing the horror potential baked into the very concept of Airbnb (what if your hosts were a little too invested in your love life?).

After Veron and Pearce faced creative pushback from interested studios, McLoughlin joined the project as executive producer and ended up personally financing the entirety of principal photography. Another of Pearce’s pals, prolific film producer Mali Elfman, also joined alongside her longtime partner Helmstreet Productions. Helmstreet financed post-production.

Godmother is set to begin a festival circuit soon, and (we’re guessing) will release later this year.

The context: Pearce told TheWrap she noticed Hollywood’s increased interest in creator horror projects following the releases of Iron Lung, Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, and Curry Barker’s Obsession, and foresees “a huge, overwhelming wave of content-creator-led features funded by Hollywood over the next couple of years.”

She said she’s glad that Godmother will come out ahead of that wave, “not only because it’s easier to stand out, but also because I fear quality will drop.”

McLoughlin, meanwhile, said he’s “had a lot of projects floated my way recently” and that our industry is in “an exciting time.” The YouTube vet is also set to produce an upcoming animated Sony Pictures film based on his favorite game of all time, Bloodborne.

WATCH THIS 👀

The partnership: As DiVine makes its public debut, Taco Bell is helping fans of the app’s predecessor immerse themselves in 2016 nostalgia.

DiVine, which is backed by former Twitter chief Jack Dorsey and offers an archive of Vine videos, is now open to all—and Taco Bell has come on board as its first official brand partner. The fast food chain is launching a Decades menu filled with discontinued items from 2016, so teaming up with the hottest social media app of the mid-2010s seems like a solid strategy.

Maybe we’re easy targets, but this six-second video is all it took for us to start craving a Beefy Crunch Burrito and Caramel Apple Empanada.

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