The most interesting creator news this week happened where entertainment meets distribution: who develops the shows, where audiences find them and how talent participates beyond an endorsement. Hollywood supplied the biggest headlines, but podcasting, publishing and agency acquisitions also kept moving.

Here is what stood out across the creator economy during October 7–13.

Kevin Hart and Fox put vertical series on the development slate

Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat signed a deal with Fox Entertainment giving Fox Entertainment Studios first-look rights to adapt vertical series into feature films and television projects, Variety reported on October 13.

The arrangement involves Codeblack and partnerships with Essence and Revolt. Codeblack is working with Holywater Tech, the company behind the vertical-video platform MyDrama, on a dedicated branded channel. Twenty-five live-action titles are in development across drama, thrillers and faith-based storytelling.

The series will debut on MyDrama, with Fox Entertainment Global handling worldwide distribution after their initial runs. Fox then has an early opportunity to develop selected stories for larger screens. That is a development pathway, rather than a promise that all 25 titles become films or television shows.

For viewers, the first encounter with a potential future film could be a succession of phone-sized episodes. The deal gives that journey a named studio partner and an initial slate. Variety reporting

Sony puts a YouTube veteran in charge of Screen Gems

Sony Pictures named Fede Goldenberg Head of Screen Gems on October 9, bringing a 15-year YouTube veteran into the leadership of its genre-film label.

Screen Gems will expand into theatrical projects from creators who built their audiences online. Goldenberg has led YouTube’s film and television content partnerships since 2017, with earlier experience working with digital-media companies including Maker Studios and Fullscreen. He will report to Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group president Sanford Panitch.

The appointment puts someone familiar with creators and platform distribution in a position to shape a studio’s film slate. Alongside the Hartbeat announcement, it makes this a particularly active week for the route from digital audiences to traditional entertainment. TheWrap reporting

A TikTok drama gets 44 episodes and a cinema date

SuperOrdinary’s SuperLab studio launched Caldwell Academy exclusively on TikTok on October 8. The 44-episode series follows student president Eden Clarke and lacrosse star Beckett Langford through an elite boarding school’s romances, secrets and rivalries.

Produced with Enzyme Films, the project was developed as both a vertical series and a feature-length film. SuperLab plans three additional original series before year-end, with a second season of Caldwell Academy scheduled to begin filming in early 2027. Net Influencer reporting

There is already a concrete destination for the longer cut: ALZA’s program lists a 58-minute version for an October 17 screening in New York, followed by a creator Q&A. The same story is being packaged for a scrolling audience and a seated one, with both releases planned from the outset. Festival program

Druski takes a stake in Gopuff

Druski and Gopuff announced an equity investment and a multiyear strategic partnership on October 9. The comedian will work with the commerce platform on exclusive products and fan experiences connected to his Coulda Been Records and 4Lifers Entertainment properties.

The collaboration combines Druski’s characters and audience with Gopuff’s product development, merchandising and delivery capabilities. It also builds on an existing relationship: Druski previously appeared with Tom Brady in Gopuff’s HARD PASS Super Monday Off campaign.

The new agreement gives the relationship a longer horizon and an ownership component. The size of Druski’s stake and other financial terms were not disclosed, and specific product launches will be worth watching as the partnership develops. Gopuff announcement

Goalhanger’s next launch starts beyond the podcast feed

Goalhanger introduced Goalhanger X on October 12, with Marina Hyde’s Always On as its first launch. The project begins with a YouTube show, written columns and original social content.

Goalhanger will provide creative support, audience development and commercial resources. The venture can expand into audio, memberships, live experiences and additional intellectual property as the audience develops.

For a company closely associated with successful podcasts, the choice of launch formats is the interesting part. Writing, video and social are built into the project from day one, giving audiences several ways to discover and follow the same personality. The initial launch is free, with a paid tier planned. Advanced Television reporting

Podcasting gets a major renewal and another AI bet

Spotify renewed its agreement with Joe Rogan. The company announced a new multiyear licensing agreement for The Joe Rogan Experience on October 8. Spotify says the show has 18 million followers on the service and has been its most-followed podcast since 2020.

Episodes will remain available on Spotify and other platforms. Financial terms and the precise contract length were not disclosed. The renewal keeps one of podcasting’s largest established audiences tied to Spotify while preserving distribution elsewhere. Spotify announcement

Rebel Audio announced Series A financing at an approximately $50 million post-money valuation. The October 8 announcement named HardScope, led by DraftKings co-founder Matt Kalish, as lead investor. The round targets a $10 million close, with additional funding expected over a 90-day window, so the full target should not be treated as already raised.

Rebel Audio is developing an AI-assisted workflow spanning recording, editing, publishing, translation, distribution and monetization. The financing follows a $4.15 million seed round. Founder Jared Gutstadt’s team includes Mike Majlak as Chief Creator in Residence. Company announcement

New ways to find videos and fund subscriptions

YouTube expanded conversational search to mobile. On October 12, the company said Ask YouTube is now available across web, mobile and TV in the United States. Viewers can ask more detailed questions and follow up within interactive search results.

YouTube also said its watch-page Ask YouTube feature will reach Shorts and livestreams soon. Those additions are still upcoming. For creators, the immediate development is another way for viewers to find videos by describing what they want to learn or watch. YouTube announcement

Substack is testing sponsorships that pay for access. Its October 8 announcement introduced three formats: an upgrade funds a month of paid access for free subscribers; an unlock opens an individual paid post; and a masthead sponsors a themed collection of work from multiple creators.

The company is also adding Kantar studies for larger campaigns to measure brand awareness and perception. Testing remains limited to small groups of publishers and brands. The practical distinction is that a sponsor can underwrite something readers receive directly, including access to work normally behind a paywall. Substack announcement

Five acquisitions across sports, media and creative services

Agency dealmaking added another set of announcements, spanning sports audiences, performance media, design and event production.

FUEL acquired 53Six. Announced October 9, the deal adds the sports marketing agency’s strategy, creative, performance media and audience data capabilities to FUEL’s live experience and production work. The 53Six brand and co-founders remain with the business. Buyer announcement

MSQ acquired January Digital. The October 7 deal adds an 80-person agency with offices in New York and Dallas, expanding the media capabilities within MSQ’s U.S. offering. It is the week’s most direct local connection for readers here in Dallas. Buyer announcement

Chemistry acquired Colossus. Announced October 7, the transaction establishes a Boston office and expands Chemistry’s creative and design capabilities. Company release

GreenRubino acquired Rupert. The October 8 announcement combines the Seattle agencies and brings Rupert founder Noah Tannen into the role of director of strategic partnerships. Buyer announcement

Eventeam acquired Keneo. Announced October 8, the deal expands the group’s sports-event consulting, design and production capabilities. Buyer announcement

✦ Talk to Stellamont

We advise owners on valuation, transaction preparation, and competitive sell-side processes across the creator economy, marketing infrastructure, software and tech-enabled services, with a focus on creator commerce.

SAMY’s acquisition of Get Engaged gives a global agency group a larger U.S. business. Live Nation is backing a new company with an explicit mandate to acquire creator-management firms. THE·TEAM has bought Outreach Talent Group, while WME is building digital operations and investing in a specialist.

For owners of creator and marketing businesses, this week’s announcements make the potential buyer landscape more concrete. Each organization is assembling something different. The opportunity for a seller depends on how the business contributes to that plan.

In our last edition, we examined what changes for founders and employees after a sale. This week’s question comes earlier: which buyer has a compelling reason to want your business in the first place?

SAMY adds a U.S. agency with Get Engaged

On October 6, Get Engaged announced that it was joining SAMY. The buyer’s own announcement confirms the acquisition and identifies Bridgepoint as its majority shareholder. Get Engaged will anchor SAMY’s U.S. operations, with its leadership remaining in place. Buyer announcement · Company release

ADWEEK reports low-nine-figure cash-and-equity consideration, citing a person familiar with the transaction. The companies have not disclosed an exact purchase price. Fortune reports that the deal closed September 30. This is an October announcement of a transaction reportedly completed at the end of last month. ADWEEK reporting · Fortune reporting

Our read: an established U.S. agency can give an international group client relationships, local leadership and delivery capacity that would take time to build. For a founder, those capabilities become more persuasive when the evidence shows repeat business, a team that owns the relationships and profitable delivery across accounts.

The reported consideration is useful context. Without disclosed earnings and detailed transaction terms, it does not establish a valuation multiple that another agency can apply to itself.

Live Nation is organizing a new buyer

Live Nation announced its backing of Creator Nation on October 1. Led by Scott and Alexis Fisher, the new company plans to acquire and expand creator-management firms and adjacent businesses, including capabilities in commerce and touring. Initial acquisitions are expected in the coming months. Timeline Management remains separate. Live Nation announcement

The announcement establishes a new acquisition strategy and a capital commitment. It does not disclose an investment amount or announce a completed portfolio acquisition.

For a creator-management owner, the strategic possibilities extend beyond adding more talent to a roster. A partner with live-entertainment resources could help develop touring, events and other revenue around a creator’s audience. The commercial case would depend on whether that audience follows the creator into those formats and whether the resulting economics work.

Our read: a newly formed acquisition platform creates a reason to prepare before an approach arrives. Management agreements, revenue by creator, client concentration and the responsibilities of key managers help a prospective buyer understand what can transfer and grow. An audience is part of the story. The business’s rights, relationships and operating team determine what a buyer can do with it.

THE·TEAM extends its representation business

On October 6, THE·TEAM announced that it had acquired Outreach Talent Group, a London-based creator-management business with a New York presence. OTG chief executive Emilio Arciniega joins as SVP, Creators. The stated rationale includes expanding European representation and creating more global opportunities for clients. Financial terms were not disclosed. Buyer announcement

This is an existing agency adding reach through acquisition. For a specialist firm, geographic relationships and local expertise may be important parts of its appeal. A buyer still needs to understand how much of that value resides in the company and how much depends on a founder’s personal involvement.

Owners can prepare by showing who manages each important relationship, how new clients arrive and how opportunities move across the team. That gives a buyer a clearer basis for assessing continuity and expansion.

WME builds services around creator businesses

October 1–2 reporting describes WME’s launch of Creator Labs, a digital-operations team supporting services such as channel management and syndication, alongside an investment in Astra Media and expanded creator advertising sales. This combines an internal operating expansion with a strategic investment. The reporting does not establish a full acquisition of Astra, and investment terms were not disclosed. Net Influencer reporting · The Drop reporting

The relevance for service providers is practical. Representation can sit alongside the work of running channels, selling advertising and distributing content. A specialist that can demonstrate reliable performance in one of those activities may have a role within a broader organization.

Our read: acquisition is one route to that capability. Building a team or making a strategic investment are alternatives a potential buyer can consider. A founder’s case becomes stronger when it explains the time, relationships or expertise the business would contribute, supported by operating results.

The agency still has to earn its fee

There is a useful counterpoint to the acquisition news. Goalhanger plans to bring all advertising sales in-house from January 2027, according to October 1 reporting. Its proposed offering spans audio, video, social, newsletters and events. The Media Leader reporting

Digiday’s October 2 coverage also examines advertiser concerns about transparency in creator-agency fees. The reporting raises questions about how buyers of marketing services understand the costs inside a campaign. Digiday reporting

These developments do not establish that agency margins are falling across the sector. Bringing sales in-house requires investment and sufficient scale. They do reinforce a question that matters in diligence: what value does the agency provide, and what revenue does it retain for providing it?

Owners should be able to separate campaign billings from retained revenue, explain creator and production pass-through costs, and show delivery margins and repeat work. That makes the business easier to understand for clients and prospective acquirers alike.

Prepare for the buyer’s specific reason to buy

This week offers several paths: an international agency acquiring a U.S. business, a new platform planning acquisitions, an established representative expanding geographically, and a talent agency building services alongside an investment.

For an owner, a useful preparation exercise is to write a separate case for each plausible buyer type.

Identify the capability the buyer would gain. Be specific about the clients, market access, talent relationships or operating expertise the business contributes.

Show the economics behind that capability. Retained revenue, repeat business, delivery costs and concentration help establish whether the contribution is durable.

Explain how the business continues after a transaction. Document the roles, agreements and relationships that allow the company to operate and grow with a new owner.

The strongest buyer discussion starts with a clear explanation of how the business fits the buyer’s plans. This week’s announcements give founders several concrete models against which to test that explanation.

✦ Talk to Stellamont

We advise owners on valuation, transaction preparation, and competitive sell-side processes across the creator economy, marketing infrastructure, software and tech-enabled services, with a focus on creator commerce.

For owners of creator, media and marketing businesses, that is a useful place to start thinking about a sale. The transaction determines what you receive for the company you built. It also establishes your relationship with the business you may spend the next several years helping to grow.

This week’s announcements offer several versions of that next chapter: employees participating alongside a new majority investor, an agency founder continuing within an international group, and specialist technology teams joining larger platforms.

The practical question for an owner is what the deal makes possible, and what it asks of you in return.

Puck pairs liquidity with continued ownership

On September 24, Reuters reported that RedBird Capital Partners had agreed to acquire a majority stake in Puck at an approximately $250 million company valuation. That figure is the reported value of the company, not the disclosed price of the stake. The transaction remains subject to regulatory approval, with closing expected about a month after the announcement.

According to the staff memo reported by Reuters, employees with vested shares or options will receive both liquidity and continued ownership. Puck and RedBird have also established a new equity incentive plan. The growth agenda includes additional talent, acquisitions, new markets and expanding intellectual property into other formats. Reuters reporting

Our read: a business built around recognizable people needs a convincing reason for those people to keep contributing after ownership changes. Equity participation can be part of that answer. So can the resources and opportunity to do work they could not do independently.

For an owner evaluating a proposal, the continuing investment deserves its own assessment. How much value becomes available at closing? What remains invested? What would have to happen for that remaining stake to become worth more? A strong headline valuation does not answer those questions by itself.

Brew’s founder and brands continue inside a larger group

Cosmo5 announced its acquisition of Singapore-based Brew Group on September 29. The group includes Brew Interactive and LiteBrew, with more than 60 people across five Asian markets.

Brew’s announcement says both brands will continue, founder Marcus Ho and the existing management teams will remain, and no changes to day-to-day operations are planned. The combination expands access to international clients, services and markets. Financial terms were not disclosed. Company announcement

For an agency owner, the continuing role can be as consequential as the initial handover. A larger group may offer new accounts, specialist colleagues and a broader geographic reach. Making use of those opportunities requires clarity about who controls hiring, investment, client relationships and delivery.

Brew’s announcement establishes management continuity. It does not disclose the founder’s continuing equity or individual compensation. Those are separate parts of a transaction, and an owner should understand each before deciding that a proposed partnership fits their goals.

AMD makes an $8.2 billion move into AI model research

The week’s largest technology transaction in our review came on September 28, when AMD announced a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs in an approximately $8.2 billion all-stock transaction. Closing is expected by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and customary conditions.

World Labs develops spatial-intelligence models that create and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images and video. Following closing, its team would continue model research, with co-founder Fei-Fei Li becoming AMD’s executive vice president and chief scientist. AMD says the acquisition will help shape its hardware, software and systems around emerging AI applications. AMD announcement

For businesses producing games, visual content and immersive experiences, this is a development to watch as creation tools evolve. For software owners, it illustrates a different buyer rationale: a specialist research team can influence the direction of a much larger technology platform.

The purchase consideration is stock. The headline amount should be read with that structure and the pending closing in mind.

Three more transactions worth watching

Loopmasters acquires technology already inside its product

On September 29, Loopmasters announced its acquisition of Jamahook, whose sound-matching technology already powers search within Loopcloud. The software helps music producers find audio that fits the track they are working on. Terms were not disclosed. Acquisition announcement

Our read: an existing product integration can give a buyer direct experience with a specialist company’s technology. For a software owner, usage inside a partner’s product can help demonstrate commercial relevance. The evidence still needs to show how the technology performs and why customers value it.

Modulate raises $25 million for audio AI

Modulate announced $25 million in new funding on September 28, led by Future Ventures, with Hyperplane and Lakestar participating. The company plans to expand its audio AI research, products and developer ecosystem, serving applications including synthetic-voice detection, fraud prevention and trust and safety. This is a financing round. Company announcement

The relevance extends beyond tools that generate content. Businesses also need to understand, authenticate and manage the audio moving through their products. Modulate is attracting capital to address those problems.

Creatd takes a minority stake before a proposed full acquisition

Creatd announced on September 29 that it had acquired 10% of C2 Capital Group, the operator of livestreaming platform C2 Live. It also signed a nonbinding letter of intent for the remaining 90%, with further diligence ahead. The full acquisition has not closed. Company announcement

The release’s approximately $3.6 million figure describes an expected addition to stockholders’ net equity. It is not a disclosed purchase price. For owners following transaction headlines, this is a useful distinction: a completed minority investment and a proposed purchase of the balance are different milestones.

Discord expands its advertising offering in stages

Discord announced Ads Manager and a new mobile-first Video Quests format on September 29. Ads Manager is initially available through managed access to selected advertisers, with full self-service access planned for early 2027. Video Quests reward users for watching ads. Discord announcement

For agencies serving gaming and community-led brands, the rollout adds another channel to evaluate. Access to a new advertising product is the starting point. The commercial case depends on whether the agency can turn that access into effective creative, measurable customer outcomes and repeat work.

Define the role you want before offers arrive

This week’s ownership stories make a useful preparation exercise for business owners: describe what you want your working life and financial position to look like after a transaction.

Start with liquidity and continued investment. Identify how much value you want to realize and how much you would consider leaving exposed to the business’s future performance. Understand the rights and risks attached to any continuing stake.

Then define the operating role. If you want to keep building, be specific about the responsibilities, resources and decisions you need. A promise of growth becomes more useful when both sides can explain how it will be funded and delivered.

Finally, consider the people who make the business valuable. Talent, managers, technical teams and client leaders will each have reasons to stay or leave. Their incentives and working environment belong in the discussion about the company’s next chapter.

Those priorities give an owner a clearer basis for comparing buyers. Price remains central. The continuing role, ownership and growth plan determine how the transaction fits the life and business the owner wants to build next.

✦ Talk to Stellamont

We advise owners on valuation, transaction preparation, and competitive sell-side processes across the creator economy, marketing infrastructure, software and tech-enabled services, with a focus on creator commerce.

The most useful question in this week’s deal announcements is what the buyer gains. Infillion is adding location intelligence. Taboola is pursuing a specialist advertising network. Podium’s new investors are backing a publishing business with a substantial catalog.

Alongside those transactions, investment in avatar concerts and new products from Pinterest, PeakMetrics, Spotify, AnyMind and Whatnot show how content reaches customers and earns revenue. Together, these developments give founders several concrete ways to think about the capabilities they are building.

Infillion brings Foursquare into its measurement strategy

September 18 | Acquisition announced; closing not confirmed

Infillion announced an acquisition of Foursquare that would combine location and visitation data with Catalina purchase intelligence and its advertising platform. The company describes a system that can connect campaign execution with store visits and purchases. Its announcement refers to leadership joining after closing, so the transaction should still be treated as announced.

The strategic rationale is specific: add information that helps advertisers understand whether their spending produced a real-world result. For an independent marketing business, that raises a useful question. What evidence can you provide that a client would struggle to reproduce elsewhere? Proprietary data, measurement capabilities and an established place in the customer workflow can strengthen that answer.

Read the source announcement ↗

Taboola moves to acquire a specialist financial advertising network

September 18 | Proposed acquisition; pending approvals

Taboola announced an offer to acquire Dianomi, which connects advertisers with audiences across premium business, finance and lifestyle publishers. Taboola plans to combine that network with its Realize performance advertising platform. The offer values its fully diluted share capital at approximately £19 million in cash, rising to approximately £27 million if the contingent consideration is earned. Completion is expected before the end of 2026, subject to regulatory conditions and Dianomi shareholder approval.

This is an example of a larger platform buying established access to a specialized market. Dianomi brings relationships on both sides of the transaction: advertisers seeking qualified audiences and publishers offering relevant inventory. For founders, the lesson is to explain the commercial value of their niche through customer relationships, distribution and results.

Source: Taboola announcement · Official offer documents and financial terms

Podium changes hands as investors back its publishing catalog

September 21 | Acquisition announced as completed

Podium Entertainment announced that Flexpoint Ford and Shamrock Capital acquired the business from Presidio Investors, with GoldState Music making a minority investment alongside them. The independent publisher says it has built a catalog of more than 15,000 titles since 2019.

For the creator economy, the relevant connection is the business built around intellectual property. A catalog and the organization that develops and distributes it can generate value across many works and authors. That makes Podium a useful strategic example for content businesses. Its publishing model does not establish a valuation benchmark for a talent management agency.

Read the source announcement ↗

Unit1 secures $20 million for touring avatar concerts

September 21 | New investment

Balderton confirmed $20 million of new investment in Unit1 Studio, an avatar concert producer. Unit1 says its technology allows productions to transfer economically between venues, addressing a major limitation of shows built around a single location.

The investment targets the repeatability of a live entertainment product. If a production can travel at viable cost, the same artist IP can reach more audiences. The commercial questions remain practical: production costs, rights arrangements, ticket demand and the economics of each additional venue. It is a useful reminder that expanding the uses of content requires a workable delivery model.

Read the source announcement ↗

Pinterest gives visual discovery a new advertising format

September 17 | Advertising product announcement

Pinterest announced Visual Search Ads at its annual advertiser summit. The format places advertisers in search results and Pin closeups, using keyword relevance to reach people as they compare options and move toward a purchase. Advertisers can bid for a top response and direct users to their own sites.

The opportunity for commerce and performance agencies is to connect creative work more closely with the moment a customer decides what to buy. The test will be incremental sales and acquisition economics. Agencies that can demonstrate those outcomes will have a clearer case for keeping and expanding client budgets.

Read the source announcement ↗

PeakMetrics extends reputation monitoring into AI answers

September 17 | Product launch

PeakMetrics launched AI Perceptions to help communications teams monitor how brands are represented across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok and Perplexity. The offering connects that monitoring with its existing analysis of news, social media and other online sources.

This gives PR and communications firms another outcome to track: how a brand is described when someone asks an AI system about it. The useful work involves identifying inaccurate information, understanding the available sources and measuring changes over time. Agencies pursuing this service will need a repeatable methodology and evidence of client value beyond a dashboard of mentions.

Read the source announcement ↗

Spotify opens more markets for podcast monetization

September 17 | Expansion announced; rollout scheduled for October 20

Spotify announced plans to expand its Partner Program into more than 35 additional markets. Eligible creators can earn through Premium video revenue and advertising while keeping revenue from their own embedded sponsorships. Spotify lists October 20 as the availability date for the newly announced markets.

The expansion gives more podcast operators access to multiple revenue sources. For owners considering a future sale, the financial reporting should make those sources easy to distinguish: platform payments, directly sold sponsorships and other income. Buyers will want to understand which relationships the business controls and which earnings depend on a platform policy.

Read the source announcement ↗

AnyMind connects livestream analytics, campaigns and payments

September 17 | Product launch

AnyMind launched AnyCreator Stream with an initial YouTube Live integration. Creators can review performance, access brand campaign opportunities and track campaign earnings and payments. For advertisers, the platform connects with AnyTag to support creator discovery, campaign management and measurement.

This development brings more of the work surrounding a creator campaign into one system. For agencies, the relevant question is where their own value sits as software takes on additional coordination tasks. Specialized expertise, execution quality and measurable customer outcomes will need to carry more of the commercial argument.

Read the source announcement ↗

Whatnot makes seller volume part of the margin equation

September 17 announcement coverage | Existing-seller rates activated September 21

Whatnot introduced commission tiers determined by a seller’s sales over the previous four-week period. The next period’s rate depends on that volume and the category. The company promotes rates as low as 3%, but the applicable rate varies by category and market, and payment processing remains separate.

The change can improve economics for qualifying sellers, while also making volume consistency more important. A live-commerce operator should model its actual category mix and sustainable tier. Using the lowest advertised commission across the entire business would overstate the benefit.

Read the source announcement ↗

What this means for business owners

For founders, the practical exercise is to identify the part of the business a buyer could use to grow: unique data, customer access, a content catalog, specialist expertise or a repeatable operating capability. Then support that case with the economics. Retention, margins, contractual rights and the team’s ability to deliver without constant founder involvement determine how convincing the story becomes.

Stellamont M&A Intelligence covers transactions and industry developments across creator businesses, marketing infrastructure, software, and tech-enabled services.

Steven Bartlett and Authentic announced a venture with ambitions to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars into creator businesses. Expert Marketing Advisors announced an acquisition that brings creative services closer to demand generation. TikTok introduced a program for branded creator series, while new reporting shed light on how Google is testing payments for content used in AI answers.

Billion Dollar Boy’s Companion also introduced tools for creator vetting and recruitment.

These five developments touch different parts of the market: who supplies capital, how agencies organize their services, how brands select creators, what they commission, and how publishers get paid.

Bartlett and Authentic launch OBSN with a $400 million investment ambition

Steven.com and Authentic announced OBSN, pronounced “Obsession,” on September 14. The venture will support creator-led media companies and brands through audience development, products, licensing, partnerships, and distribution.

Steven.com will lead media, technology, data, and audience growth. Authentic will contribute its brand-building and commercialization capabilities.

Bartlett said the ambition is to deploy up to $400 million into creator businesses over the coming years, with OBSN central to that strategy. The announcement describes an investment objective rather than a completed $400 million funding round.

OBSN also has a media and experiences business already operating, with plans to expand into additional formats and live events.

The industry significance is the pairing of creator distribution with an established licensing and brand-development operation. That could expand the partnerships available to creators pursuing consumer products, entertainment properties, and international audiences. The next substantive development will be which businesses OBSN backs and how those partnerships are structured.

Source: Authentic’s announcement

Expert Marketing Advisors adds JET Advertising

On September 15, Expert Marketing Advisors announced its acquisition of JET Advertising.

The combination joins JET’s creative and technical execution with Expert Marketing Advisors’ capabilities in SEO/SEM, demand generation, and marketing operations. The company positions the deal as an expansion of its B2B and B2C offering, including support for its B2B technology practice.

This is a concrete example of an agency using acquisition to broaden the work it can deliver. Creative development, campaign execution, and performance measurement can involve several specialist firms within a single client engagement. Bringing more of that work into one organization offers a different service model.

The integration will determine how effectively the expanded offering works in practice. For the agency market, the announcement is worth following as a capability-driven transaction: the strategic rationale rests on combining different strengths across the marketing process.

Source: Company-issued acquisition announcement

Billion Dollar Boy expands the tools behind creator partnerships

Billion Dollar Boy’s technology platform, Companion, announced SafeMatch and Community Builder in a launch covered on September 15. The additions focus on two practical parts of creator marketing: reviewing potential partners and finding creators to work with.

SafeMatch analyzes historical text, audio, and visual content against a brand’s brief, flagging material for human review. Companion says the tool records the rationale behind flags and maintains an audit trail of review decisions. The company also says SafeMatch has operated across Billion Dollar Boy Group campaigns for three years; the latest edition is now available to all Companion clients.

Community Builder adds creator identification and recruitment capabilities alongside that vetting process.

The industry significance is the work happening behind each campaign. As brands work with more creators, reviewing their content and keeping track of decisions becomes a larger operational task. Billion Dollar Boy is turning experience from its agency campaigns into software other clients can use. Adoption will show how much demand there is for that approach.

Source: Companion launch announcement via Roastbrief

TikTok and Amplify give brands an episodic format

TikTok and creator agency Amplify introduced The Next Episode on September 14 through TikTok’s Australia/New Zealand newsroom.

The program connects brands with Amplify’s creator network to develop original series. Advertisers can participate in a creator’s content world or commission a creator-led brand series. Eligible brands can access production support through TikTok alongside their media investment.

The formats include micro-dramas, interviews, game shows, documentaries, and reality programming. TikTok and Amplify point to earlier collaborations involving Kia, Gatorade, and Tinder as examples of their work together.

For the industry, the interesting development is the more deliberate packaging of creator entertainment for advertisers. A series gives a brand multiple appearances within a recognizable format, while creators and production teams have a larger storytelling canvas.

The commercial test will be whether viewers return across episodes and whether that sustained attention produces results advertisers want to repeat. The announcement establishes the program; those performance outcomes remain to be demonstrated.

Source: TikTok’s announcement

Google’s AI publisher-payment pilot comes into view

On September 14, Digiday reported that Google is expanding a pilot that pays publishers when their content contributes significantly to AI-generated answers across products including Gemini, AI Overviews, and AI Mode.

Google confirmed the early-stage pilot to the publication. Participants receive earnings information through Search Console, but the reporting describes limited visibility into how contributions are valued and payments calculated.

That makes this a notable development for publishers and the broader search industry. It introduces a potential payment relationship around content used in an answer, alongside the familiar economics of visits to a publisher’s own site.

The unresolved issue is scale. The reporting does not establish that payments can meaningfully compensate publishers for changing referral traffic. Nor does it establish a broadly available program with predictable rates.

For now, the pilot offers an early view of how Google and publishers are negotiating the value of content inside AI products. Payment transparency and participation will be important developments to watch.

Source: Digiday’s original reporting

What comes next

Each story has a clear next milestone: OBSN’s first announced investments, the integration of JET Advertising, adoption of Companion’s new tools, the first series commissioned through The Next Episode, and more detail on Google’s publisher payments.

Together, they show several approaches to expanding the commercial market around content. Capital providers are assembling creator partnerships, agencies are combining services and developing software, and platforms are experimenting with new advertising and payment formats.

The next round of announcements should reveal which of those plans are translating into sustained activity.

Stellamont M&A Intelligence covers transactions and industry developments across creator businesses, marketing infrastructure, software, and tech-enabled services.

Then a potential buyer asks a question that takes longer to answer:

Why will those customers still be here after you leave?

The answer sits somewhere between the contracts, the work your team does, and the relationships you have built. A recurring invoice captures only part of it.

Three acquisition announcements this week give founders a useful way to think about the rest. They involve fleet software, document automation, and managed risk services. Different businesses, each doing work that customers need to get done repeatedly.

Alongside them, a fresh earnings release shows what one company’s customer economics actually look like.

The creator economy offers another angle: an acquisition agreement announced this week puts direct fan relationships and licensing at the center of the buyer’s plans.

Recent transactions at a glance

Selected acquisitions, closing updates and equity developments from September 3–10, 2026, inclusive. Dates reflect announcements, closing updates or reporting.

Sources: Baseten / Blaxel · Levenza / Fluid Inference · SoundHound AI / LivePerson · HarbourView / Kershenbaum royalties · GameSquare / FanEngine · Koto / Stereo Creative · Banyan / Veicoli · Smooth Media (Axios) · Valsoft / Square 9 · Concentrix / CastleHill.

These transactions illustrate different acquisition rationales. They do not establish a common valuation multiple or prove that the targets have comparable retention or margins. Creator partnerships and consumer research discussed below are separate from this M&A table.

Start with the job the customer needs done

On September 9, Banyan Software announced its acquisition of Veicoli, an Italian fleet-software provider. Its platform supports maintenance, compliance, and daily vehicle operations, with telematics data feeding into those activities. Banyan emphasized the importance of the software to customers’ operations and the relationships Veicoli has built. Read the announcement.

For a founder, the useful exercise is to describe the consequences of taking your product away.

Would someone have to rebuild a maintenance schedule? Reconcile records manually? Hire another employee? Would an important deadline become harder to meet?

Those answers give substance to the phrase “essential software.” They also give you something specific to measure: hours saved, errors avoided, work completed, or operating capacity added.

On September 8, Valsoft announced the acquisition of Square 9 through TAG Software Group. Square 9 automates document work, including accounts payable, order processing, and contract management, for more than 1,000 organizations. The release says its leadership and employees will remain in place and the business will continue operating autonomously. Read the announcement.

The connection between these businesses is practical. Their software helps people complete work inside an organization. Our reading is that this is a more useful starting point for an acquisition story than the frequency of the invoice alone.

It still needs evidence. Neither announcement gives us the target’s customer-retention figures or enough financial information to establish a valuation multiple. A buyer’s stated rationale helps explain strategic interest; it does not tell us what every similar business is worth.

Services founders have a place in this conversation

Also on September 8, Concentrix announced its acquisition of CastleHill Managed Risk Solutions. CastleHill’s governance, risk, and compliance offering combines specialist people, operating processes, and technology. Concentrix said the acquisition expands its ability to design and run these programs for clients. Terms were not disclosed. Read the announcement.

That is a relevant example for owners of accounting, compliance, technology, and other business-services firms.

An ongoing customer need can support a lasting relationship. But the economics depend on how the work gets delivered. How much follows a documented process? How much requires a senior person to intervene? Can the next client be served by the existing team, or does every new account require another hire?

Consider two hypothetical outsourced accounting firms with the same monthly fees. One uses consistent onboarding, a defined service scope, and a team that closes the books without the founder. The other earns similar revenue, but the owner fixes exceptions every weekend and personally manages each renewal.

The second business may have excellent clients and talented employees. Its owner still has more work to do to demonstrate that delivery can continue through a transition.

The same question applies to an agency whose largest client calls the founder whenever a campaign struggles, or a software company whose engineers routinely build unpaid custom features to preserve accounts.

Recurring revenue is easier to explain when the work behind it is understood.

In the creator economy, ask what the business can retain

On September 9, GameSquare announced an agreement to acquire FanEngine’s assets, which support fan engagement and monetization across sports, music and entertainment. GameSquare said the assets would add opportunities in commerce, events and licensing alongside its agency and campaign revenue. Closing is expected in the fourth quarter, subject to approvals and other conditions. Read the announcement.

This is broader creator-economy M&A, rather than a talent-management acquisition. But the distinction is useful for managers: representing talent, holding commercial rights and owning intellectual property produce different revenue streams. A buyer needs to understand exactly which relationships and rights the business can retain.

Demand for creator expertise also has a timely signal. IAB research released September 9 found that 56% of surveyed consumers preferred AI shopping recommendations incorporating creator perspectives. The study covered 2,200 recent users of AI shopping tools across five countries; it does not represent all consumers or establish what an agency is worth. Read the research.

For a creator-management founder, the practical question is how that demand becomes repeat agency earnings. Which brands return? Which talent relationships generate commissions consistently? How concentrated are those commissions, and who manages the relationships when the founder is away?

Separate brand campaign spending and creator payouts from the revenue the agency actually earns. Then explain the relevant representation terms, content rights and team responsibilities. A large audience can create opportunities; those records help show which earnings could continue under a new owner.

Put a number behind the retention story

ServiceTitan’s September 8 earnings release offers a useful measurement example. For the quarter ended July 31, the company reported 21% year-over-year revenue growth and net dollar retention above 110%. It also reported a $27.6 million GAAP operating loss, alongside $44.4 million in non-GAAP operating income. Those profitability measures use different treatments of expenses and should remain clearly distinguished. Read the results.

This is an operating-results example, not an acquisition comparable or a valuation benchmark for a smaller private company.

Its relevance is the discipline of examining customer revenue and profitability together.

For a simple illustration, take customers who generated $1 million of recurring revenue last year. If that same group generates $1.1 million this year after cancellations, reductions, and expansion, net revenue retention is 110%. Revenue from newly acquired customers stays outside that calculation.

Now look underneath it. Suppose lost and reduced accounts removed $200,000 while expansion added $300,000. The net figure looks healthy, but there is still customer erosion to understand. This is why it helps to examine retention before expansion as well as after it.

For a services business, pair that customer analysis with the cost of delivery. An account that spends more but requires disproportionately more senior time may contribute less than the revenue increase suggests.

Five questions to answer before a buyer asks

You do not need to be planning a sale to make this useful. Start with your largest customers and the last twelve months of actual results.

1. What revenue is reasonably expected to repeat?

Separate subscriptions and ongoing service agreements from setup fees, implementation work, and individual projects. Record renewal dates and cancellation rights. Repeat business can be valuable even without a long contract; describe it accurately.

2. Why do customers renew?

Use renewal conversations, product usage, and service outcomes to identify the reason. “They like us” is a beginning. “We complete a necessary monthly process accurately, with less work for their team” is an explanation you can investigate and support.

3. What does it cost to keep the promise?

Include onboarding, support, customization, and the senior time that may never appear on a client invoice. Look for customers whose fees have stayed flat while their demands have grown.

4. Where is the business dependent?

Identify concentration in customers, employees, referral partners, and platforms. If your largest account left, which costs could adjust? If you stepped away for a month, who could handle the relationship and the work?

5. Can someone else verify the answers?

Bring the customer schedule, contracts, invoices, and financial records into agreement. Give a colleague enough information to explain a renewal, a lost account, and a margin change without relying on your memory.

Doing this may reveal a pricing problem, a service that needs a clearer scope, or a relationship that should extend beyond the founder. Each is a concrete operating decision you can address now.

This week’s announcements offer examples of buyers investing in businesses that perform important, ongoing work. The next step for a founder is to show how that work produces customer loyalty, sustainable earnings, and continuity under new ownership.

That is a stronger answer to the buyer’s question. It is also a useful way to decide what to improve before a buyer ever calls.

Which of the five questions is hardest to answer for your business? Reply and tell us. We’ll use those questions to shape a future issue.

Stellamont is a sell-side M&A advisory firm for founder-owned businesses in marketing infrastructure, software and SaaS, tech-enabled services, and the creator economy. We represent sellers exclusively, never buyers. stellamont.com

The two weeks on one page. Widening the window this issue, because the deals cluster either side of the month end.

Seven transactions. The biggest number belongs to the deal furthest from this newsletter’s beat. The most instructive one is the deal nobody put a number on at all.

Publicis bought an influence agency and folded it the same day

On August 26, Publicis Groupe France acquired Point d’Orgue, a Paris influence marketing agency founded in 2016 by Carine Fernandez. About forty staff. Roughly forty exclusive creators. Strong specialization in luxury and beauty. Terms were not disclosed.

The agency goes straight into Influential France, the influence unit Publicis recently launched in the French market under Paul Boulangé. Fernandez continues to lead it inside the group.

If you own a creator or influence agency, this is the most important transaction of the two weeks, and it is worth sitting with what actually happened.

A good agency, ten years old, with exclusive talent relationships and a defensible niche, sold for a price nobody involved wanted to print. It was absorbed into a platform the buyer already owned, on the day the deal was announced.

That is not a criticism of the business or of the outcome. Founders sell for all kinds of good reasons, and a home inside Publicis is a real one. But notice the shape of it. Publicis was not buying a company to run. It was buying capability to install.

Capability gets priced on what it earns. Undisclosed usually means a number that would not flatter anyone in print.

Source: Publicis Groupe France

The same two weeks, the money went somewhere else entirely

Two creator businesses raised money in the same two weeks, and neither of them sells campaigns.

Levanta raised $22 million in a Series B led by Volition Capital on August 27, the firm’s second investment after leading the $20 million Series A in 2024. Total funding now past $43 million. The headline on Levanta’s own release reads “to Deploy the Infrastructure for Creator Commerce Media.”

What Levanta does is unglamorous and valuable. Brands find creators, send product, set affiliate commissions, track the sale and handle payment. More than 90,000 vetted creators on the platform, revenue up 80% year over year in 2026, expanded from Amazon affiliate roots into Walmart, Shopify and other marketplaces.

That is a closed loop from creator post to tracked, paid transaction.

CreatorFi raised $45 million to advance capital against creator and studio revenue. Checks run from $500,000 to $5 million. In exchange the firm takes a share of platform revenue, typically around 50%, and requires the creator to produce new intellectual property on a schedule. Its portfolio includes the music label Coasthill IV, the game developer Mythical Games, and individual creators.

Strip away the creator framing and this is a specialty lender underwriting cash flows.

Which raises the question every owner should sit with. You can only underwrite what you can measure. CreatorFi is not advancing money against a follower count. It is advancing against observable, recurring platform revenue with a contractual obligation to keep producing the asset that generates it.

A capital provider has arrived at the same test a strategic acquirer applies. When lenders and buyers converge on one test, that test is the market.

Separately, Workweek raised $17 million in a Series B led by Next Coast Ventures on September 1, bringing total funding to $36.5 million, for a B2B creator media business.

Sources: Levanta, GeekWire, EQS News

Later showed what that looks like once it works

On September 1, Later announced it has paid creators more than $300 million cumulatively, with revenue more than doubling over two years and growing 50% in the last twelve months. In the same move, Mavely stopped operating as a separate brand and became Later.

That is the closing chapter of a deal, not a new one. Later acquired Mavely in January 2025 for $250 million. One year in, the combined business reported a $2.4 billion annual GMV run rate and $250 million in cumulative creator payouts. Now the brand is folded and the number is past $300 million.

Note which figure Later chose to lead with. Not followers reached. Not campaigns run. Dollars paid out. It is the one number that cannot be inflated, and it doubles as evidence that the attribution works.

An influencer platform that reports reach is selling a metric the buyer already distrusts. A platform that reports attributed revenue is selling proof.

Set that beside the Publicis deal. Later paid $250 million for the company that closed its loop. Publicis paid an undisclosed sum for forty people. Both were rational. They were not buying the same kind of asset.

Source: PR Newswire

X took its own payment rail, and nobody could stop it

On September 2, X moved all US creator payouts off Stripe and onto X Money, its own payments service. The change covers income from both the Original Content Rewards Program and creator subscriptions. Creators outside the US stay on Stripe for now.

The stated benefit is real. X Money removes the bi-weekly processing cycle and the $30 minimum threshold. Payouts are instant.

The same week, X confirmed that its older Creator Revenue Sharing Program, which stopped accepting new participants in August, retires on September 7. Those creators migrate to Original Content Rewards.

So in a single week a platform changed who processes its creators’ money, and changed which program governs how that money is earned. No creator was consulted. No creator could opt out.

Payment processing is not a feature. It is a data position. Whoever moves the money sees every transaction, every cadence, every dollar earned per creator per format. X did not just cut a vendor. It repatriated the highest-resolution dataset in its own economy.

Source: TechCrunch

YouTube rewrote monetization by the second

On September 4, YouTube published new rules for graphic violence in gaming content, ahead of the November 19 release of GTA 6. The framework is now measured in seconds. Graphic content in the first seven seconds of a video disqualifies it from ad revenue entirely. Content appearing from the eighth second onward can run standard ads.

An entire content category’s economics now turn on where an editor places a cut.

The point is not whether the rule is reasonable. It probably is. The point is that a creator business built on that platform had its unit economics rewritten by an announcement it did not see coming and cannot appeal.

Source: YouTube Help

The same logic, at a scale none of us will play in

Two data points from the top of the market, because they price the principle the rest of this issue is describing.

On September 3, Nvidia confirmed it will acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, its second largest deal on record. Agreed, not closed; completion is expected in the first half of 2027 subject to regulatory approval. Hugging Face has more than 18 million developers, more than 3 million models, and 200,000 enterprise customers. It does not produce models. It is where models are found, hosted and pulled from.

Nvidia already sold the compute. What it did not own was the layer where every developer decides which model to run on that compute.

And on August 31, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Ads had reached a $1 billion annualized run rate in under 200 days. In these two weeks it expanded across 31 European countries plus India and MENA, with self-service now listed in 52 markets, alongside custom audiences, conversion measurement, campaign pacing and product-level reporting through an Insights API. That is a demand-side platform, built in under seven months.

Neither deal is creator economy. Both price the same thing your buyers are pricing: the layer everyone else has to route through.

Sources: CNBC, Search Engine Land

Meanwhile, the tenants signed longer leases

Three of the biggest names in media and retail spent the same two weeks committing harder to infrastructure they do not own.

On September 2, the NFL renewed its TikTok partnership in a new multi-year agreement. The interesting part is not the highlights. It is that Pulse Premiere, TikTok’s product for placing ads alongside official content, now extends past the main @nfl account down to individual member clubs. The deal also puts NFL hubs inside TikTok GamePlan and adds a fan rewards product called TikTok Pro Events. Terms were not disclosed.

The most valuable rights holder in American sport just routed more of its advertising surface through a platform’s ad stack rather than its own.

The same day, Sephora announced a TikTok Shop pilot, its Sephora Drop Shop, launching September 19. Monthly exclusive drops, creator-led content, culminating in a TikTok LIVE with a celebrity host. Worth being precise, because most coverage was not: Sephora has not launched. It has announced a pilot that begins on the 19th.

Then the exception. Google signed MrBeast to a multi-year partnership spanning Gemini, Google Health and Fitbit, with the first video landing September 5. Google framed the deal around his being the first individual creator past 500 million YouTube subscribers.

Notice the direction of payment. Everywhere else the platform took something. Here the platform is paying, because 500 million subscribers is the one asset Google cannot build, buy cheaply, or replicate with a product update.

That is what leverage looks like on the creator side, and it is vanishingly rare.

Sources: Sports Video Group, Sephora Newsroom, Google

Two more worth watching

BMG and Concord closed their merger on September 1, announced back on April 28, creating a company with roughly $2.2 billion in pro forma annual revenue and $730 million in adjusted operating EBITDA for 2026. Bertelsmann holds about 67%, with affiliates of Great Mountain Partners at roughly 33% after a one-time cash payment of $1.16 billion. Music publishing and recorded rights are the purest version of the asset this newsletter keeps describing: owned, cataloged, contractually durable.

RedBird Capital is in advanced talks to invest in Puck at around a $250 million valuation, reported August 26. The structure is the interesting part. It would be all cash, buying out institutional holders including TPG, and would not include shares held by Puck’s founders and journalists. Puck has roughly 50,000 paying subscribers. Nothing is signed.

Sources: Bertelsmann, Axios

What this means if you own one of these businesses

Put the two weeks in one line. A ten-year-old creator agency with exclusive talent sold for a price nobody printed. Levanta, which owns the attribution layer, raised $22 million at a valuation it was happy to publicize, from an investor backing it for the second time.

That gap is not about quality. Point d’Orgue is, by every account, a good agency. The gap is about what each business owns when the buyer runs diligence.

There is a harder lesson underneath, about dependency. Two platforms in these two weeks unilaterally changed how creators get paid and how much they earn per video. Any business whose economics sit downstream of a decision like that is a tenant, and tenants trade at tenant multiples.

MrBeast was the only party who negotiated from the other side of that table, and he did it with an audience no platform can reproduce. Note that the NFL has enormous leverage over rights and still routed its inventory into someone else’s ad stack. Leverage over content is not the same as leverage over the rail.

So the diligence question has not changed. It has only gotten sharper.

Can your revenue be attributed? Not described. Traced, inside a buyer’s own system, without taking your word for it.

Does it recur? Campaign and project revenue gets discounted hard. Contracted, renewing, embedded revenue does not.

Does it survive a rule change? If a single platform policy update can reprice your business, a buyer will price that risk before you finish the pitch.

Businesses that pass own something. Data, attribution, contracts, workflow the client cannot easily remove. Businesses that fail sell access to a platform they do not control, and every strategic buyer already has that access in house.

If you want a candid read on where yours sits today, reply to this email. We will tell you straight, including when the answer is not yet.

Stellamont is a sell-side M&A advisory firm for founder-owned businesses in marketing infrastructure, software and SaaS, tech-enabled services, and the creator economy. We represent sellers exclusively, never buyers. stellamont.com

Three weeks ago we argued that creator marketing was becoming performance infrastructure. That budgets were moving from brand awareness to measurable customer acquisition, and that buyers would follow.

August made the same case from the other direction.

Almost none of the notable deals were creator deals. They were martech deals. And nearly every one was a buyer paying for the ability to measure something.

Start with the story that has been running all summer.

Publicis bought the neutral party. In August the bill came due.

Back in May, Publicis Groupe agreed to acquire LiveRamp at an enterprise value of $2.167 billion, paying $38.50 a share, a 29.8% premium to the last close before the announcement. The deal has not closed yet. It is expected to complete before year end, subject to regulatory and shareholder approval.

So the deal is not the August news. The August news is what the deal did to LiveRamp’s customer base while everyone waited for it to close.

LiveRamp was the connective tissue that let competing agencies, brands and platforms move identity and data across each other’s walled gardens. No other company in adtech held that position. Neutrality was not a feature of the product. It was the product.

Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun called the deal a nonevent for clients. LiveRamp technology, he said, is neutral by design.

The market disagreed within days. Omnicom accelerated its exit from the platform. WPP stopped using it. Both said the same thing. They will not run their identity layer on infrastructure owned by a direct competitor. Both are now building their own.

Sadoun’s claim was about code. The customers’ objection was about incentives. Roadmap, pricing and access get decided by the parent company, and the parent company competes with the people paying for the service.

There is a lesson in that for owners, and it is not the obvious one.

If your business depends on sitting between rival parties, the strategic buyer offering the highest headline number may be the one who breaks what they bought. That is not a reason to refuse the deal. It is a reason to know it before you run a process, so you can price it, structure it, and judge whether a financial buyer or a neutral strategic is worth more to you net of the churn that follows.

The highest bid and the best outcome are not always the same document.

Source: AdExchanger

Buyers are paying for measurement, not media

Set LiveRamp aside and the deals actually announced this month tell one story.

Integrate acquired CaliberMind on August 26. Integrate runs lead management and data governance for B2B marketing teams. CaliberMind does multi-touch attribution, marketing mix modeling, account scoring and revenue intelligence. Terms were not disclosed. The stated goal is closing the loop between top-of-funnel activity and revenue outcomes, turning performance insight into immediate next-step activation.

That is demand generation buying its own scoreboard.

Source: MarTech

The same day, MERGE acquired Brado’s Insight and Digital practices. MERGE is a marketing and technology agency with more than 160 clients. It bought proprietary qualitative research and performance media, pointed at health, wellness and life sciences. The stated rationale was behavioral research combined with generative engine optimization.

Source: GlobeNewswire

Also in August, WellStack acquired DeLorean AI, and Eckoh acquired Quality Xperience to expand AI capability in customer experience.

Four deals, one pattern. In every case the target owned research, data or attribution. None were bought for reach.

Platforms are buying AI teams outright

On August 5, Klaviyo agreed to acquire Agency, a three-year-old AI customer success startup founded by Elias Torres. Terms were not disclosed, with close expected in Q3. Agency had raised $32 million from Sequoia, Menlo Ventures and Felicis. Its 25-person team joins Klaviyo, and Torres becomes chief product officer.

Torres previously co-founded Drift, which sold to Salesloft in 2023.

Note the shape of that deal. A public lifecycle marketing platform bought a 25-person company and installed the founder in the C-suite to run product. The team and the capability were the asset. Klaviyo is pointing it at two AI agents already in market, Composer for campaign build and Customer Agent for post-sale support.

If you run a small AI-native software company, that is the exit actually available right now, and it clears at a real price. It also requires a founder willing to go operate inside someone else’s company for several years. Not every owner wants that deal. It is worth deciding which you are before a banker puts you in front of one.

Source: Klaviyo

Retail and commerce media keeps pulling capital

Nine acquired QMS on August 26, adding digital signage software for out-of-home advertising. Advisar, a retail media platform founded by a Walmart veteran, raised pre-seed funding from Clutch VC in late August.

Retail media is where marketing budget goes when the CFO wants attribution. Two more entrants funded in a single week is not a coincidence. The M&A is following the budget.

The creator side is converging on the same test

Two firms made the argument explicitly this month.

Fohr founder James Nord told brands to treat creators like an investment portfolio. Billion Dollar Boy launched a product called Creator Investment Intelligence, on the finding that half of marketers misprice creator fees.

Both are saying creator spend should be underwritten, not budgeted. That is a martech idea applied to a creator problem.

The transactions match.

Boksi acquired Goodlife Management on August 27 in a reported eight-figure deal, described as the largest known acquisition in the German influencer market. Boksi is a Helsinki-based creator marketing platform. Goodlife is a German talent agency representing around 30 beauty and lifestyle creators, with brand relationships including L’Oréal and LVMH. Founder Armin Danesh stays on as Managing Director and becomes a shareholder in Boksi’s parent company. It is Boksi’s third German acquisition in three years.

Note the direction of that one. The software company bought the services company. The roster became distribution for the platform, not the other way around. Note the structure too. The founder rolled equity into the acquirer rather than taking all cash and leaving, which is what a buyer asks for when the relationships still matter.

Source: ArcticStartup

And the counterexample worth studying

On July 31, Razer acquired StreamElements. Terms were not disclosed, but this was a rescue.

StreamElements had been through several rounds of layoffs. Its founder had publicly asked users to donate to keep the service running. By May a shutdown looked imminent. The company sought a buyer to avoid collapse, and the acquisition is believed to have closed well below the roughly $111 million it had raised over its life. Razer bought the assets.

2.6 million creators used StreamElements daily. It was not enough.

That is enormous reach, and it was not enough.

Scale of usage is not enterprise value. A business can sit at the center of millions of creator workflows and still fail to convert that position into revenue a buyer will underwrite. When it does not, reach becomes a cost line, not an asset, and the outcome is an asset sale below invested capital.

This is the most useful transaction of the month for founders, precisely because it went badly.

Source: Tubefilter

What this means if you own one of these businesses

The diligence question has converged. It is now the same question in martech and in the creator economy.

It is no longer how large your audience is, which brands you serve, or which creators you represent. It is three things.

Can your revenue be attributed? Can a buyer trace what your business produced, inside their own system, without taking your word for it?

Does it recur? Project revenue and campaign revenue get discounted hard. Contracted, renewing, embedded revenue does not.

Does it survive you? If the relationships, the judgment and the selling all live with the founder, the buyer is not acquiring a company. They are hiring a person and paying goodwill for the privilege.

That is a harder test than most owners expect. It is also the fairer one, and it is the test that sets the multiple.

Businesses that pass own something. Proprietary data. Embedded customers. Attribution the buyer can verify. Workflow the client cannot easily rip out.

Businesses that fail sell access. Every strategic buyer already has access in house.

If you are two or three years out from a process, the work starts now, and it does not start with a banker. It starts with the parts of the business a buyer will underwrite.

If you want a candid read on where yours sits today, reply to this email. We will tell you straight, including when the answer is not yet.

Stellamont is a sell-side M&A advisory firm for founder-owned businesses in marketing infrastructure, software and SaaS, tech-enabled services, and the creator economy. We represent sellers exclusively, never buyers. stellamont.com

Subscribe now

It is a stack of related business models: talent representation, creator-led media, podcast networks, social commerce, influencer marketing software, live shopping, music rights and content licensing.

That is what made the recent activity notable. Buyers and investors were not just chasing creators as personalities. They were backing infrastructure, distribution, monetization rights, agency capability and commerce outcomes.

Below are the most notable publicly reported transactions and strategic announcements from the period, and what each one says about where capital is moving.

1. Unwell secured outside investment at a reported $500 million pre-money valuation

Company: Unwell
Investor: WTSL
Structure: Strategic minority investment
Valuation: Reported $500 million pre-money
Investment amount: Not disclosed

Unwell, the media company co-founded by Alex Cooper and Matt Kaplan, secured its first outside capital from WTSL, the investment firm led by former Endeavor executives Patrick Whitesell and Jason Lublin.

The headline number is the reported $500 million pre-money valuation. The investment amount and ownership percentage were not disclosed.

Unwell is important because it is not just a podcast company. Public reporting describes a platform spanning podcasts, video, live events, production, consumer products and brand work. That makes it a useful valuation marker for scaled creator-led media businesses that can extend audience into multiple revenue streams.

For buyers, the key diligence questions are not limited to downloads or followers. They include audience durability, host concentration, owned IP, ad revenue quality, renewal behavior, margin profile and the ability to monetize the same audience across audio, video, live, licensing and commerce.

Source: Axios

2. Acast acquired Backyard Ventures for $20 million

Buyer: Acast
Target: Backyard Ventures
Structure: Acquisition
Consideration: $20 million

Acast acquired Backyard Ventures, a U.S. creator and podcast sales network, for total consideration of $20 million, including $16 million in cash at closing and $4 million in deferred Acast shares.

Backyard Ventures brought more than 200 creators across audio, YouTube, newsletters and social. Acast also disclosed that Backyard generated $16.1 million of revenue in 2025 with a 12 percent adjusted EBITDA margin.

The strategic logic is straightforward. Podcast companies are increasingly trying to sell creator inventory across more than one channel. Audio alone is not enough. Advertisers want omnichannel creator reach, measurable campaigns and bundled inventory across podcasts, YouTube, newsletters and social.

This transaction is one of the cleaner examples of the creator economy moving from personality-led media to packaged, sellable, multi-format advertising inventory.

Source: Acast

3. Digital Brand Architects acquired V1sion Ventures

Buyer: Digital Brand Architects
Target: V1sion Ventures
Structure: Acquisition
Consideration: Not disclosed

Digital Brand Architects, the creator talent-management and influencer marketing business owned by UTA, acquired V1sion Ventures, a boutique creator talent-management firm founded by Alina Benun.

V1sion Ventures was founded in 2022 and focuses on creator representation, brand development and commercial partnerships. Benun and the V1sion team joined DBA as part of the transaction.

The transaction reinforces a continued consolidation theme in creator representation. Talent management remains fragmented, and buyers can use acquisitions to add creator rosters, manager relationships and category depth.

The diligence question is always retention. The value is tied to whether creators and managers stay after closing, whether contracts transfer cleanly, and whether the buyer can expand commercial opportunities without disrupting the creator relationship.

Source: Net Influencer

4. Chief Media acquired AMZ Advisers and AMZ Advisers’ stake in Reach Social

Buyer: Chief Media
Target: AMZ Advisers / Reach Social stake
Structure: Acquisition
Consideration: Not disclosed

Chief Media acquired AMZ Advisers and AMZ Advisers’ stake in Reach Social, a creator-led social commerce agency focused on TikTok Shop and retail-platform growth.

This is a social commerce capability acquisition. AMZ Advisers brings Amazon marketplace expertise, while Reach Social adds creator-led commerce and TikTok Shop capability.

The strategic rationale reflects a broader shift in the market. Brands do not just want influencer impressions. They want measurable commerce outcomes. Agencies that can connect creators, marketplace operations and retail conversion are likely to become more valuable as creator budgets move closer to performance marketing and retail media.

Source: GlobeNewswire

5. FUSE Create acquired a strategic stake in Sway Group

Investor: FUSE Create
Company: Sway Group
Structure: Strategic investment
Consideration: Not disclosed

FUSE Create acquired a strategic stake in Sway Group, an influencer marketing agency. Sway will remain independent and certified woman-owned.

This is not a full integration story. It is a strategic stake that gives Sway access to deeper creative strategy, PR, paid media and integrated campaign resources while preserving the identity and certification status of the business.

That structure is worth noting. In influencer marketing services, full acquisitions can create integration risk. Strategic stakes can give both sides commercial leverage without forcing a complete operating merger on day one.

Source: Sway Group

6. Whatnot reportedly raised $545 million at a $20 billion valuation

Company: Whatnot
Structure: Series G financing
Capital raised: Reported $545 million
Valuation: Reported $20 billion

Live-shopping marketplace Whatnot reportedly raised $545 million at a $20 billion valuation.

Whatnot combines marketplace infrastructure with live video, community and creator-led selling. Sellers host live broadcasts, interact with buyers and convert entertainment and expertise into real-time commerce.

The reported valuation matters because it highlights the strategic value of owning the transaction layer. Media companies monetize attention through ads and sponsorships. Commerce platforms can monetize the purchase itself.

That distinction is relevant across the creator economy. Businesses that can connect creator influence directly to GMV or attributable sales may command stronger interest than businesses that only measure impressions or engagement.

Source: Bloomberg

7. Amaze Holdings signed a non-binding LOI to invest in C2 Live

Investor: Amaze Holdings
Target: C2 Live
Structure: Strategic minority investment
Status: Announced LOI, not closed

Amaze Holdings entered into a non-binding letter of intent to make a strategic minority investment in C2 Live, a creator-first live social platform.

Because this is an LOI, it should be treated as announced and pending rather than closed. Still, it belongs on the watch list because it points to continued investor interest in creator monetization infrastructure, live social engagement and social commerce.

The creator economy has always had an attention problem and a monetization problem. Platforms like C2 Live sit in the middle: they try to give creators a more direct way to turn live audience engagement into commercial value.

Source: Amaze Holdings

8. The Podcast Consultant acquired Rise25

Buyer: The Podcast Consultant
Target: Rise25
Structure: Acquisition / merger
Consideration: Not disclosed

The Podcast Consultant acquired / merged with Rise25, a done-for-you B2B podcasting service. Dr. Jeremy Weisz will remain involved as Director of Client Success.

This is smaller than the Acast / Backyard transaction, but it points to the same direction: podcasting is becoming a services, content and distribution category with enough recurring client demand to support consolidation.

For B2B companies, podcasts increasingly function as relationship infrastructure. They create content, but they also create a reason to build executive relationships, support outbound sales and develop owned media. That makes podcast production and strategy attractive to buyers looking for recurring marketing-services revenue.

Source: Sounds Profitable

9. IPNation and Influence Media Partners launched a MENA music-rights investment platform

Platform: IPNation
Strategic partner: Influence Media Partners
Structure: Music and entertainment IP investment platform
Target deployment: $50 million to $100 million

IPNation and Influence Media Partners announced a platform dedicated to music and entertainment intellectual property across the Middle East and North Africa.

The platform is targeting $50 million to $100 million of deployment across approximately 10 to 20 catalog transactions, with expected individual ticket sizes ranging from $2 million to $10 million.

The strategy includes master recordings, publishing rights and name, image and likeness rights. It also reflects a broader trend: creator-owned and artist-owned intellectual property is becoming an institutional asset class.

For creators and rights holders, this widens the liquidity menu. A transaction does not have to be a full exit. Rights owners can sell a majority stake, sell a minority stake or structure partial liquidity while retaining participation in future upside.

Source: IPNation

10. Shashi Sinha invested in creator-intelligence platform Qoruz

Investor: Shashi Sinha
Company: Qoruz
Structure: Strategic investment
Investment amount: Not disclosed

Former Omnicom Media India strategic advisor Shashi Sinha invested in Qoruz, an India-based influencer marketing and creator-intelligence platform.

Qoruz provides tools for creator discovery, audience analysis, campaign planning, outreach, competitor monitoring and performance reporting. The investment amount was not disclosed.

The transaction reflects continued demand for creator marketing infrastructure. As brand budgets grow, marketers need more than a spreadsheet of influencers. They need workflow tools, verified data, brand-fit analysis, performance measurement and repeatable campaign management.

Platforms embedded in those workflows may benefit from recurring revenue and valuable campaign-level data.

Source: Marketing Mind

Other notable strategic announcements

Not every important item was an M&A transaction or financing. Several announcements during the period still matter because they show where the market is moving.

Disney signed a content deal with Dhar Mann Studios

Disney signed a content deal with Dhar Mann Studios, including an initial 20-episode series order. This is a clear signal that traditional media buyers continue to license and package scaled creator studio output directly.

Source: TheWrap

YouTube reportedly offered creators multimillion-dollar exclusivity packages

YouTube reportedly offered top creators multimillion-dollar incentives to keep their work off Netflix. These are not reported M&A transactions, but they matter because they show platforms using exclusivity economics to defend premium creator content.

Source: Business Insider

Publicis Sports and Travis Kelce’s TEKTA launched an NIL marketing offering

Publicis Sports and Travis Kelce’s TEKTA announced an NIL-focused marketing offering, with 3 Arts Sports as a strategic operating partner. The announcement shows holding companies turning creator and athlete activation into a more formal product for large brand clients.

Source: Publicis Groupe

Filmhub partnered with UnderCurrent

Filmhub announced a partnership with talent-management company UnderCurrent to help digital creators expand into distribution, licensing and original film and TV opportunities. This points to an increasingly active creator-to-studio pipeline.

Source: Yahoo / Variety

Amazon continued building creator services around commerce

Amazon’s creator services and creator ad partnership push reflects the same broader theme seen in Chief Media / Reach Social and Whatnot: creator marketing is moving closer to measurable commerce and retail media outcomes.

Source: Yahoo / Variety

What this says about the market

The recent activity points to six themes.

Creator media is institutionalizing.
Unwell and Acast / Backyard both show that scaled creator audiences can support real institutional capital and strategic M&A when the business has multiple monetization channels.

Talent representation remains a consolidation market.
DBA / V1sion shows that management rosters and creator relationships remain acquisition targets, especially for larger agencies with centralized sales and operating infrastructure.

Commerce is becoming the premium layer.
Whatnot, Chief Media / AMZ / Reach Social, Amaze / C2 Live and Amazon Creator Services all point in the same direction. Buyers want creator businesses that can connect influence to transactions.

Podcasting is becoming broader than podcasting.
Acast / Backyard and The Podcast Consultant / Rise25 show two versions of the same trend: podcast businesses are increasingly valued for their ability to create repeatable distribution, advertising and relationship infrastructure.

Creator IP is becoming financeable.
IPNation’s MENA music-rights platform reinforces that creator and artist rights can be underwritten as cash-flowing assets with additional upside from active commercialization.

Platforms are competing directly for creator supply.
Disney licensing Dhar Mann content and YouTube reportedly offering exclusivity packages both show that large platforms and media companies increasingly treat creators as premium content suppliers.

The creator economy is still fragmented, but the buyer logic is getting sharper.

The most valuable assets are not simply accounts with large followings. They are businesses with durable audience relationships, proprietary content, measurable monetization, transferable customer relationships and infrastructure that can scale beyond any one personality.

✦ Talk to Stellamont

Thinking about selling your agency, talent management firm, creator business, or media company? We advise founders on valuation, transaction preparation, and competitive sell-side processes across the creator economy.

Confidential Buyer Briefing

Stellamont is representing Project FastBreak, a Florida-based digital-first sports and creator management business. The company originates opportunities with brands and agencies, then fulfills those mandates through represented talent across athletes, creators, sports, and culture.

Read more

Building on Last Week’s Framework

Last week, we outlined five strategic pillars that make a creator business sellable: own a commercial niche, build brand-direct revenue, create repeatable services, ensure roster durability, and institutionalize operations.

That’s the what. This is the how.

If you’re running a creator-focused agency or service business, knowing what to build is only half the battle. The other half is executing it operationally. This post dives into the specific systems, team structures, revenue models, and processes that transform strategic intentions into buyer-ready assets.

Introduction

Influencer marketing is entering its next phase.

The winning model is no longer a one-off post, a large impression count, or a celebrity endorsement that is difficult to connect to revenue. Brands increasingly want creator partnerships that can produce content, test messaging, support paid media, and generate measurable customer acquisition.

That shift is visible in the way performance-focused agencies are building their offerings. Creator-generated content can be reused across paid social. Whitelisted campaigns allow brands to amplify content through a creator’s account. Ongoing creator relationships create a repeatable testing engine rather than a single campaign moment.

The result is a creator system with three connected functions:

• content production;

• customer acquisition; and

• performance learning.

Why This Matters for Business Valuations

This shift changes how buyers underwrite creator-economy businesses. Revenue tied primarily to one-off talent introductions or pass-through campaign spend is usually viewed as less durable. Revenue from recurring retainers, managed services, paid-media execution, creator-content production, affiliate programs, and measurable customer acquisition is more attractive because it can be repeated across clients.

The most valuable businesses can demonstrate:

• recurring or repeatable revenue rather than isolated campaign spikes;

• direct brand relationships that are not dependent on a single creator;

• gross margins that remain attractive after creator and contractor costs;

• campaign data showing conversion, customer acquisition cost, return on ad spend, or other commercial outcomes; and

• a team and process that can deliver across multiple clients without depending entirely on the founder.

Maximizing Value: Building a Business That Buyers Want

For owners preparing for a sale, the opportunity is clear. A creator roster helps generate attention, but a documented system for sourcing creators, producing content, testing creative, managing media, and proving results makes the business more transferable.

That transferability can improve buyer confidence, expand the strategic buyer universe, and support a stronger valuation.

1. Build Your Playbook Stack

Create documented systems that survive leadership change. This is what buyers actually pay for.

Build your content playbook. Document what works: messaging frameworks that drive conversions, content formats that perform, creative briefs that resonate. Codify your testing approach. How do you decide what to test? What metrics determine success? Make it repeatable enough that a new team member can execute it without hand-holding.

Document your creator sourcing process. How do you identify performers? What’s your screening criteria? How do you onboard and brief them? Build templates for creator briefs, performance expectations, and content delivery. Buyers want to know that tomorrow’s hired creator can hit results without you personally vetting them.

Create your media buying playbook. Outline your approach to audience targeting, bid strategy, creative rotation, and scaling winners. Document your budget allocation logic. Show that your media decisions are systematic, not intuitive.

Finally, build your measurement framework. Define what success looks like for every campaign type. Document how you track attribution. Show the pathway from creator content to customer acquisition. This is the moat. Buyers will replicate your team before they replicate your talent relationships, so make your data infrastructure bulletproof.

2. Shift Revenue to Recurring Models

Campaign fees are transactional and volatile. Buyers value predictability.

Move clients to retainer-based pricing for ongoing services. Structure it as a baseline monthly fee plus performance bonuses. This locks in revenue and gives buyers visibility into future cash flow. It also means your best performing client relationships become the most sticky.

Create managed service tiers. Offer “Creator Content Production” as a monthly service. “Paid Media Management” as a managed service. “Creative Testing and Optimization” as a retainer add-on. Break your value into repeatable functions that clients can purchase month after month.

Build affiliate and commission programs where applicable. If you’re driving trackable customer acquisition, take a percentage of new customer revenue. This creates an aligned incentive structure and recurring revenue that scales with client success, not your time.

Price your services to capture the value you create. If you’re driving measurable customer acquisition, your pricing should reflect that ROI, not just your hours. Buyers will pay more for proven revenue generation than for campaign management.

3. Make Your Client Relationships Transferable

The moment your biggest client says “I only work with the founder,” your valuation caps out. Fix this now.

Assign named account leads to every material client. Invest in training these people to own the relationship, not just execute the work. Have them present results. Have them participate in strategy calls. Make the client relationship belong to the team.

Create client review cadences that don’t depend on you. Quarterly business reviews with standardized decks and metrics. Monthly performance reviews. Weekly execution stand-ups. Systematize the communication so that if you step away, the client doesn’t feel abandoned.

Document your client success metrics. What does the client care about? Conversions? CAC? ROAS? Engagement lift? Create dashboards that show these metrics automatically, updated weekly. Make it boring for the client and for your team. Remove the need for heroic end-of-month analysis.

4. Scale Your Team Away from You

Founder-dependent businesses are valued at founder multiples, not business multiples.

Hire for the systems you’ve documented. A good operator can execute your playbook. You don’t need to hire replicas of yourself.

Build clear roles: a creative director who owns content output quality, a performance analyst who owns data and attribution, a client lead who owns relationships, a creator manager who owns outreach and retention. These roles scale independently.

Document decision rights. Who decides what to test? Who can approve media spend above X dollars? Who owns client escalations? Make it clear where the boundaries are. Buyers want to see that decisions don’t all flow through the founder.

Invest in junior team members with growth potential. Train them on your playbooks. Let them run smaller accounts or campaigns. When a buyer asks “What happens if the founder leaves?” you should have answer: “These three people can run the business without skipping a beat.” That’s worth millions in valuation.

5. Build Your Creator Network as an Asset

Talent relationships are personal, but networks are systematic.

Document your creator performance data. Which creators consistently hit your conversion targets? Which ones are reliable? Which have the strongest audiences for specific client verticals? Turn reputation into data.

Formalize your creator agreements. Make terms repeatable and clear. This way, onboarding new creators or expanding relationships doesn’t require founder negotiation every time.

Create creator tiers based on performance and reliability. Tier 1 creators get priority access to high-value campaigns. Tier 2 get regular mid-level campaigns. Tier 3 are bench players. This allows you to scale creator operations without the founder personally managing every relationship.

Offer recurring retainers to your best creators when it makes sense. Give them predictable income for monthly content obligations. This strengthens the relationship and gives you a cost structure buyers can forecast.

6. Institutionalize Your Performance Edge

What makes your creative better than competitors? What makes your media buying smarter? Make that a system, not a person.

Build a creative testing framework. Design and execute tests systematically. Track what performs. Share learnings across clients. The more you test, the more data you accumulate, the better your next campaign becomes. This is a learning moat that gets stronger over time.

Create performance benchmarks. For each client vertical or audience type, know what good CAC looks like. What conversion rates are realistic. What creative typically performs best. Compare every campaign against these benchmarks. This gives you an edge and gives buyers evidence that you have one.

Document your media spend logic. Why did you allocate 60% to channel A and 40% to channel B? Why did you pause campaign X and scale campaign Y? Write it down. Build a decision log. Buyers want to see that you’re making informed choices, not gut calls.

The Math on Valuation

Businesses with predictable recurring revenue, documented systems, scalable teams, and proven performance metrics trade at 6x to 9x EBITDA in the creator services and marketing services space.

Businesses that are founder-dependent, reliant on one-off campaigns, with transactional pricing and undocumented process, typically trade at 4x to 6x EBITDA.

On a $4M revenue business, the difference between trading at 4x EBITDA and 9x EBITDA is $8M in valuation.

Here’s the math:

• $4M revenue × 40% EBITDA margin = $1.6M EBITDA

• At 4x EBITDA: $1.6M × 4 = $6.4M valuation

• At 9x EBITDA: $1.6M × 9 = $14.4M valuation

• Difference: $14.4M - $6.4M = $8M

That premium exists for one reason: buyers will pay more for businesses they can scale without the founder.

Start building these systems today. They make your business stronger to operate. They make it more valuable to sell. And they make it more likely that your team can scale what you’ve built without you.

The market is moving away from “How many impressions did the campaign generate?” and toward “Can this system acquire customers, improve creative, and scale across clients?”

That is the distinction between influencer marketing as media spend and creator marketing as infrastructure.

Source: Influencer Advantage: The Creator Economy Is Shifting From Brand Awareness to Measurable Customer Acquisition

✦ Talk to Stellamont

Thinking about selling your agency, talent management firm, creator business, or media company? We advise founders on valuation, transaction preparation, and competitive sell-side processes across the creator economy.

Subscribe now

The creator economy is still being described as a talent business. That description is increasingly incomplete.

The most active buyers are not only looking for access to creators. They are looking for businesses that can help brands participate in culture, activate fandom, and produce measurable commercial outcomes at scale.

That matters for founders building agencies, management companies, creator platforms, and talent businesses. A roster can create attention. A repeatable operating model is what creates enterprise value.

The recent transaction pattern

Our latest review of June and July public announcements surfaced 13 supported transactions across creator media, commerce, software, music, and agencies.

Accenture Song agreed to acquire Whalar, adding a scaled creator and social agency to its customer-growth platform.

NextTrip acquired a controlling interest in YADA, adding a TikTok commerce agency to its creator, entertainment, and travel-commerce ecosystem.

Penske Media acquired Vox Media’s digital brands, including The Verge, Eater, SB Nation, Popsugar, and The Dodo.

LBG Media acquired 75% of Uncovered, bringing a Gen Z-focused social-first creative agency into its media platform.

ECD International acquired a majority stake in SC Media House, adding an influencer-marketing agency to its broader services platform.

Miroma Group took a majority stake in Ad Results Media, combining creator, audio, podcast, and performance media capabilities.

Podean acquired Social Commerce Club, expanding its TikTok Shop and social-commerce infrastructure.

AMZ Advisers acquired Reach Social Commerce, moving from Amazon growth services into TikTok Shop.

Wonderloom Media launched with the acquisition of Dr. Insanity, treating a YouTube-native business as scalable media IP.

Epidemic Group acquired Blenda Labs, adding AI-native video production capabilities to a music and sound platform.

Whatnot acquired Shaped, strengthening real-time discovery and personalization for live commerce.

Influencer Hero acquired Afluencer, combining campaign-management software with a creator marketplace.

SoundCloud acquired Nina Protocol, adding an independent-artist community, editorial archive, and discovery assets.

These are not identical transactions. Some add brand-facing agency capabilities. Some consolidate scaled audiences and media IP. Others add software, commerce, or production infrastructure.

The common thread is that buyers are acquiring strategic capabilities and operating systems, not simply lists of creators.

The distinction buyers are making

In a recent conversation with a large agency platform, the buyer described its acquisition strategy as an effort to build a more integrated agency. The focus was on sports, creators, experiential work, branded content, partnerships, and social activation: services that can be sold directly to brands and integrated into a broader client offering.

That is different from pure talent representation.

A representation business primarily earns commissions from contracts between talent and brands. It can be an excellent business, especially when the roster is differentiated and the relationships are durable. But a buyer evaluating an agency platform will ask a different set of questions:

• Does the company own the client relationship, or only the talent relationship?

• Can the service be sold repeatedly to brands without relying on one-off introductions?

• Is revenue generated from repeatable agency services, or mostly commissions passed through to talent?

• Can the team execute campaigns across creators, athletes, media, experiential, and content?

• Does the business add capability to an existing platform, or require the buyer to rebuild the model?

This is why some buyers are actively looking for agency-like businesses. An agency can be integrated into an existing sales machine, introduced to more brands, and scaled through shared creative, media, strategy, data, and production resources.

How a pure representation business becomes more sellable

The answer is not to stop representing talent. The answer is to build layers around the representation model.

1. Own a clear commercial niche

“We represent creators” is not a strong enough position by itself.

A more valuable business might own a defined intersection such as sports creators and betting brands, beauty creators and commerce, gaming and live events, or music creators and direct-to-fan monetization.

The narrower the commercial problem, the easier it is to explain why a buyer needs the business.

2. Build brand-direct revenue

Track the percentage of revenue that comes directly from brands, agencies, platforms, and recurring accounts. Separate it from pass-through talent economics.

Buyers want to understand net revenue, contribution margin, client concentration, renewal behavior, and the amount of work required to generate each dollar. Gross billings can look impressive while obscuring the actual economics of the business.

3. Turn relationships into repeatable services

Project work is useful, but repeatable services create more strategic value.

Examples include creator campaign management, brand partnership strategy, content production, experiential activation, social commerce execution, measurement, and ongoing account management.

The goal is to make the company useful even when a particular creator is unavailable.

4. Make the roster durable

Exclusivity helps, but it is not the only measure of roster quality. Buyers will look at contract duration, renewal history, revenue concentration, creator retention, audience quality, and whether the business can add new talent without losing its identity.

A roster should be an asset supported by systems, not a spreadsheet held together by personal relationships.

5. Institutionalize the operating system

Document how the company sources talent, prices campaigns, manages brand relationships, approves creative, tracks deliverables, collects cash, and reports performance.

The more the business depends on the founder’s memory, network, and personal ability to close every deal, the more the buyer is acquiring a job.

The more the company has repeatable processes, trained account owners, clean data, and visible pipeline, the more it resembles an asset.

Sources

Recent transaction announcements and public disclosures referenced in this article:

• Accenture Song — Accenture to Acquire Leading Creator and Social Agency Whalar from Whalar Group

• NextTrip — Form 8-K: Acquisition of Controlling Interest in YADA

• Penske Media — Penske Media Corporation Acquires Vox Media Brands

• LBG Media — LBG Media Acquires 75% of Uncovered

• ECD International / Clairfield — Majority Investment in SC Media House

• Miroma Group — Miroma Group Acquires Majority Stake in Ad Results Media

• Podean — Podean Acquires Social Commerce Club

• AMZ Advisers — AMZ Advisers Acquires Reach Social Commerce

• Wonderloom Media — Wonderloom Media Launches with Acquisition of Dr. Insanity

• Epidemic Group — Epidemic Group Acquires Blenda Labs

• Whatnot — Whatnot Acquires Shaped

• Influencer Hero — Afluencer Joins Influencer Hero

• SoundCloud — SoundCloud Acquires Nina Protocol

All transaction descriptions are based on publicly available company announcements, SEC filings, and press releases. Stellamont M&A is not advising on these transactions unless expressly stated.

✦ Talk to Stellamont

Thinking about selling your agency, talent management firm, creator business, or media company? We advise founders on valuation, transaction preparation, and competitive sell-side processes across the creator economy.

Subscribe now

Traditional entertainment is contracting while creator advertising and M&A continue to grow. The apparent contradiction disappears once you understand what buyers are actually acquiring.

A founder recently described what the last several years had done to her entertainment business.

Clients had left, most of the staff was gone, and domestic film and television production had slowed dramatically. New business was becoming harder to win, while the clients who remained were on month-to-month agreements and could leave at any time.

Her experience raises an uncomfortable question:

If the creator economy is growing, why are some entertainment and talent businesses struggling?

The answer is that “entertainment,” “media,” and “the creator economy” are not one market moving in one direction.

Traditional production is contracting while creator advertising continues to expand. M&A remains active, but buyers are becoming much more selective about the difference between a growing category and a transferable company.

That distinction matters for every founder considering a sale.

Two media economies are moving in opposite directions

The divergence is visible in both operating and advertising data.

Traditional production and creator advertising are moving in opposite directions. Sources: IAB and FilmLA; trend lines are conceptual rather than indexed time series.

The pressure on traditional entertainment is real.

FilmLA reported that Greater Los Angeles on-location production fell 16.1% in 2025 compared with 2024. Feature-film activity ended the year 31.7% below its five-year average.

Fewer productions mean fewer launches, fewer working actors, fewer publicity campaigns, and less spending across the network of firms that historically served Hollywood.

For a business whose revenue depends on domestic film and television production, this is not a temporary headline. It is an operating reality.

At the same time, creator-led advertising is moving in the other direction.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, U.S. creator advertising spend was projected to reach $37 billion in 2025, an increase of 26% year over year and nearly four times the growth rate of the broader media industry. IAB expects the figure to approach $44 billion in 2026. Nearly half of creator-ad buyers now consider creators a “must buy.”

The creator economy is not insulated from economic pressure. It is taking share from traditional media because brands increasingly see creators as a measurable distribution channel.

That money tends to reward businesses connected to:

• Influencer and creator campaigns

• Social-first creative

• Athlete and talent partnerships

• Performance marketing

• Affiliate and social commerce

• Owned audiences and intellectual property

• Audience data, attribution, and measurement

• Recurring brand relationships

It does not automatically reach every company with an entertainment logo or celebrity client list.

M&A is active but activity is not immunity

The same distinction appears in the transaction market.

Public-relations M&A slowed in 2025, with PRovoke Media and Davis+Gilbert identifying 80 transactions, down from 99 in 2024. Buyers increasingly favored integrated firms with differentiated capabilities, technology, analytics, healthcare exposure, and meaningful scale.

Activity then accelerated in the first half of 2026. Davis+Gilbert reported 44 completed PR and earned-media transactions, with more than 60% of sellers generating less than $6 million in revenue. Influencer and celebrity partnerships moved higher on buyers’ priority lists. Reputation and crisis management, data analytics, and content strategy remained in demand.

Creator-economy M&A has also remained active across agencies, talent management, media, software, commerce, and infrastructure.

But this does not mean buyers will acquire any business that operates in the category.

Instead, buyers are underwriting creator companies the same way they underwrite every other company:

• Is revenue growing?
• Is it recurring?
• Is it contractually durable?
• Is the customer or talent base concentrated?
• Are margins healthy?
• Can the business operate without the founder?
• Do the relationships transfer after a change of control?
• Is there a system behind the revenue—or only an individual?

The market may be growing while a particular company remains difficult to sell.

A category is not an asset

Consider three anonymized businesses.

The first is a traditional entertainment publicity boutique. It has recognizable clients and decades of relationships, but revenue has declined, the team has contracted, clients are month-to-month, and nearly every important relationship belongs to the founder.

The second represents athletes and digital creators, executes brand partnerships, has grown rapidly, and has signed revenue scheduled through the remainder of the year. It still faces concentration and founder-dependence risk, but buyers can see financial momentum and strategic scarcity.

The third represents a carefully curated roster of digital creators in attractive, brand-friendly consumer categories. Its niche aligns with consumer-brand spending, and the roster may support multi-creator campaigns, affiliate revenue, commerce, and owned products. But without financial statements, creator-level concentration, contract terms, and retention history, its strategic appeal remains a hypothesis rather than an underwritable transaction.

All three can be described as entertainment or creator-adjacent businesses.

Only the underlying evidence determines whether they are sellable.

Month-to-month revenue is not automatically worthless

Founders often assume that recurring billing equals recurring revenue.

Buyers make a finer distinction.

A monthly retainer that can be canceled tomorrow is not equivalent to a multi-year agreement. But contract duration is not the only evidence of durability.

A client that has renewed every month for eight years may demonstrate stronger behavioral retention than a newly signed one-year contract.

Buyers evaluate durability using multiple factors, including:

• Contract term and cancellation rights

• Historical client or talent tenure

• Gross and net revenue retention

• Churn by year

• Reason for each material departure

• Revenue concentration

• Relationship ownership inside the team

• Performance through previous market cycles

Month-to-month relationships become a valuation problem when they are combined with declining revenue, high concentration, and founder dependence.

The founder-dependence discount

Many service businesses begin because the founder is exceptional at the work.

That strength becomes a transaction risk when the founder remains the only reason clients stay.

If every client calls the founder, every employee relies on the founder, and every new engagement comes through the founder’s reputation, a buyer is not acquiring an autonomous company. The buyer is acquiring a relationship book plus the founder’s continued labor.

Those transactions can still happen, but the structure changes.

Instead of receiving the full price at closing, the founder may receive:

• A smaller upfront payment

• An earnout tied to retained revenue or gross profit

• A multi-year employment agreement

• Equity in the acquiring platform

• Additional payments as relationships transfer

This is why two firms with identical EBITDA can receive very different offers.

One has a leadership team, durable agreements, diversified revenue, and repeatable systems. The other has a talented founder and a collection of relationships that may disappear when the founder leaves.

What buyers are paying for now

Across creator, talent, media, and communications transactions, the premium attributes are becoming clearer.

1. Revenue engines, not audience narratives

Follower counts and recognizable names can open a buyer’s door. They do not complete diligence.

Buyers want evidence that attention converts into recurring revenue, commerce, licensing, subscriptions, brand partnerships, or owned intellectual property.

2. Diversified talent and clients

One creator, athlete, or client contributing a disproportionate share of income can materially reduce value. If that relationship leaves, the buyer’s investment thesis may disappear overnight.

3. Transferable contracts and relationships

The agreement must survive a transaction—or the person represented must be willing to affirmatively remain. Buyers will examine assignment clauses, change-of-control provisions, exclusivity, termination rights, and historical churn.

4. Leadership beneath the founder

Managers must own meaningful relationships. Finance must produce reliable information. Sales must originate opportunities without the founder. Operations must function through documented processes.

5. Data and measurement

Brands increasingly expect measurable outcomes. Agencies with audience intelligence, attribution, campaign analytics, and repeatable reporting are more valuable than firms relying only on personal judgment and access.

6. Profitable growth

The creator label does not excuse weak economics. Buyers still want healthy margins, controlled working capital, clean revenue recognition, and confidence that growth will not require expenses to rise at the same rate.

A founder’s sellability test

Before launching a transaction, a founder should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What percentage of revenue is truly recurring?

2. How much revenue comes from the largest client or creator? The top five?

3. How long have the most important relationships stayed?

4. Can contracts be assigned after a change of control?

5. Who owns each relationship besides the founder?

6. What has annual churn looked like for the last three years?

7. Can the company add meaningful revenue without doubling headcount?

8. Are gross billings and net agency revenue clearly separated?

9. What is adjusted EBITDA after paying the founder a market salary?

10. How long is the founder genuinely willing to remain after closing?

If those questions cannot be answered, the business may still have strategic potential. It is simply not ready for market.

The creator economy is growing up

The creator economy’s maturation is good news for founders—but maturity brings discipline.

Buyers are no longer paying simply for proximity to creators. They are paying for scalable systems, durable economics, proprietary access, differentiated capabilities, and companies that can survive a transition of ownership.

The opportunity is real. So is the divide.

Traditional entertainment businesses exposed to declining production may need to reposition toward creators, brands, reputation management, digital distribution, or measurable campaign services. Creator-native firms may need to reduce concentration, strengthen contracts, build leadership, and document recurring revenue before approaching buyers.

The strongest transaction story is not:

“We operate in the creator economy.”

It is:

“We built a durable revenue engine inside one of media’s fastest-growing channels—and that engine will continue after the founder steps back.”

That is what buyers are competing to own.

Sources

• FilmLA — Q4 and Full-Year 2025 Production Report

• Interactive Advertising Bureau — 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report

• Davis+Gilbert — Mid-Year 2026 PR M&A Tracker

• PRovoke Media — 2025 M&A Review

✦ Talk to Stellamont

Thinking about selling your agency, talent management firm, creator business, or media company? We advise founders on valuation, transaction preparation, and competitive sell-side processes across the creator economy.

Subscribe now

There is a framework that institutional investors use to time capital deployment into entire industries. It’s called the capital cycle. Marathon Asset Management built one of the most respected long-only funds in the world using it. The insight is simple: the best time to buy into an industry is when everyone else has given up on it. The best time to sell is when supply is constrained and strategic buyers are competing for assets.

The creator economy just finished three of the four stages. This isn't true for the entire space. New agencies still launch every day. But for the established, profitable tier, the cycle looks exactly like this.

The Cycle

Marathon’s framework breaks every industry into four phases:

Stage 1 — Investors Optimistic / New Entrants Flood In

Capital chases narrative. Everyone wants a piece of the opportunity. New firms launch, platforms raise at impossible multiples, and money enters faster than the market can absorb it.

For the creator economy, this was 2019 to 2022. Influencer marketing agencies raised rounds. Creator platforms were valued at 15x ARR. SPACs targeted UGC businesses. The pitch was simple: the internet is eating advertising, and these agencies own the relationships.

Stage 2 — Rising Competition / Returns Fall

Supply exceeds demand. Undifferentiated players compete on price. Clients get more selective. The firms that grew fast on the promise of scale start losing accounts.

This hit between 2022 and 2023. Brand performance budgets tightened as inflation rose. Agencies that couldn’t prove ROI lost retainers. The market started asking hard questions that the optimistic phase never had to answer.

Stage 3 — Investors Pessimistic / Firms Exit

Capital retreats. The narrative dies. VC moves to the next thing. Weaker operators close. Consolidation happens quietly, without fanfare, because nobody is writing about this sector anymore.

This was 2023 and 2024. Venture moved to AI. Mid-tier influencer agencies contracted or shut down. The firms that survived were leaner, more defensible, and running on real economics.

Stage 4 — Supply Contracts / The Cycle Turns

This is where we are now.

Marathon’s observation, backed by decades of equity research, is that the highest returns come not from chasing what is popular but from buying what has been abandoned and is now scarce.

The same logic applies to sell-side timing in M&A.

When an industry is in Stage 1, buyers overpay because they are competing on optimism. When it hits Stage 3, buyers pull back because the narrative is broken. But Stage 4 is different. Supply is contracted. The survivors are proven. And strategic buyers who missed the window in Stage 1 are now under pressure to acquire rather than build.

That is exactly the setup in the creator economy right now.

Publicis acquired Influential. UTA expanded its creator division. Havas is active. Night Media is acquiring. The buyers who sat out 2021 and 2022 because valuations were irrational are now moving -- because the assets that remain are worth acquiring and the price of waiting keeps going up.

What This Means If You Own One of These Businesses

If you built a creator economy business and survived the last three years, you are not just still standing. You are scarce. That scarcity has value -- but only if you move while the strategic window is open.

Capital cycles do not wait. Stage 4 does not last forever. The firms that sell into buyer competition extract significantly more value than the ones that wait until the next optimistic phase drives the narrative back up.

The question is not whether the market for your business exists. It does. The question is whether you are positioned to access it before the window closes.

✦ Talk to Stellamont

Stellamont advises founders of creator economy businesses on sell-side M&A. If you are thinking about a process in the next 12 to 18 months, reach out at ruben@stellamont.com.

The most expensive mistakes in a business sale happen before any document is signed. They happen in the first call with a buyer. A founder answers a question they didn’t need to answer. Reveals a number they shouldn’t have named yet. Enters a bilateral conversation without knowing the other side has run this exact process dozens of times.

Here is what that process looks like from the other side of the table, and what it costs to learn it during the deal rather than before it.

The deal starts before you know it’s happening.

When a strategic acquirer reaches out, they are already running a process. You are not. They want to learn how much you want to sell, whether you have other options, and how low the number can go. Every question in that early call is intelligence-gathering. Every answer is leverage you’ve surrendered before the negotiation has officially begun.

The side that wants the deal more loses. Professional buyers know this. They are trained to reveal as little desire as possible while drawing out as much as they can from the seller. Most founders walk into that dynamic without knowing it exists. By the time an advisor is brought in, the founder has already shared their ARR, explained their margins, disclosed why they’re open to a sale, and implicitly confirmed there’s no competition. The leverage is gone before the first offer arrives.

Price is a function of competition, not business value.

This is the most important thing to understand before entering any sale process. Your business has real value. But the price a buyer offers reflects how many other buyers they believe are in the room far more than it reflects the underlying business. A buyer negotiating with no competition offers what the model supports and nothing more. A buyer who believes they are competing against four credible acquirers offers what they need to win.

Here is what each scenario typically produces on a $10M ARR business:

• Single inbound buyer, no process — The buyer controls the price. Anchored below market.

• Structured competitive process, 6 to 12 buyers — The market controls the price. Competitive tension at top of range.

On a $10 million ARR business, the spread between a bilateral conversation and a structured competitive process is routinely $5 to $15 million. That is not a negotiation skill gap. That is a market structure gap. You cannot close it by being a better negotiator. You close it by running a different kind of sale.

The acquisition universe is almost always too small.

Most business owners come into a sale with a short list of obvious buyers. One or two strategics they’ve heard mentioned. Maybe a PE firm that reached out. The instinct is to focus on the most likely buyer and protect the relationship. That instinct is expensive.

Effective sell-side processes expand the buyer universe aggressively, including buyers who may seem like secondary fits. Not every participant is expected to close. Some are in the process to create pressure. In at least a quarter of the competitive processes we run, buyers with no realistic chance of closing force the eventual acquirer to pay more than they otherwise would have. That is not a coincidence. It is the design.

The right buyer universe sits between six and fifteen participants. Below six, there isn’t enough competitive pressure. Above fifteen, the process becomes cumbersome. High single digits, run simultaneously, is where the math consistently works in the seller’s favor.

A bidding process is not complicated. It is just rarely used.

Most sellers assume a structured competitive process means months of complexity and friction. The mechanics are simpler than that.

No asking price goes to market. Buyers have to bid to find the floor. Bids are closed: no buyer sees what anyone else offered. Rounds run simultaneously. Round one bids are due Thursday at 5 PM. All of them. Not one this week and one the next. All of them at the same time. Then the seller reviews the offers side by side and asks everyone still in the room to sharpen their number.

That is the structure. It exists because ninety percent of progress in any negotiation happens in the last ten percent of time. Imposed deadlines compress that into the seller’s timeline, not the buyer’s. A buyer chasing a deadline they didn’t set is a buyer who can’t control the pace. That is exactly where a seller wants them.

Founders who negotiate their own sales give up the result before it starts.

This is not a question of intelligence or preparation. Business owners are structurally disadvantaged when negotiating their own sales for reasons that have nothing to do with capability.

Your identity is tied to the business. Your employees are on the line. The number being discussed is the largest check you have ever seen. And the person across from you has done this exact deal 20 to 40 times. They are trained to read when a seller is nervous, when they’d take the lower number, when the walk-away is a bluff. They see it before you know you’re projecting it.

The value of a dedicated sell-side advisor is not just buyer access. It is the insulation between the seller and that exposure. The advisor takes the heat. Makes the difficult asks. Has the uncomfortable conversations. And because the advisor is not the decision-maker, they can say “I’ll bring that back to my client.” Buyers use that phrase against sellers every single day. It is far more powerful when the seller’s team says it first.

"The price you walk away with is not a reflection of your business's value. It is a reflection of how many buyers had to compete to get it. Those two numbers are often far apart."

The right time to think about this.

If you are fielding inbound interest or beginning to think seriously about a sale in the next one to two years, the most useful conversation you can have right now is not with the buyer who called. It is with someone who already knows which companies are actively acquiring in your space, what they paid in the last 12 months, and how your business sits against their criteria.

The founders who get the best outcomes are not the ones who waited for the right offer. They are the ones who understood the market before any buyer knew they were thinking about it. That knowledge changes what you say, what you don’t say, and how the process gets structured when the time comes.

A 30-minute conversation, under NDA, at no cost, is enough to tell you whether the timing and the value are there. That is where this starts.

✦ Talk to Stellamont

If you’re considering a sale or fielding acquisition interest, we’ll give you an honest read on value, the active buyer landscape in your space, and what a competitive process would actually look like for your business. No cost, no commitment.

Accenture just paid roughly $500M for Whalar.

The deal closed in June 2026. Whalar is a 170-person creator and social agency. The kind of business a lot of people in this industry would call a “lifestyle company.” Accenture called it a strategic acquisition and wrote a nine-figure check.

Industry observers called it the largest creator economy transaction on record.

That framing matters. Not because of the headline number, but because of who bought it. Accenture is not a media company. They are a $200B management and technology consulting firm. When firms like Accenture start buying creator agencies, they are not dipping their toe in. They are making a structural bet that creator infrastructure is core business infrastructure.

The week Accenture announced Whalar, CAA and TPG announced a $250M acquisition vehicle specifically to buy creator economy businesses. The week before that, Publicis paid $500M+ to acquire 160over90 from WME.

Three deals. Three weeks. Over a billion dollars deployed.

This is not a trend. It is a cycle completing. The creator economy spent 10 years proving itself. Now the institutions are here to buy what the founders built.

If you own a founder-led agency or creator business, the question is no longer whether buyers are active. The question is whether you will be ready when one calls you.

Stellamont is a strictly sell-side M&A advisory firm. We represent founders only, never buyers. stellamont.com