Deals
‘Brand Safe’ Tana Mongeau’s Deal Sheet Disguised as a Pod
Tana Mongeau named the show after the media-buying classification that kept her unbookable. Then she put the sponsors in episode one.
On an episode of Cancelled last year, Brooke Schofield asked Tana Mongeau what her first move would be if she married Jeff Bezos. After a detour through some unprintable answers, Mongeau landed on the truth: an “unlimited lifetime supply” of Medicube masks.
Today Medicube is one of her brand partners. The bit became a line item.
That conversion, joke into contract, is the actual story of Brand Safe, the solo video podcast Tana Mongeau premiered May 9 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. The Hollywood Reporter confirmed the launch and the team behind it: WME, Brillstein Entertainment Partners’ Brittny Turner, and ICON PR. “Brand Safe isn’t the Tana people might expect,” Tana Mongeau said in a statement, describing a show that is still honest but built around growth and sitting with her life instead of reacting to it.
The Title Is an Industry Term, and That Is the Whole Play
“Brand safe” is not slang. It is a media-buying classification: the suitability machinery of advertiser guidelines, content-rating vendors, and platform monetization tiers that decides which creators are eligible for brand spend before a human ever evaluates the pitch. PEOPLE’s coverage of the launch defined the term exactly that way, noting Mongeau was long considered the opposite. For most of her decade online, her content profile placed her outside the circuit regardless of how large her audience grew. The risk rating, not the reach, set her price.
Naming the show after the classification that excluded her is the sharpest piece of positioning in the launch. Mongeau is not quietly cleaning up her profile and hoping the suitability scores catch up. She is publicly arbitraging her own risk rating, and selling tickets to the repricing. The pivot is the pitch deck.
The Deal Sheet at Launch
Read the launch the way a deals desk would, and the structure is unusually complete for a podcast debut:
The representation stack is WME for agency, Brillstein for management, and ICON PR for publicity, the full configuration normally assembled around television talent and recording artists, not podcasters mid-pivot. The sponsorship column already has entries: SeatGeek appears with a promo code in the show notes of episode one on Apple Podcasts, and product partnerships with Medicube and Peter Thomas Roth followed her sobriety, per THR’s reporting. And the editorial product is the commerce itself: the show’s official description promises she will walk listeners through “the deals, the shoots, and the rants she almost posted.”
That last part is the structural novelty. Most creators exiting a controversy cycle treat the rebrand as backstage work and present the cleaned-up result. Mongeau has collapsed that distance. The process of becoming bookable is the content, with sponsors in the credits before the first episode dropped. Episode one’s title was, in full: “WE ARE SO BRAND SAFE!!!!!!”
The Asset Being Repriced
The audience was never the problem. Mongeau carries 9 million followers on TikTok, 5.5 million each on YouTube and Instagram, and 2.4 million on X. Cancelled, her four-year run with Schofield, closed in September 2025 after 130 episodes, sellout tours, and regular top-10 chart placements, and its tearful finale drew 1.5 million YouTube views. That is the floor Brand Safe has to clear, and it is proof the audience follows her emotional arcs, not just her chaos.
What changed is the classification on top of the audience. Mongeau got California sober in 2024, telling Elite Daily “it was sober era or die,” and the honest asterisk in that label is itself part of the wager. A suitability team parsing her profile will still find things to flag. The bet Brand Safe makes is that a documented, narrated recovery is worth more to brands in 2026 than a quietly clean rating, because the documentation is distribution. Medicube and Peter Thomas Roth are not buying a blank slate. They are buying the redemption arc’s viewership.
What the Infrastructure Signals for Tana Mongeau
A WME, Brillstein, and ICON configuration is not assembled to service one podcast feed. It is the setup that precedes television development, books, and touring. None of that is announced, and the confirmed facts remain the May 9 premiere and the sponsors already in the credits when it dropped. But the structure tells you where the ambition points.
For the creator economy, the precedent is the interesting part. Every platform’s suitability system produces a class of creators with enormous audiences and throttled commercial access. Mongeau just demonstrated the exit: make the reclassification itself the IP. If Brand Safe converts, the next dozen pitches that cross an agency desk will look exactly like it.
Jack Dorsey, best known as a co-founder of Twitter, Bluesky and Block (formerly Square), has backed the app Divine, an open-source, relaunched version of the influential short-form video social media app Vine. The launch of the new app this past week comes almost 10 years after Vine was shuttered and archived by Twitter, its then-parent company. Divine is being developed by Evan Henshaw-Plath, known online as “Rabble,” and is backed by his non-profit collective “and Other Stuff,” which is financially backed by Dorsey. Notable features of Divine include its archive of previous Vines and a policy designed to prevent AI-generated videos on the platform.
Vine was founded in 2012, acquired by Twitter the same year, and launched in 2013. TikTok is often described as a successor to Vine, with its focus on short videos within a social platform. The same year that Vine was archived and its short-format videos were rolled into Twitter, TikTok’s sister app Douyin was launched. By 2020, Instagram and YouTube had also launched short-form video features (Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts). Many social media users questioned Twitter’s reasoning for discontinuing and archiving Vine in 2016, including Vine’s founder, Rus Yusupov, according to the Guardian. The relaunch of the app alongside archived content appears to be an attempt by former Twitter employees Dorsey and Rabble to correct that mistake, and to address a desire for more short-form content. Sarah Perez reported for TechCrunch that the Divine app has an archive of many older Vine videos (presently almost 500,000 videos according to the sidebar on the company’s website), and provides an opportunity for beginner and returning users to craft new short clips.
The app launched a beta version in November 2025, inviting some previous Vine users to return to an early version of the app. Initially invite-only, with opportunities for additional invitations, Divine is currently public and free. During the beta, the team rewrote portions of the code and developed features like compilation mode, which autoplays streams of Vines by hashtag.
Several former Vine creators have been involved or expressed support, including Lele Pons, JimmyHere, MightyDuck, and Jack and Jack. Other early Vine stars whose content is in the archive include Liza Koshy, Logan Paul, David Dobrik, Drew Gooden, Thomas Sanders, Danny Gonzalez, Sam and Colby and Hannah Stocking. The archive of old videos drew from work from Archive.org. Original Vine creators retain copyrights and can claim their old accounts, or request that their videos are removed.
Divine is notable for its rejection of AI-generated content, something that Henshaw-Plath excluded intentionally according to a statement made to TechCrunch. Company policy prevents usage of AI by only allowing content to either be filmed in-app or undergo verification and detection processes to filter out generated content. Users can also report AI usage. Previous rumors from Tumblr in 2025 had suggested that the app could be used to train AI content, given some of “and Other Stuff” projects involve AI. An older but currently live staging page for “and Other Stuff” describes Nostr, the open-source protocol used by Divine, as the “best protocol for open source AI development.” Divine’s FAQ page addresses this concern about AI directly. Under “Is Divine going to sell our data or content to AI companies?”, the company states: “No, Divine is not in the business of selling user data or content to AI companies for training. We don’t do it, we won’t do it. We can’t stop AI companies which want to ignore terms of service and people’s copyright from scraping publicly accessible data, just like it’s hard to stop AI companies from scraping publicly available websites.” The app also promises not to sell personal information “in the traditional sense.”
Divine is available for free on the App Store, Google Play Store and Zapstore, a decentralized app store launched by Rabble that also has backing from Dorsey. The app has been endorsed by many former high-profile Vine users. Since the app’s public launch, it has jumped up to the top 20 most-downloaded apps in the U.S. App Store’s Social category and has over 10,000 downloads on the Google Play Store. Divine has no framework for revenue at present. Rabble has suggested a potential for Patreon-style or Pro account (possibly like premium features of X or Instagram) options in the future, and believes that the app could give some control back to creators, leading to potential for monetization from using partners, like brand partnerships.
Meta has announced the start of a new invite-only, three-month program for creators on Facebook. The “Creator Fast Track” program is offering eligible content creators with at least 100,000 followers on TikTok, YouTube or Instagram $1,000 a month for three months for posting content on Facebook. According to Meta, the program promises payment up to $3,000 a month for three months for accounts with over one million followers. The program comes just after news of significant layoffs as well as reports of Meta winding down large aspects of its investments in the metaverse. In a press release, Meta said that enrollment in the program also gives accounts access to Facebook’s “Content Monetization Program”, enacted in 2024. The older “Content Monetization Program” allows members the option to make money on their content after the “Fast Track” program ends. Here’s how the new “Creator Fast Track” program works and who is able to apply.
“Creator Fast Track” is invite-only and seems to be limited to accounts with 100,000 followers or more, but creators who are curious about the program can fill out an interest form by navigating to Content monetization in the Monetization tab of the Professional Dashboard on the Facebook mobile app. The program comes with three new metrics for creators to view and understand how they’re getting paid from content. “Qualified Views” tells you the number of views of your content that could be eligible to earn money from. “Earnings Rate” is a simple measurement of your earnings per 1000 views. Finally, “Non-Qualified Views” breaks down why some views don’t qualify for payment. According to Meta, creators can earn from short-form Reels, longer videos as well as photo and text post, but creators have to post at least 15 eligible reels a month to receive payment, on 10 separate days a month. Program members with at least 20,000 followers but less than 100,000 can expect between $100–$450 dollars a month, while those with over 100,000 followers can earn the advertised $1,000 a month and creators with over a million getting $3,000 a month. Program members must have a recent Facebook account (at least 30 days old) and at least 30,000 views on videos in the past two months.
The platform says it wants to reward original content with the “Creator Fast Track” Program. In Meta’s press release, the company touted a “35% increase” in payments to content creators in 2025, totalling nearly $3 billion, the highest annual total the platform has paid to creators ever. Additionally, Meta says that “creators earning more than $10,000 annually on Facebook have grown by over 30%” annually”, although they did not provide a full time-frame. Despite the promised focus on original material, it seems that creators can reuse content posted on other platforms as long as it’s their material, hasn’t been posted on Facebook before, and meets the platform’s community guidelines.
It’s unclear what will happen after the three-month program ends, or how long the promotion will last. The program is a part of Facebook’s bigger push to gain back users lost to other social media platforms. Meta stopped breaking down daily user data by platform in 2024. Overall, social media usage peaked in 2022, and has declined since, likely related to pandemic lockdowns and time spent indoors. Facebook has seen a significant overall decline in usage for years, as newer social media platforms came along, and the app was perceived as dated. Despite this decline, a recent social media analysis by media engagement company Buffer, reported by tech news platform BetaNews, showed a slight increase in users on the platform, alongside other previously declining platforms like X (formerly Twitter). If the program pays off, maybe Facebook will have an even greater resurgence as a social media platform, especially as many content creators already cross-post most of their material.
The Federal Trade Commission has set its sights on influencers once again. Starting in December, expanding on their new round of disclosure guidelines from 2023. The guidelines went into effect in 2024 and the FTC has put out a series of letters, press releases and blog posts, attempting to tighten the standard for what has to be disclosed for sponsored social media posts. This comes after years of controversies related to content creators and brand partnerships, cryptocurrency endorsements and unregulated blank on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. So what do these new guidelines mean for influencers in the U.S.?
Federal regulators have sent a clear message to brands and creators: disclosure rules in influencer marketing are not optional. On December 22nd, the FTC announced that it had sent warning letters to 10 companies regarding potential violations related to the agency’s new Consumer Review Rule, related to potentially “fake or false consumer reviews, consumer testimonials, or celebrity testimonials.” Fines could be up to $53,088 per violation. Legal analysis by the law news publication The National Law Review earlier this month emphasized that disclosures in social media remain a central enforcement focus, particularly as content moves fluidly across feeds, stories, and short-form video. Essentially the FTC wants someone to be able to tell if a post is sponsored or an ad when they scroll past it.
For years, many creators relied on brand tags, brief in-content references or hashtags blended into a long caption to signify a sponsored or partnered post. Regulators are signalling that they are increasingly skeptical of those approaches, especially when those notices are easy to miss and easy to potentially misinterpret. Platforms are also responding, with YouTube, Instagram and TikTok labeling branded or promotional content in the past few years. Additional layers to sponsorship exist as well. An article by daily Legal news outlet JD Supra made clear that disclosure is not limited to obvious ad reads with scripts provided by a brand. A creator who casually praises a product while participating in a broader paid partnership may still need to disclose that relationship. The focus is on context that would matter to viewers, not on how formal the arrangement looks behind the scenes.
The placement of where you disclose that a post has been sponsored is also an issue. With shorts on social media, a disclosure that appears only in the description field can easily go unseen, especially when videos are reposted or embedded elsewhere. Regulators have signaled that disclosures should appear within the content itself in a way that stands out, whether spoken in the video or displayed as readable on-screen text. If viewers are unlikely to see it, it is unlikely to satisfy the standard. A related, recent study on tobacco marketing found that influencers were one of the main groups who failed to disclose business relationships with tobacco companies, noting that “influencer-related posts lacked proper FTC-mandated disclosures of financial relationships”.
Livestreaming adds another layer of complexity. Audiences join and leave at different points, and many viewers skip the opening minutes of a broadcast. A single disclosure at the beginning of a two-hour stream may not reach a significant portion of the audience. Recent guidance suggests that repeating disclosures during the stream, or maintaining a visible on-screen notice, is a more reliable approach. The expectation reflects how live content is actually consumed rather than how it might look on paper.
The practical effect of these developments is easy to understand. For creators, when money, free products, or commissions are involved, being straightforward is a legal requirement, even if the post is styled as a casual recommendation. The current round of warnings suggests regulators are less concerned with punishing technical mistakes and more focused on patterns that make paid influence look organic. If sponsorship is part of the business model, it has to be visible in the content itself.
