A flurry of mini-IPOs could be on the horizon for the creator economy.
Gigastar has launched Gigastar Trading, an SEC-registered secondary trading platform that allows investors to buy and sell digital creator securities. It builds off of Gigastar’s primary investment platform for creator businesses and operates similarly to major capital markets like Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange.
The launch comes as more people are trying to figure out how to participate financially in the creator economy. That includes everyone from institutional to retail, or non-professional, investors.
“We are making the creator economy an investable asset class,” Scott Kitun, chief strategy officer at Gigastar, told us.
The trading platform also starts to provide a way for founders and potential investors to better understand the value of a creator business at a time when more creators are seeking outside capital or planning an exit. Previous valuations for creator companies, including Beast Industries, Alex Cooper’s Unwell and Steven Bartlett’s Steven.com, have come from private investors.
“On [the platform], you have a trading value. You can substantiate how much money your enterprise is worth,” Kitun said.
But there’s a catch.
Gigastar allows investors to purchase so-called “channel revenue tokens,” or CRTs, that represent a percentage of a participating creator’s future revenue from YouTube’s ad revenue sharing program, Adsense. After a 12-month waiting period, investors can list their assets on the secondary platform and anyone can buy them.
But most big creators have multiple lines of revenue beyond YouTube’s Adsense, such as brand deals, subscriptions, merchandise and licensing agreements. For many, these make up a sizable chunk of their income, meaning that the total value of their businesses isn’t represented.
The problem for Gigastar—and anyone else who wants to value a creator company—is that these revenue streams can be murky. “As a platform or investor, I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m asking what was net revenue vs. gross,” Kitun explained.
Meanwhile, Gigastar is connected to YouTube’s API and allows investors to see metrics from views to distributions. “There's no subjectivity, there's no discrepancies, there's no argument,” Kitun said.
Zooming out, this isn’t the first attempt at creating a capital market for creators. But it’s still early days and most others have been focused on things like crypto and memecoins.
“It's not as sexy, and the numbers aren’t as massive,” Kitun said, comparing Gigastar’s approach to some of those previous attempts. “But it's the first step to making this legitimate and something that Wall Street and real institutional investors take seriously.”
The company said it is starting with a group of 19 creator businesses and expects to add three more soon. Early creators include Brian Kim of ClearValue Tax, which has nearly 3 million YouTube subscribers, and gaming-focused channel Craftee, which has over 5 million YouTube subscribers.
Since July, Gigastar Trading has gained over 1,000 investor accounts and cleared over $100,000 in trading volume.
Looking ahead, Kitun told us he’d ultimately like to extend trading to other revenue streams, such as brand deals, especially now as more are being sold programmatically. He added that he’s also in conversations with other platforms beyond YouTube.
For Gigastar, launching a secondary market was always part of the plan. But for most creators, it’s a relatively new concept and one that only the top echelon have likely explored.
Still, Kitun has big ambitions: “There’s no reason this doesn’t become the NASDAQ for creators,” he said.
🎥 Creator Mov(i)es
Creators Mark Vins and Ziwe will each screen content at the Toronto International Film Festival as part of the inaugural Creator Festival hosted by YouTube and Variety. Both shows will move exclusively to YouTube later this year.
Vins, who hosts the show Brave Wilderness and has roughly 729,000 subscribers on his own YouTube channel, will premiere a feature-length documentary “Reef to Ridge.” Ziwe, who has 624,000 YouTube subscribers, will debut two new episodes of her series “You’d Be an Iconic Guest.” Giving creators a red carpet premiere is a clever way for YouTube to get more exclusive content.
Andrew Rea, who produces food content on the YouTube channel Binging with Babish, will debut his first short film starring actors Liza Koshy and Dean Winters. The movie is being submitted to film festivals ahead of a YouTube release, per Variety.
Mark Fischbach, better known as Markiplier, is now the largest shareholder in GoPro after acquiring an 8.5% stake in the camera company, per Bloomberg. What’s Markiplier doing investing in GoPro? He said he thinks the company is undervalued and wants it to succeed.
Markiplier, who self-funded and distributed a feature-length horror film “Iron Lung”earlier this year, also seems to think GoPro could make filmmaking more accessible to creators. One of the biggest barriers to entry is cost, including the price of equipment. In a YouTube video about GoPro’s new $700 camera, he called it “cinema quality” and said he would be using it “extensively.”
We go deeper into creators’ blockbuster summer at the box office, as well as the return of monoculture, in our next podcast episode, publishing Thursday.
The Round Up
Instagram is cracking down on AI influencers. The platform is changing its “AI creator” label to “AI-generated profile” to make it clearer that the account doesn’t feature a real human being. Instagram says it will stop recommending content from unlabeled profiles that are AI-generated.
The move comes as AI influencers have become more lifelike—even “attending” events like Coachella and Wimbledon—and frustrations over AI-generated content on social media have grown. Instagram says that creators who use AI only in the “creative process” won’t be affected, but we could see some accounts slipping through the cracks.
Puck, a newsletter-focused media company, is in talks for new funding from RedBird Capital Partners, which would value the company at $250 million, Reuters reported. Puck offers equity stakes to its journalists and encourages them to build their own personal followings.
Former NBA player Blake Griffin is launching a weekly late-night talk show called “The Stepback with Blake Griffin” on Prime Video and YouTube on October 20. The show is produced by Amazon’s Wondery podcast studio and network, which also produces “New Heights” from Travis and Jason Kelce.
Lone Palm Labs, the startup behind friends-focused photo-sharing app Retro, has raised over $21 million in series A funding, per Business Insider. Retro was created by two former Instagram product engineers and makes money via subscriptions, rather than ads. It seems even investors are buying into the 2016 nostalgia!
Alex Cooper’s media company Unwell will premiere “Unwell Summer Games,” a dating competition show, on YouTube on September 7. The series follows “Unwell Winter Games,” which garnered over 1 million views per each of its four episodes, likely in part due to the debate over its controversial cast. The news also comes as Hulu canceled “Love Overboard,” a dating show that Cooper executive-produced, after one season.
Read more about how Cooper is building her estimated $500 million media empire here.
By the Numbers: $30 billion
That’s how much OnlyFans has paid out to creators since the adult content platform launched in 2016, including $6.3 billion in its fiscal 2025 alone. (For context, Meta recently said it paid out $3 billion to creators in 2025.)
OnlyFans also seems to be minting millionaires: Over 5,000 creators have made more than $1 million on the platform, per the company. Still, that’s a fraction of the $709 million OnlyFans’ late owner Leonid Radvinsky received in dividends just before his death in March.
🔊Soundbite
I have a nine year old son and I am a YouTuber, so I do find myself being OK with him watching YouTube… but I want my kid to do it in a way that feels good for both of us and doesn’t create a bunch of extra conflict.
These comments from OG YouTuber Hank Green came as he launched ClockwiseTV, an app for kids aged 8-12 focused on science, technology, education, arts and mathematics (STEAM) content.
The app licenses pre-existing YouTube videos from creators, which are then shown to users without ads. To start, the app will have content from Complexly, the educational media company Green co-founded, MinutePhysics, Odd Animal Specimens and others.
Notably, parents can set time limits on kids’ usage and the app will close once the allotted time is up. ClockwiseTV is currently only available on iPads and Android tablets and costs $39.99 per month.
Just a few days earlier, Meta reached an $18 billion settlement in a lawsuit that argued that its apps were harmful to minors. As part of the settlement, Meta agreed to make changes to its apps, including a two-hour time limit for teens. Parents can override the setting.
Read more of Jasmine’s take on why this settlement shifts more of the responsibility of protecting kids onto parents—and two of Meta’s biggest rivals—in the AFP.
Talent Tracker
Pinterest’s chief financial officer Julia Donnelly, who joined in 2023, will step down in October to pursue another opportunity. Donnelly’s departure comes after a series of executive shakeups, including the departures of CRO Bill Watkins, CMO Andréa Mallard and chief content officer Malik Ducard, as well as the hiring of a new CMO and the company’s first-ever chief business officer.
Taken together, these moves raise questions about the stability of Pinterest’s business, which has shown good growth during Donnelly’s tenure despite stiff competition from larger rivals.
Spotify promoted Joe Hadley to vice president of global music content and partnerships. In the new role, he will oversee the streaming service’s music editorial and partnerships teams and work directly with artists, music publishers and labels. Hadley joined Spotify from CAA in 2022.
Deborah Turness is joining UK-based agency Independent Talent Group as president of Independent Talent Studio, a newly formed division that will build original media brands, franchises and IP. The goal is to work with the existing roster of talent and attract new creators.
Most recently, Turness was CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs. She has also served as CEO of ITN and president of NBC News and NBC News International.
Acast named Mark Bulling as its new vice president of product and promoted Ricardo Neto to managing director, US sales.
