Netflix’s Pod Pitch Lands Flat; Fox Comes for YouTube; Yeezy Alum Drops New App
CREATING DISRUPTION From left: Ashley Flowers moved her Crime Junkie pod from SiriusXM to Tubi; Doomscrollr founders Victoria de la Fuente and Adam Ayers; YouTube is holding stars like Trevor Noah closer. (Like & Subscribe illustration; image credits below)This is a preview of Like & Subscribe, my standalone Ankler Media newsletter on 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.comHello 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, you can read what’s shaping the wider landscape right now over at Like & Subscribe, where I have:Netflix’s and Fox’s push into video podcasting via licensing and originalsWhy top podcast creators may not be impressed by the dollars or the deal points Netflix is floatingHow Fox’s Tubi Media Group is emerging as a real challengerAnd how YouTube is shoring up its biggest stars as the streamers start poachingLet’s dive in.CREATOR CURATION “You’re not going to have your feed be taken over by ads or someone else’s content,” says Doomscrollr’s Adam Ayers, right, with wife and co-founder Victoria de la Fuente. (Courtesy of subjects)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.The rest of this column is for paid subscribers to Like & Subscribe, a standalone newsletter dedicated to the creator economy from Ankler Media. Click here or on the button below to access the full story.Interested in a group sub for your team or company? Click here.Image credits: Flowers: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Hello Sunshine; De la Fuente/Ayers: courtesy of Doomscrollr; Noah: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for YouTube
