Money
The Creator Economy’s $480B Race Runs on Relationships
The ‘Magic Connector’ Antonia Jade Amico is rethinking the intersection of brands and content creators with Creator Culture Club.
The creator economy could nearly double to roughly $480 billion by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs, and it now runs on more than 200 million people who call themselves creators. For all that scale, its oldest problem is stubbornly low-tech. Most brands still cannot find the right creator, and most creators still cannot find the right brand. The software industry has spent a decade and enormous sums trying to solve that with data. The answer keeps turning out to be a lunch table.
That gap is what Antonia Jade Amico kept seeing on the 2025 conference circuit. Brands, creators, agencies, and platforms shared the same rooms without any real infrastructure to turn proximity into partnership. Her response was Creator Culture Club, an invite-only community she built inside Meltwater, where she serves as Head of Creator Strategy. CCC now runs events across seven cities and it arrives at Cannes Lions 2026 with three private lunches planned at Beau Restaurant.
“Brands, creators, agencies, and platforms were all attending the same conferences, but very few spaces were designed to create genuine relationships between them,” Amico told Parasocial in an interview. The club is her bet on closing that gap, with Meltwater’s global footprint as the scaffold.
The Matchmaking Problem Money Hasn’t Solved
The discovery gap is not a small inefficiency at the edge of the industry. It is the industry’s central friction. By widely cited estimates, fewer than 5% of creators earn six figures while about half make under $15,000 a year, and brand partnerships drive roughly 70% of creator income. That combination, a vast undermonetized middle and a brand budget that flows mostly through deals, means the entire economy hinges on whether the right introduction ever happens.
An entire software category exists to make it happen. Influencer marketing platforms have raised hundreds of millions promising to turn creator discovery into a search query, and influencer marketing spend itself crossed $32 billion in 2025. Meltwater plays in that category. Through its platform Klear, Amico’s team can sort more than 110 million creator profiles to determine which creators belong in which room. The data tells you who exists. It does not tell you who will say yes, who will show up, or who two people will actually want to work with after they have met.
“Relationships matter just as much as data,” Amico said. That line is the quiet argument underneath every networking dinner, agency retainer, and talent manager in the business, and it is the part the dashboards have never been able to automate.
Appetizers at Beau Restaurant in Cannes, France
What a Curated Room Is Actually For
CCC’s structure is an attempt to operationalize that argument. A software company’s discovery infrastructure supplies the names. A human curation layer decides the mix, who sits next to whom, which platform leader meets which emerging creator, which agency is in the market for exactly the talent in the room. The events have run in New York, London, Toronto, and Dubai. Each guest list is assembled from Meltwater’s local client and partner relationships so the room reflects the market it is in.
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The downstream names are recognizable. Creators who came through CCC have gone on to work with Meltwater clients including Microsoft, NARS, and Expedia, and partners whose briefs have run through the ecosystem include Canon, Radisson Hotel Group, Snapchat, and Deloitte Digital. “It’s a great reminder that even though we’re a software company, real relationships and in-person connections still drive some of the best business outcomes,” Amico said. For a data company to say that out loud is itself a signal about where the industry’s real leverage sits.
The Newsletter as Warm Pipeline
The other half of the model reflects a broader shift in how the creator economy does business. Less cold outreach and more owned, opt-in channels. In February 2025, Amico launched the Meltwater Creator Brief, a newsletter that now reaches more than 90,000 creators and runs three brand campaign briefs a month that creators can apply to directly.
The mechanism inverts the traditional scramble. Instead of waiting for a brand introduction to happen by chance, a client broadcasts a brief, creators self-select, and the team facilitates the match. It is the same logic reshaping the rest of the space, where creators increasingly prize a direct line to opportunity over the hope that an agency cold-emails them first. A warm inbound pipeline, at newsletter scale, is simply a more efficient version of the lunch table.
Cannes as Creator-Economy Infrastructure
That Cannes Lions is the setting for CCC’s next three events is its own marker of how far the creator economy has traveled. A festival built for advertising agencies has become a week the creator industry plans its year around, and the private rooms off the Croisette now matter as much as the awards inside the Palais. CCC’s three lunches at Beau Restaurant, running during the June 22 to 26 festival, will gather creators (such as Einstein of Wall Street, Zachery Dereniowski and Shuang Hu), brands, agencies, and platforms around fireside conversations featuring voices from Snap, Deloitte Digital and many more.
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For Amico, the table matters more than the stage. The introductions made over lunch, she argues, are “often the moments that lead to partnerships, collaborations, and ideas that shape the industry long after Cannes ends.” It is the thesis that earned her the “Magic Connector” nickname, after enough of her introductions turned into campaigns, contracts, and careers to make the pattern hard to ignore.
“Opportunities often come from proximity,” she said. “The right introduction can change someone’s career.”
Beau Restaurant in Cannes, France
CCC is one of the 15 events on Parasocial’s Cannes Lions 2026 creator guide. Creators can apply to join a future event or subscribe to the Meltwater Creator Brief through Meltwater’s creator channels. Whether a curated room scales like a database is the open question. The bet underneath it, that relationships are the layer data cannot replace, is one the entire industry is quietly making alongside her.
Money
Soulja Boy Launches Rapper University on Twitch
Denied a seat at Kai Cenat’s Streamer University, Soulja Boy built a rival campus on Twitch. Rapper University is the first time a recording artist has answered a streamer’s format with one of his own.
Kai Cenat opened the doors to Streamer University 2026 auditions on June 8. Soulja Boy wanted in. When the invite never came, the Atlanta rapper built his own campus instead.
On June 9, Soulja Boy announced Rapper University, a Twitch-native reality-competition series filming in Atlanta. He pitched it as a direct answer to Cenat’s program. The pivot took hours. First came the ultimatum on X: “If you don’t let me in Streamer University @KaiCenat we beefin. I let u slide the first time.” Then came the redirect.
The campus-format show is a multi-day program where unknown creators audition for mentorship and exposure. It has been Cenat’s invention and his alone. Rapper University is the first time a signed recording artist has built that same machinery on Twitch as a competitive reply. The genre is crossing from gaming into hip-hop. A music artist is the one carrying it across.
The escalation followed a schedule. Soulja Boy released a trailer to his social accounts on June 13. He described a reality series with freestyle challenges, studio sessions, live performances, and surprise eliminations. By June 14, RapperUniversity.net carried a full application portal. Applicants upload a one-minute YouTube audition and submit the link. The door is open to students, artists, producers, creators, teachers, mentors, guest judges, managers, and promoters.
The Pitch Got a Video Game
The same update added Rapper University: Campus World. It is a free in-browser game. Players make a character, walk a campus, collect items, and reach Soulja Boy on a main stage to finish an admission quest. The site bills it as a multiplayer game with a “Players Online” counter.
Dexerto tested it. The counter changes when you click to join a room. No actual other players ever appear.
It is engagement bait wearing a campus costume, which is its own kind of honest.
A Professor Claim That Doesn’t Hold
In the trailer, Soulja Boy delivered the line that became the headline. “I was the first rapper to be a dean and a motherfucking professor. Come on, now. I’m here to teach y’all this game, man,” he said.
The record disagrees. Complex pointed to Lupe Fiasco’s MIT visiting professorship in 2022, a Yale fellowship, and a Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute faculty role beginning Fall 2025. The same piece noted Bun B teaching at Rice University since 2011. The claim is a marketing flourish.
What the claim does reveal is the on-ramp Soulja Boy is testing. Cenat built a streaming-world institution. Soulja Boy is borrowing its mechanics to see whether a rapper’s audience behaves like a streamer’s. The open portal, the eliminations, the in-browser hook: these are streamer-economy tools, now aimed at hip-hop hopefuls.
The scale gap is the open question. Cenat’s 2025 Streamer University, held at the University of Akron, drew over one million applications and enrolled roughly 120 students, with the 2026 class expected to hold about 150 student spots. Rapper University has a website and a two-week application window Soulja Boy mentioned on stream. It does not yet have a start date.
The applications close in about two weeks. The first episode has no date at all.
Money
Johnny Harris’s Newpress Wins Its First News Emmy
Three months after launch, Johnny Harris’s independent newsroom took home a News & Documentary Emmy. For a company earning roughly 95 percent of its revenue from sponsorship, the trophy is a pricing tool.
Johnny Harris‘s independent newsroom Newpress has won its first Emmy. The company took Outstanding Graphic Design: News at the 47th News & Documentary Emmy Awards in late May, three months after its public launch.
Harris built his audience on YouTube. He announced the result on Newpress’s community site: “I’m so excited to share this with you all: Newpress has won an Emmy for Outstanding Graphic Design!”
The statue is also a commercial document. Nieman Journalism Lab reported in March that roughly 95 percent of Newpress’s revenue comes from advertising and sponsorship deals, with membership subscriptions a secondary stream. A newsroom funded that way has no network check behind it. It sells advertisers one thing above all, a trusted audience.
In that model, prestige is pricing power.
Newpress runs the business side for its creator-journalists. The company hires the video editors and secures the sponsorship deals while the journalists focus on the work. It pays them a salary plus a share of revenue. The structure looks less like a traditional newsroom than a holding company for journalist-led channels.
There is no settled playbook for converting a News Emmy into a higher sponsorship rate. The mechanism is simpler than a playbook. Sponsorship pricing runs on what a brand believes an audience and a production are worth. A national award aimed for decades at networks changes that belief. For an outfit earning almost all of its money from brand deals, the trophy goes straight into the sales conversation.
Simon Owens, a media analyst quoted in the same profile, described the pitch to journalists who sign on. The Harrises, he said, are “providing the infrastructure and funding to get a new channel off the ground.”
Newpress publicly launched on February 19. Iz Harris co-founded the company and runs it as CEO and executive producer. The founding roster pairs Harris with former Vox producers Sam Ellis and Christophe Haubursin, plus Max Fisher, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and founding Vox editor.
The audience those sponsors are buying starts with Harris’s own channel. The profile counted more than 7.5 million YouTube subscribers there as of early 2026. In the announcement, Harris credited the team behind the win. Newpress, he wrote, is “built video by video by an amazing, creative, scrappy, resourceful team of self-taught artists and creative journalists.”
Harris has won at these awards before, under someone else’s banner. He took a News & Documentary Emmy in September 2022 as the video producer on a New York Times opinion piece. That statue came inside a legacy outlet, two years after he left Vox to go independent with Iz Harris.
This one belongs to the company the Harrises own.
Money
Kane Parsons’ Backrooms Becomes A24’s Biggest Film Ever
Kane Parsons gave his Backrooms series away for free on YouTube at 16. Ten days into its theatrical run, his A24 debut has $212.6 million worldwide, the studio’s all-time record, and a sequel question already swirling.
Kane Parsons posted the first Backrooms video to YouTube for free when he was 16. It was a found-footage horror short set in an endless maze of empty rooms. The A24 movie it became has now outgrossed every film the studio has ever released.
Backrooms reached $212.6 million worldwide through Sunday, Deadline reported. That passes the $191.2 million lifetime global gross of Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Supreme. It makes Backrooms A24’s highest-grossing film of all time.
The number is remarkable. The shape of it matters more. The film took 10 days to set the record on a budget under $10 million, co-financed by A24 and Chernin Entertainment. A teenager built its audience years earlier, upload by upload, by giving the series away for free. He kept creative control all the way into the director’s chair. Audience first, theatrical release later. That inversion is the creator economy’s cleanest proof of concept yet.
Ten Days to the Crown
Backrooms opened in late May to $81.4 million domestically and $118 million worldwide. It was the biggest debut weekend in A24’s history. The same weekend made Parsons the youngest filmmaker ever to top the domestic box office.
Parsons is 20.
Before Marty Supreme, the studio’s global record belonged to Everything Everywhere All at Once. That multi-Oscar winner finished its entire theatrical run under $148 million worldwide.
Marty Supreme needed 53 days to claim that crown. Backrooms took it away in 10.
It Started With a Free Upload
The whole franchise traces to a single video. Parsons uploaded “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” on January 7, 2022. It turned an anonymous piece of 2019 internet lore into serialized horror, and studios soon came calling.
Those first studio meetings happened over Zoom, with his parents sitting in. A24 officially boarded the project in 2023. Parsons put the timeline plainly in an interview published in May: “when this first started gaining traction and when I first met with them, I was 16.”
The finished film pairs the self-taught director with established machinery. Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve star. Blumhouse-Atomic Monster, 21 Laps and Phobos produced alongside the financiers.
Parsons is not an isolated case, either. Backrooms arrives in the same season as Obsession, another studio horror hit from a YouTube-native filmmaker, Curry Barker. Together the two films sketch a shift in where Hollywood now finds both its talent and its stories.
A Sequel Report and a Denial
What comes next is the only contested part of the story. On Friday, two days before the global record fell, the same outlet reported a follow-up was already taking shape: “Sources tell us that Parsons is looking for a screenwriting collaborator to work on the sequel with. That’s the state that the Backrooms sequel is in right now.” His contract for more Backrooms resides with A24, the report added. No greenlight and no casting are attached.
Parsons disputed that framing on Monday. “I’m not sure where that got out; that seems more like a hallucination based off of a notion that I am very open to continuing this project. There’s no meaningful movement on that currently, though,” he said in comments published by The Hollywood Reporter. However the sequel question resolves, the franchise’s front door has not moved.
The first episode is still on YouTube, still free, exactly where a 16-year-old left it.
