Good afternoon, and welcome to the seventh issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• Virgin Voyages hosted a party at sea for 1,000 creators to document.

• Ba Thức Food used TikTok LIVE Shopping Ads to achieve 23.7x ROAS.

• Bilibili relaunches globally to attract Western creators.

Virgin Voyages hosted a party at sea for 1,000 creators to document.

Continuing with my Vietnam series, this is a really cool story that I read about which made me go like I should share this one with you guys.

The Business Case →

The cruise line partnered with TikTok to pull off what they’re calling a Creator Voyage mobilizing over 1,000 nano, micro, macro, and VIP creators to sail with the brand and post from onboard in real time.

It was all done just to make content that feels native to TikTok.

The results were hard to ignore. The campaign generated over 20M+ video views, triggered over 3000+ organic posts from the broader community, and drove almost 700% increase in TikTok-referred traffic to the Virgin Voyages website.

The infrastructure behind it matters too. Virgin worked with TikTok Creative Exchange partner to build a custom Creator-led package, handling onboarding, contracts, and content deliverables for 1,000+ creators at scale.

They also locked in 180-day usage rights through TikTok’s Branded Buzz solution, which let them take the highest-performing creator videos and push them through paid amplification without losing the authentic, creator-first feel that made them work in the first place.

My POV: In the previous edition I had covered how authenticity is winning over the internet, backing the story with proof. This is an example of why that’s the case. What once paid ads did for brands, creator-led GTM is doing at the moment.

Ba Thức Food used TikTok LIVE Shopping Ads to achieve 23.7x ROAS.

Ba Thức Food is a Vietnamese dried beef snack brand, and their TikTok story is one of the cleanest small-business turnarounds I’ve come across. Think of it as a business turning itself into a creator.

The Business Case →

The offline sales of the brand were dropping. So Ba Thức Food did what more and more Vietnamese brands are doing, they moved the store to TikTok.

They started by making high-quality self-produced videos that pulled in millions of views and built a loyal following. To get the money in they layered in two tools: Video Shopping Ads (VSA), which put shoppable product cards directly inside their best-performing videos on the For You feed, and LIVE Shopping Ads (LSA), which pushed their livestreams out to users who hadn’t found them yet.

The livestream piece is worth slowing down on. Once a viewer clicked in, they could browse products, ask questions in the live comments, and buy all without leaving the app. It’s basically a virtual store, running in real time, with a host who can answer any objection on the spot.

The numbers that came out of this were crazy.

• 23.7x ROAS on live shopping ads

• 10.4x ROAS on video shopping ads

• 15% on-site complete payment rate, and

• Over 2,000+ completed purchase events.

Their videos also hit the trending leaderboard in Vietnam, which compounded the organic reach on top of everything else.

My POV: Ba Thức Food is a masterclass in sequencing. First earn attention organically, then amplify what’s already working with paid. Most small brands do it backwards, they pay before they’ve proved anything. These guys proved it first, then put money behind the proof.

Bilibili relaunches globally to attract Western creators.

This one is big and honestly, not enough people in the creator world are talking about it yet.

The Business Case →

Bilibili, China’s answer to YouTube, just went global. The Shanghai-based platform has more than 300 million monthly active users, and until recently, it was almost impossible to use if you weren’t in China.

Uploading required government ID verification, a passport, a national ID card. Most international creators didn’t even bother. That wall is now gone. The relaunched international app only needs an email address or phone number to sign up. It’s live on Android, with iOS coming soon. And according to Bilibili themselves, the Chinese and global versions of the platform carry the same content library.

Here’s what makes it genuinely interesting for creators. Bilibili Studio, their creator services hub, automatically translates uploaded videos into Chinese for the domestic audience.

You upload once, in English, and the platform handles the localization into a market that YouTube can’t even reach.

YouTube is blocked in mainland China. That’s a billion-person audience that most creators have had zero access to.

My POV: I first discovered the platform when Varun Maya’s team put their game trailer on it and it was received really well. The same opportunity could exist for creators outside China. In return, the world could discover entirely new ways of creating content emerging from China.

🗞 Creator Gossip

• Adidas and Puma are both reviving their iconic originals, tapping nostalgia and heritage to make classic designs feel culturally relevant again.

• Chicken Shop Date is coming to a close, marking the end of one of YouTube’s most distinctive creator-led interview formats.

• Media investment firm WTSL just invested in the world’s most valuable female creator, highlighting how female-led creator businesses are becoming major forces in the global media economy.

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Good afternoon, and welcome to the sixth issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• Vietnam’s creative economy is turning into a $95B beast.

• How a small Independent newspaper still manages to find its readers.

• Why are tech companies & VCs wanting to own a piece of the creator economy.

Vietnam’s creative economy is turning into a $95B beast.

I’m in Vietnam right now, and as I write this edition of Creator Games, I wondered what the creator economy looks like here. So, I read up a few articles, understood the sectors that are booming, and creators that have benefited the most. So here’s a brief breakdown.

The Business Case →

According to The Art and Science of Authenticity report, Vietnam’s creator economy is on track to generate $95 billion in commercial value by 2030. The report argued that polished content is losing, 3 in 4 people skip content that appears overly polished or inauthentic.

In Vietnam specifically, the pull toward raw, real content is even stronger than the regional average. 95% of Vietnamese consumers say authentic content directly influences their purchase decisions and Vietnamese audiences are 1.3x more influenced by livestream content than the APAC average.

The case study TikTok leads with for Vietnam is about Jayni (@Jaynitravel), who transformed a career setback into a cultural storytelling platform, driving 87x revenue growth and 94x commission volume between 2024 and 2025.

And the other story is about PewPew. He built his name as one of Vietnam’s early gaming streamers before turning to TikTok Shop in 2023. His “Tạp hóa PewPew” (Pewpew’s General Store) channel quickly took off, mixing livestream commerce with his trademark humour and no-nonsense style, reaching 1 million followers within a year.

In the broader scheme of things, creator-led marketing is also expanding well beyond lifestyle. Gaming, financial services, consumer electronics, and mobile apps are emerging as the next wave, with brands in these categories using creators not just for awareness but to drive direct purchase decisions.

On the supply side, the platform’s monetized creator base has grown significantly. The number of monetized creators on TikTok grew 1,267% year-on-year as of Q3 2025.

The AI layer is also accelerating output. TikTok’s Symphony tool let Unilever’s Vaseline campaign generate 2,000 images and 300+ creator-ready videos in just three days. Two in three consumers across APAC now say they want brands and creators to use AI-generated content and TikTok users show 1.5x more interest in AI-enhanced content than users on other platforms.

My POV: The biggest takeaway after reading the report is to be “Flawsome”, that is to be awesome despite your flaws and that’s what’s attracting the viewers the most.

How a small Independent newspaper still manages to find its readers.

So, the next story is really interesting. Perhaps the times we live in make it even more relevant. When Chaymae shared this with me a few weeks ago, I knew I had to share it with you.

Newspapers have been an integral part of my life. I’ve run for them, fought with my friends over them, skipped morning school assemblies just to get my hands on them, scrolled through the sports section, and been the first to know what was happening in the world of sports.

For me, newspapers were the only source of information before I got access to the internet at school. So, when I read the story about the Chronicle, I just wanted to write about it. Because, in some sense, they were the creators of the century before the ones we’re so familiar with today.

The Business Case →

Mark Frost founded The Chronicle in Glens Falls, New York in 1980 on a $1,700 investment. It took nine years to turn a profit. Today it’s still running, free, weekly, print in a media landscape that has swallowed nearly 3,500 newspapers since the mid-2000s.

The Chronicle prints 20,000 copies a week and blasts a digital replica to another 20,000 email subscribers every Thursday. It covers town hall meetings, school board decisions, restaurant openings, parking disputes, and the occasional rattlesnake attack.

Frost, now 75, does most of the work himself. Every Thursday morning he loads bundles into a Subaru Forester and drives them to drop-off points across the region.

At one Hannaford grocery store, a 74-year-old named William Norton waits in his truck to collect 40 copies for his neighbors in Stony Creek, a town so isolated that, as Norton put it, “that’s all they got to read over there.”

The model is free-to-reader, ad-supported, and deeply local. Frost has turned down multiple overtures to replicate it in other communities. His stated ambition: build one great newspaper.

That clarity of purpose has made it resilient. According to Northwestern University’s local news project, independent weeklies like The Chronicle have been “relatively resilient” precisely because large newspaper chains can’t be bothered with them.

The pandemic nearly finished it. The Chronicle went from a staff of 12 to four. But it has since been rebuilt to seven. A 44-page graduation issue in June 2026 was the biggest in six years.

But another challenge looms, as Frost grows older, succession planning is becoming a pressing question. His son has been contributing significantly to the business since his comedy career came to a stop. But I’m sure the Chronicle will handle this challenge just as it has handled the others over the years.

My POV: I love how community-led-infrastructure can turn content into personalised experience instead of just chasing scale.

Why are VCs wanting to own a piece of the social economy.

The recent Business Insider’s third annual list of VCs backing social startups showed interesting trends. For one, they are trying to make the internet social again. Here’s how:

The Business Case →

The original social media giants had a simple premise. Connect people. Then they got big, discovered advertising, and became media companies. All of them optimized for attention over connection.

That pivot left a gap. And now venture capital wants to fill it.

The thesis is simple: helping people connect with other people. And a lot VC firms including Menlo Ventures, Forerunner, A16z, Verdict Capital, and Premise are venturing into these five categories right now:

1. Vibe coding as social: Wabi and Sekai let people build, share and remix mini apps with AI. The idea is simple: people don’t just want to watch, they want to create.

2. Dating, rebuilt: AI dating startups like Overtone, Sitch and Known are trying to rethink matchmaking, rather than just build another dating app.

3. IRL social: Posh, Corner and others are using technology to get people off their screens and into real-world experiences.

4. AI as a social assistant: Startups like Town and Eigen are exploring whether AI can help us manage relationships and even discover new ones.

5. AI-powered entertainment: Suno, Lore and Status are making entertainment more participatory, letting people create, play and engage rather than just consume.

My POV: The internet was all about creating content, distributing and gaining followers, but now what VCs are betting on is participation, with AI making it possible to build for individuals, not just audiences.

And that could reshape the creator economy. It was built on one-to-many: creators broadcast, audiences consume. But if everyone can create, remix and build, where does the creator end and the audience begin?

🗞 Creator Gossip

• This creator surpassed a million followers after 17 years of creating content. Talk about playing the long game.

• Paramount is getting into microdramas, bringing short, TikTok-style shows to mobile streaming as Hollywood chases the next big way to keep audiences hooked.

• Another week, and celebrities deciding they want their own corner of YouTube. Hollywood is increasingly realizing that owning the audience beats renting it from traditional media.

• Ted Lasso is using fashion in a surprisingly clever way and turning what characters wear into part of the storytelling. Apparently, the wardrobe department has entered the content strategy chat.

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Good afternoon, and welcome to the fifth issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• This founder turned Cursor into an AI buddy that teaches you

• This founder built a global creator army for Korean brands

• Brands are handing creators the brief

This founder turned Cursor into an AI buddy that teaches you

I was introduced to Farza during his buildspace days. He struck me as a founder who is cool, deeply online, and understands content and community really well. And that’s what makes him really special.

So this issue, we chat with a creator-founder whose curiosity has taken him from childhood side hustles to building Clicky. And what his journey tells us more about creator founders.

The Business Case →

Farza grew up in Florida, and as a teenager, he was already experimenting with ways to make money online like selling games and other products on ebay.

He built Zip School, as a tool to help parents navigate homeschooling. Post pandemic, changed into live online classes for kids. That’s when he was admitted to Y-combinator in 2020.

Later, in Dec 2021 he launched buildspace, and in Nov 2022 that caught a16z’ attention.

After successfully growing buildspace to 120,000 builders at its peak, raised $10M led by a16z, he shut down in August 2024. It was kind of a shock to me personally, because it felt like he was onto something big.

Later, he started shipping small experiments again. To be honest, I remember watching his first YouTube video when he was back, it kind of got me excited on what he was building next.

So finally, in April 2026, he posted a demo on X. It showed a tiny animated blue companion sitting next to his cursor on his Mac screen. The companion moved with the cursor, could see the screen in real time, listened to voice commands, and talked back.

When it needed to show him where a button was, it physically pointed at it, an animated cursor flying to the exact pixel. He’d been using it to learn DaVinci Resolve. He called it Clicky.

The demo hit roughly 3 million views. The open-source repo crossed 6,300 GitHub stars almost immediately.

The whole thing started as a weekend project. Within weeks, it became HeyClicky and Farza was back in Y Combinator, his second batch, this time without even applying.

The experience is what makes it stand out. Most AI tools ask you to switch contexts, open a chatbox, describe what’s on your screen, paste in the error. Clicky skips all of that.

It’s already looking at what you’re looking at. The burden of communication drops. You don’t explain the problem, you just ask what to do next.

My POV: You know what’s best about creator products is that you are somehow attached to that creator without even knowing them personally. They trust their taste, follow their journey and want to see what they build next.

That gives creators a huge advantage. They already have people who can test the product, validate the idea and speed up the feedback loop.

The startup still has to go through the difficult 0 to 1 journey, of course. But solving for the first 1,000 true fans the hardest part for most startups becomes a little easier.

And that’s why I think creator-founders will continue to have an edge in the product race. It’s not just about having an audience. It’s about having distribution, trust and a community they can build with from day one.

This founder built a global creator army for Korean brands

So, a few years ago, my friend’s sister started a Korean beauty brand. It never really took off in India, for whatever reason, but it was my introduction to Korean beauty products.

So when I came across Aram Baek’s story, I was immediately curious. Here was someone who had spent years building his own company and K-beauty brands, only to start a new chapter building the infrastructure layer connecting Korean brands with creators through Nurilounge.

The Business Case →

At first glance, you could call it a creator marketing platform. But I think that undersells what Aram is actually trying to build.

Nurilounge is essentially building the infrastructure that sits between brands and creators.

On one side, it has built a network of more than 1.5 million creators across 100+ countries.

On the other, it has worked with 400+ brands and run more than 2,600 campaigns. But what is interesting is that the company isn’t just matching a brand with someone who has a large following.

The matching is based on the data Nurilounge has collected from years of running campaigns: things like campaign completion rates, views, category expertise and content quality.

In other words, follower count is only one signal.

A brand comes in with a goal, target market and budget. Nurilounge helps build the campaign strategy, identifies the right mix of creators, manages outreach and coordination, oversees the content and then measures the results.

That ability to scale is probably one of the more interesting parts of the model.

The company says its infrastructure can support campaigns involving a handful of creators or thousands of them, while its current database spans creators from nano to mega influencers. Its reported average campaign content completion rate is over 70%.

But Nurilounge isn’t only building software or a database. It is also building a creator network. Creators can access brand campaigns, paid collaborations, products and offline events.

Nurilounge has been running creator-focused events since 2023, with activations across Seoul and New York designed to bring creators and K-beauty brands together in person.

My POV: The biggest companies often build infrastructure that helps others grow. Amazon did it for sellers, Uber did it for drivers and Nurilounge is doing it for brands and creators.

Build the rails, and as the ecosystem grows, you grow with it.

Brands are handing creators the brief

The recent Colin and Samir partnership with Lexus is a good example of how authenticity is winning on the internet. And if you haven’t read about the campaign yet, you should definitely check it out.

The Business Case →

Colin & Samir Start Over is a four-part series where the duo travels across the U.S. in Lexus cars while taking on different creative projects. But what makes this partnership interesting is that it didn’t start with Lexus handing Colin and Samir a brief.

The campaign came from a deeply personal place. After losing their homes in the Los Angeles wildfires and dealing with creative burnout, they wanted to leave L.A. and rediscover their creative spark.

They turned that feeling into an idea, pitched it to Lexus, developed the creative strategy and produced the campaign themselves. And this wasn’t simply Lexus giving creators a budget and asking them to make a few sponsored posts.

Colin and Samir say they developed the campaign with Google Creative Works, Google’s internal creative consultancy, and then worked with Portal A to produce the larger campaign assets.

We’ve seen this shift elsewhere too. YouTube has highlighted Toyota’s partnership with creator Zach King, where he was given the freedom to create, star in and direct his own Indiana Jones-inspired short film for the brand.

And the infrastructure is beginning to catch up to this idea.

Google now allows brands to take creator-made YouTube videos and turn them into paid campaigns, meaning the same piece of content can work organically on a creator’s channel and then be amplified through paid media.

My POV: The creator is no longer just the distribution channel. They’re increasingly becoming the creative agency, the talent and the media channel, all at once.

The real shift is bringing creators in at the idea stage, combining their creative instincts, audience relationship and distribution into a new advertising model.

🗞 Creator Gossip

• Influencers are becoming a bigger force behind what people buy globally. And in Brazil, India & South Africa, their influence is only getting stronger.

• Jimmy Fallon’s 20 million views might be the moment micro-dramas officially went mainstream. What started as bite-sized, mobile-first entertainment is now catching the attention of major networks and late-night TV.

• Hollywood is starting to compete for the people who understand internet-native audiences, creators, algorithms, and monetisation. The “YouTube person” is becoming a C-suite-level hire.

• OpenAI flew a group of influencers to a luxury retreat. The internet had thoughts. What was meant to be a creator getaway quickly turned into a backlash, with people questioning why influencers were being courted while concerns around AI’s impact continue to grow.

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Good afternoon, and welcome to the fourth issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• Lebanon’s media group has a new hire and it’s not human.

• This Lebanese founder thinks he can crack the creator economy in the UAE.

• Is Jordan quietly becoming a creator economy hub.

Lebanon’s media group has a new hire and it’s not human

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t surprised when I read the headline. Because the first time I read about it, I thought we’re going to have an AI reporter like we have on Instagram, that’d just share news 24x7, removing the human element out of the journalism. But that’s not what it is, so let’s get into it.

The Business Case →

Annahar Media Group introduced an AI-powered news correspondent this month, called Nahar. Its job is to read thousands of sources in seconds, monitor global developments, translate content, summarise reports, and cross-references information across languages and geographies.

The group was founded in 1993, and is now run by editor-in-chief Nayla Tueni, whose father is Gibran Tueni, also a former editor. It’s a move to make the group tech savvy with the objective of not replacing journalists.

The goal would be to handle volume work so that human editors can focus on verification and storytelling.

My POV: I feel most media houses run on thin margins. This move helps them bring about structural changes. However, if AI handles the throughput and humans handle the judgment, what happens to the junior journalists who were supposed to develop that judgment by doing the throughput first?

This Lebanese founder thinks he can crack the creator economy in the UAE

This story reminds me of two Indian founders, who went through somewhat similar problem statements years ago, and made One Impression, one of the coolest influencer marketing company. So, as they say if a problem statement works for one market, there’s an opportunity for it to work in another. So it did! Let’s just find it how he did it.

The Business Case →

Ali Younes wanted to run influencer campaigns for a brand in Lebanon. There was no platform to do it. Just Discord servers full of Excel sheets and cold DMs going nowhere.

So in 2026, he built Collabfront. It’s the first Lebanese app connecting brands with local creators for paid campaigns and barter activations, where creators take product instead of cash. Three months in, the platform has over 500 creators and 100 registered brands. It’s live on iOS and Android.

The company is incorporated in Dubai, which isn’t incidental. Lebanon was always the proof of concept and MENA the wider market.

My POV: There’s a lot of untapped potential in the markets that don’t make the news. And Lebanon is one of them. But the transition to Dubai and the wider MENA region introduces them to competitors who have been building in this space before them. So, what would differentiate them? One could draw an idea from One Impression’s pivot to deeper levers of creator economy.

Is Jordan quietly becoming a creator economy hub?

There’s something about communities that gets me excited. Think about communities like Hyrox or startup accelerators. They give a sense of collectiveness about doing something creative that makes the world a little more colourful. So, in this edition I thought about Jordan Create.

The Business Case →

Jordan Create is an annual creator economy conference held in Jordan, the first and largest of its kind in the Levant. It brings together content creators, musicians, marketers, brands, and agencies for a single-day event built around panels, keynotes, and networking.

The first edition drew 350+ attendees. Speakers included Mohanad Syoof (1.6M followers), Yazan Abuajweh (2.7M), Rozzah (13.9M), and Saba Sham’a (12M), a combined speaker reach of over 70 million followers.

The event runs three tracks: learning from top creators and marketers, meeting collaborators and commercial partners, and live music and entertainment. The pitch to brands is direct, if you want to reach Jordanian creators in one room, this is where they are.

My POV: Jordan Create solves for accessibility and infrastructure gaps. But what stands out most about community-driven events like this is the opportunity they create for creators to see how others think, discover new possibilities and monetise their work. Being a creator can often be a lonely journey. Spaces like these bring together people from across the ecosystem, spark new conversations and open up opportunities for collective growth.

🗞 Creator Gossip

• Disney and TikTok just made the crossover nobody saw coming. Disney is bringing fan-made TikToks featuring its biggest franchises, from Marvel to Star Wars, onto Disney+, while creators get access to Disney’s content library and a new ambassador programme. Basically, your TikTok fandom might now have a seat on Disney+

• Hasan Minhaj, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia are bringing Bollywood vibes to Netflix with Best of the Best. The coming-of-age comedy follows two childhood best friends as they enter the cut throat world of collegiate Bollywood-fusion dance, where friendship, ambition and competition collide. With a story rooted in South Asian culture but made for global audiences, Best of the Best hits Netflix on September 18.

• YouTube is making views easier to get. Starting August 24, simply starting a video will count as a view across long-form and live content too. The catch? Your shiny new view count might go up, but YouTube will still be keeping the real tea “engaged views” separately.

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Good afternoon, and welcome to the third issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• Japan’s Virtual YouTubers are taking over the world and nobody saw it coming

• Netflix is investing in India’s creative ecosystem. The real play is the talent pipeline.

• VHS Dates recreated a dating show that never existed.

Japan’s Virtual YouTubers are taking over the world and nobody saw it coming

Vee, a five-member VTuber project, was launched by Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) in May.

VTubing started in Japan in the 2010s as a niche corner of the internet: anime-aesthetic avatars, motion capture suits, voice modulators, livestreams. The word itself is a portmanteau: virtual + YouTuber. Nobody predicted it would become one of Japan’s most serious cultural exports.

The Business Case →

Today, major talent agencies manage VTubers the way labels manage musicians: custom avatars, multilingual content, global distribution. KAF sold out Nippon Budokan. 7,000 seats. The same hall where the Beatles played in 1966. Sony Music Entertainment Japan is now in the game too. It launched Vee, a project backing five VTubers across streaming, music, and voice acting, calling it the largest virtual talent development project in its history.

The bet is explicit, VTubers as Japan’s next great cultural export after anime and manga. “VTuber” now ranks among the top dream jobs for Japanese schoolchildren.

But the more interesting story isn’t the entertainment. It’s what happens when governments, fire departments, and universities start hiring virtual avatars instead of spokespeople.

Sakai City has a dog detective mascot doing public outreach. Nagoya’s Minami Fire Department uses a VTuber to teach earthquake preparedness. Saitama Prefecture’s virtual tourism ambassador is pulling audiences that a press release never could. Institutions that couldn’t crack younger demographics are routing around the problem entirely, building characters instead of campaigns.

The education angle is where it gets structurally significant. VTubers with academic credentials are running livestreamed lessons on mathematics, politics, Japanese language. Students who disengage in classrooms are staying on for hours.

My POV: The VTuber story gets covered as pop culture. It should be covered as infrastructure.

Japan took an entertainment format built on anonymity and aesthetic pleasure and discovered it solves a distribution problem that governments, schools, and brands have been failing at for years: how do you reach people who’ve already opted out of official channels?

The avatar isn’t the product but trust is

Netflix is investing in India’s creative ecosystem. The real play is the talent pipeline

Ted Sarandos flew to Delhi, met the Prime Minister, and announced a supply chain investment. Here’s all that you need to know.

The Business Case →

Netflix has been in India for a decade. It has done over 200+ originals, filmed across 100+ locations and has estimated 20-25 million paid subscribers against a global base of 325 million.

So, potentially there could be no Netflix globally without India, that’s what he said. And the meeting with the Prime Minister, followed by an announcement that could share the AVGC sector in India.

They have launched two partnership initiatives, one with the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies to co-develop curriculum in visual effects and media technology workflows, and the other with the National Film Development Corporation to train audio description writers and voice-over artists. Disciplines spanning character animation, e-sports management, interactive comics, virtual art department creation.

Think of this like Netflix building the factory floor from ground up, not just buying what the factory makes.

The context goes even deeper. India’s AVGC sector, animation, visual effects, gaming, comics is a stated national priority under the Viksit Bharat 2047 agenda. The talent gap is real and well-documented.

Even before this, Netflix first launched its mobile-only subscription plan in India in 2019, after testing lower-priced mobile plans in India and other Asian markets. The successful Indian launch subsequently led Netflix to test the mobile-only offering in other countries.

My POV: Every major streaming platform is in India. So, the next logical step in building this infrastructure is owning the talent. It’s like how Adobe became the center piece to the creator economy. Think of editors, designers, and animators, all confined to Adobe’s workflow.

Same is the case here.

Sarandos said Netflix wants to be “the first place you check and the last service you cancel.”

VHS Dates recreated a dating show that never existed

The Instagram account VHS Dates has been going viral for resurfacing lost dating service videotapes from the 1980s.

Think of the grainy footage, awkward men in polo shirts and women with big hair selling themselves to a camera.

But the story gets interesting when a New York Times reported, Sopan Deb, flew to Los Angeles to meet the creators. He asked the obvious question: where do you find these tapes?

The Business Case →

The VHS Dates was created by filmmakers Lee Citron and Trevor Worley. They describe the origin story when a box of VHS tapes was found in the basement of an office in Downtown Los Angeles.

Estimated to be from the mid-80s to the early 90s. From a dating company called VHS Dates that once operated out of Van Nuys, California.

That’s when they started VHS Dates, an Instagram account staging fake 1980s video dating tapes, now has nearly 900,000 followers, a merchandise line, and a Tribeca Festival appearance.

They made the whole thing with actors, a green screen, a vintage Ikegami tube camera, and old Sears catalogs for costume research.

When the NYT revealed the truth, one woman said she was “heartbroken.” Another said “I hate that.” A man who’d recorded his own real tape in the 80s said: “They look just like the real thing.”

And yet, they’ll probably keep watching.

A Syracuse professor who studies media and identity put it plainly: audiences don’t connect to the format, they connect to loneliness. To people putting themselves out there and hoping someone picks them.

My POV: Authenticity as a strategy is less about whether something is real, and more about whether it lands as real. The craft is in making the emotional core feel true, even inside something that’s clearly constructed.

🗞 Creator Gossip

• Sony Pictures Networks India dropped its festive slate: KBC Season 18, Rohit Sharma’s entertainment debut, Ajay Devgn hosting Crime Patrol, Madhuri Dixit fronting Marathi KBC, and AR Rahman-backed Tamil Idol. Sony LIV is rebranding under It All LIVs Here to anchor it all digitally.

• Ted Lasso is back on Apple TV after three years and this time Ted’s coaching a women’s second-division side in Richmond. 10 episodes, running through October 7, with the full original cast returning and Apple already planning two more seasons after this.

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Good afternoon, and welcome to the second issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• Indonesia’s creator platforms are gearing up for a breakout year

• Two Indian farmers used content to make agriculture aspirational again

• The UAE’s newest brand strategy looks more like Netflix than advertising

Indonesia’s creator platforms are gearing up for a breakout year

Indonesia has 180 million young people entering the workforce by 2030. Most of them want to be creators. Nobody built the infrastructure for that. Until now.

The Business Case →

Oktorika Mandasari started at 16, walking the streets of south Jakarta looking for work because her parents didn’t think education was worth it for a girl. She didn’t end up married at 17. She ended up running a tech agency.

In 2021, she partnered with Jason Lee, co-founder of co-working startup Cohive, to build BintangGO, a platform connecting nano creators with brands. Today it has 10,000 creators. 80 per cent women. 70 per cent under 30.

The model is simple and deliberately unglamorous. These aren’t mega-influencers. They’re first-time earners learning to make videos for brands, going from ~$18 a month to over $60. BintangGO takes 5 to 25 per cent of what they earn.

The company has raised $2.5M and is now exploring debt financing to front creators cash before brand payments clear. Lee’s framing: “The creators are like Gojek drivers. We can be the Gojek for the creator space.”

On the other end of the creator stack, Ario Tamat built KaryaKarsa for a different overlooked group: writers. He started it in 2019 with $14,000 borrowed from family.

The logic was simple: writers do 75 per cent of the platform’s GMV while making up only 40 per cent of creators. They were underpriced and underserved. KaryaKarsa gives them 90 per cent of revenue, lets them own their IP, and sets their own fees. 99,000 creators. 600,000 users. GMV already exceeds 2021 figures by May 2022.

My POV: The creator economy conversation is dominated by the US and Southeast Asia always gets footnoted. Indonesia shouldn’t be. 180 million young people, a creative economy worth $130M, and a domestic appetite for locally produced content that’s already generating hundreds of millions in ticket sales and streaming revenue.

What BintangGO and KaryaKarsa are building isn’t just startup infrastructure, it’s the economic layer that turns aspiration into income at scale.

The West built creator monetisation for creators who already had audiences. These platforms are building it for people who are still finding their voice. That’s a harder problem, and a much bigger market.

Two Indian farmers used content to make agriculture aspirational again

I’ll tell you one thing, content can change your life. And this isn’t me just rambling.

One of the stories I was fortunate enough to discover was about two Indian farmers who used content to educate, transform, and empower other farmers to do better.

We all know India, or Bharat, as they say, is an agrarian economy. I come from an area that is heavily dependent on agriculture. In fact, my dad’s business is dependent on it too.

So this story isn’t just significant to me, it’s personal. And that’s what makes it so meaningful to share.

The Business Case →

Indian agriculture has a content problem. The sector feeds a billion people and employs half the workforce,but for decades, its knowledge lived in government pamphlets, agronomist visits, and word of mouth passed between fields. Nobody made it watchable.

Santosh Jadhav and Akash Jadhav changed that calculus. Santosh walked away from a family business in Prayagraj in 2015 to return to Maharashtra and farm high-value crops like capsicum andgrapes. Akash came in with mechanical engineering training and a filmmaking instinct. In 2017, they co-founded Indian Farmer with one idea: teach farmers something new, on camera.

The first YouTube video went up in 2018 with no production budget and no audience. By 2019, they were travelling across the country,agricultural markets, apple orchards in Himachal, paddy fields in the south, documenting what actually works at ground level. By 2020, the content had gone viral. They expanded into Marathi and Kannada to reach farmers the English internet had never spoken to.

By 2021, BBC, NatGeo, and Times of India were paying attention. By 2024, Indian Farmer had a community of over 10 million farmers. The content library now sits at 5,000 educational videos.

My POV: Most agri-tech startups went after the supply chain like logistics, lending, and market access. Santosh and Akash bet on something less obvious: that information was the real bottleneck.

Agriculture isn’t a sexy business. Nobody was lining up to make farming content in 2018. They chose education, consistency, vernacular languages and turned it into a 10 million farmer community that took seven years to build and would take most consumer startups a decade to replicate.

Content opens markets that capital alone couldn’t unlock, demographics that were invisible to brands, sectors that were too fragmented to reach, communities that nobody thought were worth talking to.

The UAE’s newest brand strategy looks more like Netflix than advertising

For decades, UAE brands ran on influencer logic: pay someone with the following to hold your product. That model is being replaced by something more expensive, more structured, and harder to copy.

The Business Case →

Layal Hamdeh is currently the lead in a 30-episode scripted micro-series called Stories After Sunset built with UAE fashion label Numi & Co.

Each episode runs under a minute, pulls from Middle Eastern folklore and cultural history, and weaves the brand’s luxury silk scarves into the narrative so naturally you almost miss them. The product is never the story. The story is the story.

The series drops daily across social platforms with the architecture of a TV show, running at 60 seconds a chapter.

Hamdeh didn’t arrive at this format by accident. Eight years in New York: CBS, the UN, the BBC, followed by a move to Dubai where she joined blinx, a digital media platform covering politics, fashion, sports, and entertainment. Eventually she earned Gulf News’s Best Content Creator award in 2025. She understands both how stories are made and how they travel.

My POV: UAE brands spent years borrowing credibility from creators. Numi & Co. is doing something structurally different, they’re not renting Hamdeh’s audience, they’re building shared IP.

Brands are now thinking like studios: investing in narrative depth, episodic tension, and characters audiences return to, not ads they skip.

When marketing is built like a TV show, the line between brand and entertainment stops being visible. The harder question is whether UAE-born labels can take this format global, or whether it stays a regional advantage that international brands eventually show up to copy.

🗞 Creator Gossip

• A new BCG report maps India’s creator economy at 2–2.5 million monetised creators influencing $350-400 billion in consumer spend with that figure projected to cross $1 trillion by 2030. The catch: only 8–10% of creators currently monetise, making India one of the biggest untapped creator markets on the planet.
  

• Sony and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day landed $355 million domestically in its opening weekend, the second-biggest debut in box office history. Globally, it crossed $927 million. China led international markets with $121 million, India set a new record at $31.8 million, and the Middle East posted its biggest opening of all YouTube has banned a wave of ASMR creators citing violations. Creators say the bans wiped out years of archived content and income without warning.

Subscribe | Advertise | Apply for funding | Watch | Follow

Good afternoon, and welcome to the first issue of Creator Games.

I’m Salil, co-founder of Third Studios, I lead everything creator economy at THIRD, and I’ll be writing and editing this newsletter every week.

Creator Games exists to discover, fund and tell the stories of the next generation of creator entrepreneurs. This newsletter is where we share the ideas, companies and opportunities driving that mission across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

If you’ve got any stories to share or any feedback, feel free to email me at salil@third.group.

— Salil

Today’s lineup:

• A cricket legend’s shoe brand just outsold the athletes who wear it

• Idris Elba and Google bet $1M on Africa’s creator infrastructure gap

• The UAE just wrote checks to its first cohort of Arabic-language creators

A Cricket Legend’s Shoe Brand Just Outsold the Athletes Who Wear It

For eight years, Virat Kohli was Puma’s biggest face in India. On June 21, he opened a store that competes with it.

The Business Case →

Kohli signed an eight-year, ₹110 crore (~$12.8M) endorsement deal with Puma in 2017, one of the largest in Indian sports history. When it expired this year, Puma offered ₹300 crore (~$35M) to renew it. Kohli said no, and instead took an equity stake in Agilitas Sports, an Indian sportswear startup run by Abhishek Ganguly, Puma India’s former managing director.

That stake became One8: a sportswear label that launched its first independent footwear collection at Delhi’s Yashobhoomi Convention Centre in front of 5,000 fans, athletes, and industry leaders.

The flagship sneaker, the Seam XVIII Signature Test Red, was priced at ₹9,230 (~$96), a number chosen to match Kohli’s 9,230 career Test runs. The full collection spans three lines: Seam and Cover Drive, both cricket-inspired footwear, and Boom Rush, a multi-activity training shoe.

Pre-bookings on District by Zomato sold out within minutes when they opened on June 6. By the time the Delhi premiere wrapped, One8 had reportedly sold more than 150,000 pairs, generating an estimated ₹138 crore (~$16M) in first-day revenue.

My POV: India’s sportswear market has belonged to Nike, Adidas, and Puma for decades. Kohli spent eight years building Puma’s business in that market before turning around and building his own. The launch numbers answer the first question, whether an athlete-owned brand can move product in India. The harder one is whether One8 can do what no Indian sports brand has done yet: go global, and stay there.

Idris Elba and Google Bet $1M on Africa’s Creator Infrastructure Gap

Africa doesn’t have a shortage of creator talent. It has a shortage of studio budgets. Idris Elba and Google are betting AI can close that gap faster than money alone.

The Business Case →

At Google’s inaugural Africa Cloud Summit in Johannesburg, the company and Elba’s Akuna Group announced a $1M program giving roughly 100,000 creators in Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, and Sierra Leone free access to Gemini and other AI production tools. The program is funded jointly by Google and the Elba Hope Foundation.

It’s not just software. Akuna’s own digital wallet will handle cross-border payments for creators in the program, a persistent bottleneck for African creators trying to get paid by brands and platforms outside their home currency.

The announcement landed alongside a bigger milestone: Google confirmed it has now fulfilled its five-year, $1B investment pledge in African economies, and unveiled a new applied AI lab in Ghana and a planned connectivity hub in South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

My POV: Google framed the initiative around cost, not talent. The same production tools a major studio takes for granted, handed to creators who’ve never had a budget line for them. Pair that with Akuna’s payment rails, and the pitch isn’t just “make better videos.” It’s remove the two things, equipment and getting paid, that have kept African creators dependent on foreign platforms and foreign gatekeepers.

The UAE Just Wrote Checks to Its First Cohort of Arabic-Language Creators

Dubai has spent the past two years building creator infrastructure, a hub, a summit, now a fund. This month it started cutting checks.

The Business Case →

Creators HQ, the UAE’s dedicated creators’ hub, and content platform Alfan opened applications for the Social Content Fund: a $1.36M (AED 5M) program backing creators who make family-friendly, educational, and socially impactful Arabic-language content. The partnership was signed at the 1 Billion Followers Summit in January and formally launched at Creators Gathering, an event at Atlantis, The Palm that drew over 1,000 content creators and media professionals.

Want the numbers behind Alfan’s own raise? We shared their pitch deck in our newsletter Dealflow. Get access here.

To qualify, applicants need at least 100,000 YouTube followers, a consistent output of positive content, and a credible production plan. Selected creators get financial support, personal-branding workshops, and a year of access to the Alfan.io platform.

It’s part of a wider build-out: Wio Bank recently launched a UAE account built specifically for creator income, and the government has said YouTube creators in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt are increasingly earning seven-figure sums.

My POV: Most creator funds reward reach. This one is explicitly filtering for values: family content, education, “socially responsible storytelling,” in the fund’s own language. That’s a narrower bet than a typical creator fund, but it’s also a clearer one: the UAE isn’t just trying to grow its creator numbers, it’s trying to shape what a national content industry looks like before it scales.

🗞 Creator Gossip

• IAB Global Network launches Global Creator Week, bringing together 17 markets, including South Africa and MENA, to establish industry standards and best practices for creator marketing, and taking place from September 14-18.

• Africa’s creator economy is projected to grow from $3.08 billion today to $17.84 billion by 2030, with South Africa and Nigeria leading the market and Egypt and Kenya among the continent’s fastest-growing creator ecosystems.

• The Philippines hosts the third edition of the &FRIENDS Festival, bringing together creators, musicians and gaming communities as creator-led entertainment continues expanding across Southeast Asia.

• Creator startup funding remains concentrated around AI, with late-stage companies attracting more than 80% of disclosed capital over the past year as investors back creator tools over consumer social apps.

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