Deals
What New FTC Disclosure Rules Mean For Influencers
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.
Deals
Recho Omondi’s Cutting Room Floor Signs 3-Year Patreon Deal
Five years of handshake exclusivity just became a three-year contract. Inside the Patreon deal that lets the fashion podcaster keep every piece of the brand she built behind a paywall.
For five years, Recho Omondi kept her fashion podcast The Cutting Room Floor exclusive to Patreon on a handshake. It took a rival platform trying to poach her to turn that arrangement into a contract.
Fast Company reported the deal on June 3. The partnership runs three years. Patreon will fund joint marketing and help build out the show’s production and team infrastructure. Omondi keeps full ownership of the brand. The agreement marks the podcast’s transformation into an independent media company. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The same report placed The Cutting Room Floor in the top 1 percent of Patreon’s podcasts by earnings. Paid memberships more than doubled year over year. For independent fashion media, that is the part worth studying. A platform is paying to grow a creator’s business it does not own. The legacy model ran the other way: a publisher bought the title, and the voice answered to new owners.
The masthead stays hers.
A Rival Made the First Move
Omondi launched the show across streaming platforms in 2018. Two years later, she shut down her fashion label, Omondi, to make the podcast her full-time work. In 2021, during its third season, she moved the show exclusively to Patreon. It went fully paywalled and ad-free, with no formal platform agreement.
The exclusivity ran on trust. Then a competing platform came calling this spring. “The impetus was because there was a competitor to Patreon that was poaching me very aggressively to leave the platform. It inspired me to bring that deal to Patreon and they agreed,” Omondi told The Publish Press.
Paywalled on Purpose
Episodes will stay where they have always been: behind the paywall, with no ads. Omondi has been explicit that this is strategy, not stubbornness. “I think a lot of people use Patreon as an early release, which I think is so futile,” she said in April 2025. “That doesn’t seem like a competitive play to me. So I use Patreon as a completely different offering.”
The free side does the recruiting.
Omondi has said clips and social video are her top subscriber acquisition tool. A video team of four produces them.
On TikTok, her videos have topped 1 million views, and she has tallied nearly 200,000 followers. The episodes themselves move slowly, on purpose. She wants to give listeners, in her words, “things that they can take a week and a half to chew on before the next one comes out.”
What Each Side Bought
Patreon locked in one of its flagship fashion shows for three years. It also bought a proof point: a paywall-first podcast can become a media company without leaving the platform. “We share a vision of investing in the next generation of creative voices, and this partnership is about building that future together,” said Betsy McCormick, Patreon’s VP of creator success, in a statement.
Omondi bought infrastructure on her own terms. The partnership funds team growth, new content formats, and community events. The brand stays entirely her own. Her official statement kept the focus on the editorial product itself: “Our ethos has always been to make fashion and culture content that is intelligent, educational and entertaining.”
She marked the deal with a commemorative episode on announcement day. The guest was Patreon co-founder Jack Conte.
The new formats, community events, and expanded programming are set to roll out by autumn. The name above all of them stays Omondi’s.
Deals
Marlon Garcia Signs With Nike, Second Streamer After Kai Cenat
He was streaming through homelessness in New York not long ago. This week he signed with Nike.
Marlon Garcia, the Swedish Twitch streamer and former college basketball player, has officially signed with Nike, announcing the deal on his Instagram account @marlon3lg. It makes him the second major streamer to join the brand, after Kai Cenat.
The distance Garcia covered to get here is the whole story. He has been open about experiencing homelessness in New York City while he kept streaming, grinding through broadcasts with no guarantee any of it would work. The kid who once had nowhere to sleep now has a Nike contract.
His path to the brand runs through two sports and a career change. Like most kids, Garcia started on a football pitch, and he has said that signing with Nike and becoming “the biggest baller in the world” was one of his earliest dreams. He went on to play college basketball, suiting up at guard for Lower Columbia College in Washington, before walking away from competitive sport to pursue content full time. He thought the Nike dream had died with the jersey. It did not.
Both @NikeFootball and @NikeLA welcomed him from their verified accounts within the comments. @NikeLA wrote “Welcome fam, time to lock in,” while @NikeFootball added “Welcome to the family, let’s cook.” For a creator rather than a drafted athlete, that kind of direct embrace from the brand’s official channels is the signal that the relationship is real, not a one-off product seeding.
The support extended well beyond Nike. Creators including FaZe Rug, OussiFooty, and Lacy turned out in the comments and on their own feeds. Lacy, who released the second drop of his collectibles brand TapCap earlier the same day, posted his congratulations publicly.
Garcia’s signing is the operational story for working creators. He built modeling and streaming as parallel tracks, signing with IMG and walking for fashion houses while growing his Twitch audience. Marlon converted that combined profile into a sportswear deal of a kind the industry long reserved for professional athletes. The brand is not buying a basketball career. It is buying an audience, and the reach that comes with it.
Complex reported that Kai Cenat announced his own Nike partnership in February 2024, becoming the first major streamer to sign with the brand. Garcia now stands second in that line, and the gap between the two signings, barely two years, is the real headline: the lane is widening fast.
Nike nor Garcia have disclosed a date for specific deliverables or campaign launches as of this writing but it is safe to assume there will be activity around the World Cup.
Deals
Snap Promotes Malhotra After Meta Poaches Snappys Producer
Meta recruited the producer of the Snappys. Snap promoted a 10-year veteran the same week. The creator economy wins the bidding war either way.
On March 31, at the first-ever Snappys at Snap’s Santa Monica headquarters, David Dobrik took a moment on stage to salute the man who put the night together, “Thank you to Jim Shepherd, the #1 Snap boss.”
Two months later, Meta came calling for the #1 Snap boss.
Snap had the answer ready. The company announced on June 3 that it promoted Anmol Malhotra to global head of content and partnerships, Variety reported. The 10-year company veteran now owns Snapchat’s creator ecosystem, editorial strategy, and global partnerships across sports, media, entertainment, and music. He succeeds Shepherd, Snap’s former senior director of global content partnerships, who departed for Meta as director of content and creator partnerships with a specific focus on the company’s wearables business, per The Hollywood Reporter.
The Exec Is the Asset Now
The back-to-back moves put a sharp point on where platform competition has shifted: the executives who build creator ecosystems are now recruited like the creators themselves. Shepherd was not a back-office hire. He was the public architect of Snap’s creator relationships, the man who announced the Snappys and produced them, by his own description on LinkedIn adding “award show producer” to his resume. The night ended with the platform’s newly crowned Creator of the Year thanking Jim from the stage.
For Meta, that is a quality hire by any measure. Shepherd arrives to bring celebrities and creators into the Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses push, a product line whose sales more than tripled in 2025, and he brings exactly the relationship-building track record that work requires. Nor is the pattern isolated: OpenAI recruited Instagram’s longtime partnerships chief Charles Porch earlier this year. Across the industry, the people who know creators have become as sought-after as the creators they know.
And if there is a compliment buried in the recruitment, it is aimed at Snap. Companies do not poach from weak rosters. Snap built an executive worth hiring away, and had his successor named the same week from a legacy ten years deep.
Snap Has Been Here Before
There is a familiar shape to a Snap-built playbook scaling inside Meta. Snapchat invented Stories in 2013; Instagram launched its own version in 2016, and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom was direct about the lineage at the time, telling TechCrunch that Snapchat “deserves all the credit.” The format went on to power Meta’s apps and much of the modern social internet. Camera glasses follow the same arc: Snap shipped Spectacles in 2016, five years before Meta’s first Ray-Ban collaboration, and is preparing its next generation of AR glasses now.
Seen through that history, the Shepherd hire is less a raid than a rerun of the industry’s oldest dynamic with Snap in its usual position: ahead of the curve. Snap pioneers the category, the largest player in social scales it, and the talent that learned the craft at Snap becomes the most valuable in the market. Both things can be true at once. Meta is getting a proven operator for its biggest consumer hardware bet. Snap keeps the laboratory where operators like that are made.
The Commercial Stake
Snap’s side of the ledger is growing. The company announced in February that Snapchat+ had surpassed 25 million subscribers, pushing its direct revenue business to a $1 billion annualized run rate, per a Snap newsroom announcement. Installing a dedicated global partnerships chief at this moment is a structural signal. Snap is treating creator and media deal-making as a revenue function, not a marketing one.
The financials support the posture. Snap reported Q1 2026 revenue of $1.53 billion, up 12 percent year over year, with its net loss narrowing to $89 million from $139.6 million in the same period a year earlier. Subscription growth now sits alongside ad revenue as a stated priority metric. Every one of those lines runs through the creator ecosystem Malhotra just took over, which is exactly why the role was elevated rather than backfilled.
What Malhotra Brings
Malhotra joined Snap in 2015 and most recently led sports and media partnerships, building relationships with broadcasters and rights holders including NBC, ESPN, the NFL, the NBA, the UFC, FIFA, and the IOC. In the expanded role, he also oversees Snap’s international growth initiatives across North America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. The promotion consolidates creators, editorial, sports, music, and global expansion under one desk for the first time, and hands that desk to the executive who already holds the rights-holder relationships a sports-and-media-heavy creator strategy runs on.
It also hands him a calendar. The Snappys debuted as a flagship annual property, and year two is now Malhotra’s to deliver. Shepherd builds the creator roster for Meta’s glasses. Malhotra scales the one he inherited at Snap. For creators, this is the rare executive shuffle with no losing side. Two well-resourced platforms just signaled, in the same week, that the people who build creator relationships are worth competing over. The bidding war is the compliment, and creators are the ones who get paid in it.
