THE SUNDAE TUESDAE ☀️
Creator marketing intelligence for brand builders
June 2, 2026

By Jeremiah Rosen, Founder & CEO, Sundae Collective

This weekend, two horror films directed by 20-something YouTubers took the #1 and #2 spots at the box office. Star Wars got pushed to third.

Kane Parsons, who is 20 years old, spent five years developing Backrooms on his YouTube channel before A24 gave him a budget. His film opened to $81.5 million — the biggest debut in A24 history. Abhijay Prakash, president of Blumhouse-Atomic Monster, described what Parsons had built before a single studio dollar was spent: "A billion test screenings."

That phrase landed for me. Because it's exactly what every creator already knows, and what most brands are still learning.

The traditional entertainment model works like this: you develop a concept in a room, run it through a series of internal filters, test it against a focus group that may or may not resemble your eventual audience, and then spend $200 million finding out if you were right. Sometimes it works. Sometimes you get pushed to third place by a kid who made his movie on the internet.

The creator model works differently. You make something, publish it, read the response, make it again. Over months and years you develop a precise, almost intimate understanding of what a specific group of people care about, what makes them laugh, what makes them share, what makes them come back. By the time a creator is ready to do the big thing, they've already done thousands of small versions of it. The audience didn't just watch — they participated in the development.

This is why creator marketing works when it's done right. When a brand partners with the right creator, they're not buying distribution. They're buying access to years of audience research that no agency could replicate on brief. The creator already knows what the audience will love, what they'll reject, and how they'll respond when the product shows up in the content. That knowledge doesn't transfer to a media buy. It lives in the relationship.

Matt Dinniman didn't start with a book deal. He started with a chapter on Royal Road, a free web fiction platform, in 2019 — posting as he wrote, reading every comment, adjusting as he went. When COVID shut down the cat show circuit that was paying his bills, he moved to Patreon and kept writing. Readers voted on story elements. They caught errors in his math. They told him, chapter by chapter, what was landing and what wasn't. By the time Dungeon Crawler Carl reached a traditional publisher, it had 15,000 paying subscribers, 6 million copies sold, and a Peacock TV deal in development. He didn't write a book and find an audience. He built an audience and let them help him write the book — while they paid him to do it.

Mike Monello, who co-created The Blair Witch Project, has been thinking about this longer than almost anyone.

The brands winning in creator marketing right now are the ones who understand this. They're not casting creators like actors in a brand film. They're finding the people who already know their audience — and getting out of the way.

The audience didn't leave. They reoriented around trust. That happened years ago. This weekend's box office just made it impossible to ignore.

Here are this week’s top creator stories for brand marketers

1. Two YouTubers Just Beat Star Wars at the Box Office TechCrunch / CNN / Boston Globe · May 31, 2026

Backrooms opened to $81.5 million — A24's biggest debut ever, on a $10 million budget. Obsession, made for $750,000, is past $150 million in its third week and still climbing. The Mandalorian and Grogu finished third with $25 million. Exit polls showed 86% of Backrooms' audience was under 35 — more than half under 25, 44% under 21. Forbes ran the headline: "The Weekend Hollywood Stopped Pretending Not to See YouTube."

Sundae take: The demographic Hollywood keeps writing off as a lost cause for theatrical showed up in droves. They just showed up for creators, not IP. The question for brand marketers isn't whether YouTube-native talent is ready for the big stage. It's whether you're finding them before Blumhouse does.

Read on TechCrunch → https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/31/this-weekends-two-biggest-movies-were-both-directed-by-youtubers/

2. YouTube's Brandcast: Creators Are Now Sold Like TV Shows Adweek / Variety · May 13–15, 2026

At its annual Brandcast upfront at Lincoln Center, YouTube announced a Creator Shows slate — Alex Cooper, Trevor Noah, Kareem Rahma, Dude Perfect, Jesser and others — and for the first time let advertisers buy sponsorships against individual creator shows the same way they'd buy inventory against a TV program. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan opened with "Welcome to the YouTube era." New products included Custom AI Sponsorships, Buy with Google Pay on connected TV (conversions from CTV ads up over 200% year over year in Q1), and expanded creator partnership tools. YouTube's subscription revenue now accounts for a third of total revenue, with over 125 million paid subscribers. Creator Partnerships on Shorts drive a 30% lift in conversion.

Sundae take: YouTube isn't asking to sit at the upfronts table anymore — it built its own. The bigger signal is the buying structure: sponsorships against named creator shows, not against category or demographic. That's the industry finally pricing in what creator audiences are actually worth. Brands that have been waiting for creator budgets to "mature" just ran out of time to wait.

Read on Adweek → https://www.adweek.com/convergent-tv/youtube-brandcast-2026-creators/

3. Netflix and Spotify Paid $100M to Pull Jay Shetty Off YouTube Bloomberg / Variety · May 27, 2026

Netflix and Spotify jointly acquired exclusive video rights to Jay Shetty's On Purpose podcast in a deal worth up to $100 million over multiple years — placing him alongside Joe Rogan and Alex Cooper in the rarefied tier of nine-figure creator deals. Full-length video episodes move exclusively to the two platforms starting July 13; Spotify handles global ad sales. Shetty's show had been with iHeartMedia for three years; negotiations for renewal broke down over terms. Netflix is simultaneously in discussions with iHeartMedia to license The Breakfast Club and other video podcasts. Three other companies reportedly bid in the nine-figure range for Shetty's rights.

Sundae take: When two of the largest streaming platforms jointly bid nine figures for a single creator's audience relationship, the message is clear: the audience is the IP. Shetty spent seven years and 800 episodes building a specific community around wellness and personal growth. Netflix and Spotify aren't buying a show format — they're buying access to that community. For brand marketers, the watch-out is this: if you've built your creator strategy around platform-native distribution, the platforms are now competing for those creators too. Know where your partners are anchored.

Read on Bloomberg → https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-27/spotify-netflix-woo-podcaster-jay-shetty-from-youtube-in-new-deal

4. Dhar Mann Is at Tribeca Proving Creator Studios Move Faster Than TV Digiday · June 1, 2026

Dhar Mann — 136 million combined followers, NFL "chief kindness officer," Samsung TV Plus original deal (streaming on 100 million devices), Fox Entertainment vertical video partnership — is making the case at Tribeca X that creator studios produce content faster, more nimbly, and with greater audience precision than traditional CTV or linear TV operations. His argument: hyper-engaged audiences and lightning-fast production cycles mean creators don't have to guess what works. The deals backing that claim are real: Samsung, NFL, Fox, and a 13-episode Samsung TV Plus original series, all in the last 18 months.

Sundae take: Dhar Mann isn't pitching himself as a scrappy alternative to TV. He's pitching speed and audience fidelity as structural advantages that TV can't replicate. The brands that signed with him — Samsung, the NFL — understood that his 136 million followers aren't passive viewers. They're an audience that has been trained, over years of content, to trust his recommendations. That's not a media buy. That's a relationship transfer.

Read on Digiday → https://digiday.com/media/dhar-mann-is-going-to-tribeca-x-to-prove-ctv-can-do-tvs-job-and-that-creators-belong-in-the-conversation/

5. Bedford Is Charging Executives $3,750 to Learn What Creators Built for Free Tubefilter · May 29, 2026

Bedford, a new creator education startup founded by Ben Newton (previously CEO of childcare company Vivvi), charges $3,750/year for executives and senior leaders to learn content creation. The six-week starting course covers ideation, production, publication, and refinement — with AI workflows and peer feedback built in. Advisors include YouTubers Jordan Matter, Michelle Khare, and Samir Chaudry, alongside organizational psychologist Adam Grant and a Harvard Business School professor. Companies can enroll entire teams. First cohort launches July 20.

Sundae take: The advisor list here is the tell. Bedford isn't teaching executives to go viral — it's teaching them that content fluency is now a core professional skill, and that the people who built it organically are worth paying to learn from. When Harvard Business School professors start advising creator education programs, the creator economy has officially entered the institutional mainstream. For brands, the more interesting question is: if your executives need to pay $3,750 to understand how creator content works, how are they making partnership decisions today?

Read on Tubefilter → https://www.tubefilter.com/2026/05/29/jordan-matter-michelle-khare-and-samir-chaudry-are-strategic-advisors-at-a-new-creator-education-startup/

Worth Knowing

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Curated by Isla Novak, Sundae Collective.