Netflix’s Pod Pitch Lands Flat; Fox Comes for YouTube; Yeezy Alum Drops New App
Right now in creator land: my scoop on Kanye West’s former CTO, plus fresh reporting on big players battling in pod-land
I cover the creator economy. I interviewed two top Gen Z media founders about how to win young audiences and wrote about the M&A wave coming in influencer marketing and Famous Birthdays’ bid to be “IMDb for creators.” I’m natalie@theankler.com
Hello from Seattle, where I’m visiting family and counting down to turkey. I’m trying something new today: three fast, reported creator-economy stories, hitting your inbox a little early before the holiday.
First up: I’ve got a great scoop about the former Yeezy CTO launching a new social platform called Doomscrollr, built for creators who want more control and fewer algorithms (and it’s for “solopreneurs” but hey, even Nvidia is already using it). I’ll get into what it is, how it works, and why early adopters include names in fashion, writing and design.
After that, I’ll zoom out to what’s shaping the wider landscape right now:
Netflix’s and Fox’s push into video podcasting via licensing and originals
Why top podcast creators may not be impressed by the dollars or the deal points Netflix is floating
How Fox’s Tubi Media Group is emerging as a real challenger
And how YouTube is shoring up its biggest stars as the streamers start poaching
Let’s dive in.
1. SCOOP: Former Yeezy CTO Launches Anti-Algorithm Social Platform
What’s happening: A Yeezy alum and his wife are debuting Doomscrollr, a new platform that lets creators build a single, chronological feed pulling in everything they post across the internet — without algorithmic meddling.
Why it matters: Creators are increasingly frustrated that their audiences live on scattered platforms they don’t control. Doomscrollr promises a single hub, owned by the creator, with email capture baked in. It’s also one of the first tools built for creators, not advertisers.
Doomscrollr was conceived by L.A.-based husband-wife team Adam Ayers, a longtime product developer previously CTO at Yeezy, and fashion industry veteran Victoria de la Fuente, founder of motherhood brand Zillion Trillion. They tell me the idea for the company came from de la Fuente’s frustrations about how decentralized her presence on the internet had become. Outside of Substack, where she’s built an audience of more than 170,000 subscribers, she didn’t have a good picture of who her audience was or how to reach them. She wanted a curated feed of posts and links that would represent the full scope of the Zillion Trillion brand — and collect the email addresses of the people who were scrolling.
Doomscrollr essentially allows users to build a website with a feed of links and posts from across the internet. That means all their YouTube videos, Instagram photos, Substack posts and Shopify storefronts can sit in one feed that is organized chronologically or manually — no algorithm calculating what people see as they scroll.
As far as I can tell, Doomscrollr is the rare social tool aimed specifically at creators, creatives and entrepreneurs — what its founders refer to as “solopreneurs.” It’s been around for a little while as a paid product (pricing ranges from $99 per month to $1,999 per month depending on the level of customization) and has a number of high-profile users from creative industries including fashion designer Christopher John Rogers, creative director Alana Hadid and writer Arden Fanning Andrews, as well as brands like Nvidia and Dobel. Now the company is launching more widely with a free, public product.
“Everyone has been focused on building audiences on social media for the last 15 years, and they have nothing to show for it,” de la Fuente tells me.