Distllr

The Why’s of TikTok

The Why’s of TikTok I saw the headlines about the TikTok deal on Thursday and didn’t rush to say anything. I wanted to see what survived the weekend—what was signal and what was noise. After sitting with it, the only honest way to read this is through two different “whys.” There’s the reason the deal […]

YouTube’s Pied Piper

YouTube’s Pied Piper MrBeast is the pied piper of kids on YouTube. He marches them from videos to merch to candy to sweepstakes to feel-good fundraisers—and calls it generosity. It isn’t. It’s a conversion machine built for children. CARU already mapped the failures: disclosures kids won’t see, “no purchase necessary” hidden behind friction, and data […]

From Stacks to Stack — App Layer, Ads, FAST, and Live

From Stacks to Stack — App Layer, Ads, FAST, and Live When Warner Bros. Discovery announced the HBO Max rebrand to “Max” in April 2023, executives promised seamless technical integration with Discovery+ content. This was part of a larger consolidation strategy first announced in 2022, designed to combine WBD’s two streaming platforms into a unified […]

The Great Acceleration: Why Time-Based Moats Are Dead

The Great Acceleration: Why Time-Based Moats Are Dead AI didn’t just speed up software; it collapsed time as a source of defensibility. If your edge relied on “we’ve been building this for years,” assume it’s perishable. The durable advantage now is a system that learns faster than rivals—what I’ll call a kinetic moat. Randy Wootton’s […]

People, Not Packets — The Hardest Part Is Identity & Profiles

People, Not Packets — The Hardest Part Is Identity & Profiles When HBO Max became “Max” in May 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery promised a “seamless transition” for users. Instead, Twitter exploded with complaints: login failures, apps that crashed mid-show, watchlists that lost their alphabetical sorting, and recommendation engines that suddenly felt foreign. One user tweeted, […]

One Stack or Bust: The 18-Month War for Streaming’s Future

One Stack or Bust: The 18-Month War for Streaming’s Future Pull-quote: This isn’t “integrate carefully.” It’s consolidate decisively—one app, one backend, one identity graph. The Bleeding Warner Bros. Discovery burns through $2 billion in quarterly losses while servicing $35 billion in debt. Paramount Global, fresh from its Skydance acquisition, faces its own cash hemorrhaging as […]

The YouTube TV-Univision Fight Exposes Streaming’s Bundle Problem

The YouTube TV-Univision Fight Exposes Streaming’s Bundle Problem YouTube TV is facing one of traditional television’s ugliest battles, and it reveals why streaming platforms can’t escape the economic realities that have plagued cable for decades. TelevisaUnivision just accused YouTube TV of imposing a “Hispanic Tax” for trying to move Univision into a $15 Spanish-language tier […]

PR All The Way Down

PR All the Way Down: Why AI Can’t Tell Corporate Myth from Reality How artificial intelligence amplifies business mythology because the entire information ecosystem is built on corporate narratives Pull‑quote: You can’t automate skepticism—but you can teach it. I was researching a piece about the recent Bending Spoons acquisition of Vimeo—trying to understand how a […]

No Bars, No Benefit

No Bars, No Benefit Why a MrBeast Phone Company Is the Wrong Kind of Creator Power TL;DR: Know your customer — the bill payer, not the fan. A creator-branded MVNO is a commodity reseller in a saturated market with high churn and a buyer mismatch (kids don’t pay the bill — parents do). Cable MVNOs win because they’re bundled with something […]

Why YouTube’s NFL Stream Was Actually a Win

Why YouTube’s NFL Stream Was Actually a Win The real story behind those “disappointing” international numbers YouTube’s first NFL stream is getting roasted for low global viewership, but the critics are missing the point entirely. Media executive Hernan Lopez recently highlighted the puzzle: YouTube’s Chiefs vs. Chargers game drew 17 million viewers globally, but only […]

Disney’s COPPA Deal Isn’t About $10M. It’s About Who Controls the Defaults.

Disney’s COPPA Deal Isn’t About $10M. It’s About Who Controls the Defaults. When a trusted kids’ brand runs on someone else’s settings, the platform’s incentives become the law of the land. TL;DR: The real story isn’t Disney’s fine; it’s that defaults decide outcomes. Mislabeling kids’ videos on YouTube isn’t a one-off error—it’s a governance failure […]

White Hat, Black Box

White Hat, Black Box When Big Tech “Helps” Education It sounds like a win for access: hundreds of classic Sesame Street episodes are coming to YouTube. But in the age of algorithmic childhood, the real lesson might be about platform power—not preschool education. Starting in January, YouTube will become the largest digital library of Sesame […]

Instagram Didn’t Ship an iPad App — It Put a TV at the Front Door

Instagram Didn’t Ship an iPad App — It Put a TV at the Front Door A Reels-first tablet UI makes the distribution strategy visible. Fifteen years after launch, Instagram finally shipped an iPad app—and the default is Reels. Not your photo feed. Not your friends. The front door is a full-screen, lean-back video stream. That […]

The Hidden Infrastructure Layer That Will Define Subscription Commerce

The Hidden Infrastructure Layer That Will Define Subscription Commerce The subscription economy has hit an inflection point. Billing is easy. Orchestration isn’t. Most teams still treat subscriptions as a monthly charge with a cancel button. Real life is messier: mid-cycle upgrades and downgrades, proration, pauses, add-ons, household sharing, cross-service bundles, free trials that shouldn’t stack, […]

The Business of Fake Friends: A History of Exploiting Loneliness

The Business of Fake Friends: A History of Exploiting Loneliness How 75 years of manufactured intimacy led to the children’s crisis we face today If you believe the social media crisis is a new problem, a modern glitch in the system, you’d be missing the point. The platforms, the algorithms, the toxic features — they […]

The Sameness Trap: Why Platforms Reward Conformity Over Greatness

The Sameness Trap: Why Platforms Reward Conformity Over Greatness In a recent episode of Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast, Tobias Lütke, the founder of Shopify, shared a maxim that struck a chord: You must be different to have any chance at being great. If you aspire to fit in, to be the same, you have no […]

The Kids Aren’t Alright

The Kids Aren’t Alright Platforms profit from children. Parents profit from platforms. Snapchat’s stock just tanked. A new class-action lawsuit claims executives misled investors about user growth and competitive threats from Instagram — wiping billions off the market cap overnight. Investors are furious. But not about Snapchat’s product design. Not about youth-targeted features exploited by […]

Jake Paul’s Circus Can’t Touch This: Bundesliga’s YouTube Power Play

Jake Paul’s Circus Can’t Touch This Bundesliga’s YouTube Power Play While Jake Paul was parading around Studio City selling another pay-per-view circus dressed up as sport, the Bundesliga quietly dropped a move that actually matters: they’ve given YouTube creators Mark Goldbridge (That’s Football) and Gary Neville’s The Overlap the rights to stream 20 live Friday night matches in […]

Dear Jim, Don’t Fuck Around With the Cuban

Dear Jim, Don’t Fuck Around With the Cuban Every morning, I walk the hills above my home. The road ends where the Santa Monica Mountains begin, and I walk with headphones on. Today: The Fifties by David Halberstam, a chapter on I Love Lucy. It’s a story from seventy years ago that mirrors the creator […]

Chrome’s Future Isn’t for Sale — If It Were, It Should Belong to Everyone

Chrome’s Future Isn’t for Sale — If It Were, It Should Belong to Everyone Last week, Perplexity claimed it wanted to buy Google Chrome for $34.5 billion. It made for easy headlines — but it wasn’t real. Google isn’t selling Chrome. No process. No talks. Not on the table. And even if it were, the problem isn’t just […]

Placeholder Products

Placeholder Products What Roku’s Howdy and Fox One tell us about the future of direct-to-consumer streaming Two new streaming services were announced this week. Neither is built to win.Neither is designed to grow.Neither is really meant for you. Howdy   Roku’s new service is called Howdy.$2.99/month. No ads. No originals. Just a lightly repackaged catalog […]

fractional leadership + the outsider advantage

fractional leadership + the outsider advantage big companies. small companies. the pattern is the same: leadership waits too long to bring in senior strategy — not because they don’t see the need, but because they can’t afford it the traditional way: hiring a full-time executive. and when they finally do pull the trigger,it takes more […]

Superbundling: The Coming Platform Wars

Superbundling: The Coming Platform Wars Everyone in streaming talks about “bundles” like they just invented it. Bundle services, reduce churn, call it innovation. That’s not bundling. That’s billing. The real opportunity isn’t in payment aggregation — it’s in behavioral orchestration. And most operators are still building for a market they don’t truly control. Eighteen months […]

The Gates Were Power

The Gates Were Power “There’s something sacred about walking through the gates of Paramount, Warner Bros, Sony, Fox or Disney.”— Gary Lucchesi, producer (Million Dollar Baby), former president of Lakeshore Entertainment, at the AVP Summit, Merano, Italy, July 2025 That line wasn’t spoken at Comic‑Con.It was shared—without irony—at an invitation-only summit of Hollywood’s most successful […]

Everyone’s a Platform. No One’s in Control.

Everyone’s a Platform. No One’s in Control. Stephen Colbert is out at CBS.Substack just raised another $100 million.Ben Thompson mapped how AI removed the final creative bottleneck. Different headlines—but they all point to the same pattern. Control is breaking where it used to live: in institutions, in formats, in scale.What’s replacing it is something messier, […]

The Platform Wars: Beauty on LinkedIn and the Battle for Creator Loyalty

The Platform Wars: Beauty on LinkedIn and the Battle for Creator Loyalty Unilever, TikTok, and Instagram just revealed where the creator economy is headed next I missed three stories this weekend — which bothers me more than it should. First: Unilever ran a beauty influencer campaign on LinkedIn. Yes — LinkedIn. Second: Meta started offering […]

The AI War Is Here. Here’s How Creators and Small Businesses Can Win.

The AI War Is Here. Here’s How Creators and Small Businesses Can Win. AI is changing everything about how content gets made, distributed, and monetized — and if you’re a creator, publisher, or small business that relies on original content, it’s already affecting you. The truth is, AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have […]

Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is FAST: Rethinking the Next Wave of Streaming

Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is FAST: Rethinking the Next Wave of Streaming In an age of infinite content and zero patience, everything feels like it’s moving faster — shorter videos, tighter loops, faster scrolls, autoplay defaults. But ask anyone trying to build something that lasts, and you’ll hear a different mantra: Slow is smooth. Smooth […]

Creators: The Game Is Changing. Are You Ready?

Creators: The Game Is Changing. Are You Ready? AI, algorithms, and Big Tech are reshaping the creator economy at warp speed. If you’re not adapting, you’re at risk. The good news? If you understand the threats and move strategically, you can future-proof your business, own your audience, and thrive in the chaos. Here’s your playbook […]

AI, Generalists, and the New Tipping Point

AI, Generalists, and the New Tipping Point A few years ago, I read Range by David Epstein and found it compelling. The core idea — that generalists thrive in complex, unpredictable environments — resonated with me. I’ve spent my career at the intersection of business strategy, media, and technology, moving across disciplines and industries. Back […]

The Platforms Never Really Loved Creators — They Just Needed Them

The Platforms Never Really Loved Creators — They Just Needed Them For the better part of a decade, creators were the beating heart of social media. They gave platforms a reason for users to come back: personalities with a point of view, communities built on trust, and content that felt human. In return, creators were […]

Tariffs, Tight Wallets, and the Creator Economy Squeeze

Tariffs, Tight Wallets, and the Creator Economy Squeeze Tariffs. Inflation. Flatlining fan spend. The headlines make it sound like a macro story. But zoom in and you’ll see where it lands first: independent creators, small shops, and one-person brands—the very people powering the internet’s creative engine. Trump’s latest tariff push is framed as a trade […]

Netflix, Fungible Creators, and the Shrinking Pie for Everyone Else

Netflix, Fungible Creators, and the Shrinking Pie for Everyone Else Netflix’s new move into video podcasts isn’t just about diversifying formats. It’s about owning the next frontier of social commerce—and doing it in a way that cuts traditional creators out of the value chain. The premise is smart. Build podcast-style shows around known hosts and […]

Are Movies Really Back? Depends on Who You Ask

Are Movies Really Back? Depends on Who You Ask Lately, there’s been a lot of noise about Hollywood’s big comeback. The headlines are glowing: theaters are booming, teens are back, movies are having a moment again. At first, I wanted to believe it. But something felt off—so I took a closer look at the numbers […]

For Gen Z and Gen A, Creators Aren’t the Alternative—They’re the Default

For Gen Z and Gen A, Creators Aren’t the Alternative—They’re the Default A new Deloitte study just confirmed what many of us already knew in our bones:For younger audiences, creator content isn’t a niche—it’s the center of gravity. Gen Z now prefers creator-driven video over traditional TV and film.And Gen Alpha? They’re growing up with […]