Creator Economy
Brands Cut Out the Middleman
Brands now run three-quarters of creator campaigns themselves, up 16 points in a year. That leaves about $159m of yearly agency income at risk — and the weaker networks are already being sold or folded.
Blindside: Imminent
Blindside threats whose effects are already measurable in the data.
Creator Economy
States Lock Out Teen Ad Money
About 25 states passed age-check laws since 2023, and Australia is already locking half a million teen accounts per platform. The likely hit is $267m a year off an $11bn teen ad base — and it rarely comes back.
Creator Economy
TikTok's Rebuilt Engine Scrambles Creator Pay
TikTok is rebuilding its US recommendation engine on US-only data through mid-2026, while ByteDance keeps the original. The gap can erase 70-90% of a creator's views and puts $3.7bn in yearly US creator value at risk. The market hasn't priced it.
Creator Economy
Brands Stop Overpaying for Creators
Brands now pay creators only when posts drive sales. Results-based deals doubled in two years, quietly stripping out the premium creator pay was built on — even as total spending keeps climbing.
Creator Economy
The Vanishing Search Click
AI answer boxes settle the question before anyone clicks through. Our model puts the loss at $2.4 billion a year on a $12 billion affiliate base — and the click is disappearing, not migrating.
Gaming
Big Studios Bleed Cash Chasing Online Games
Big publishers are destroying an estimated $4.7 billion a year launching online games that mostly flop — a money pit the market still mistakes for a run of bad luck.
Gaming
Gamers Lose the Chip Fight
AI buyers outbid gamers for every chip. NVIDIA cut gaming card output 40%, memory is up 172%, the PlayStation 5 jumped $100 — a $9.4bn yearly hit to gaming hardware that won't fix itself.
Gaming
Regulators Move to Kill Game Gambling
New York is suing Valve, eight states are suing Roblox, and regulators already fined a prize-box maker. The billions games earn from random loot and item-betting just stopped being safe money.
Gaming
AI Voices Replace Game Actors
AI voices cost over ninety percent less, and ninety percent of studios already use AI. About $1.8 billion in yearly game voice and motion-capture pay is draining away — and the cheapest work goes first.
Gaming
Indie Games Vanish in the Crowd
Steam's record sales hide a brutal squeeze: the typical game now earns $249, the top 1% of titles take 90% of indie revenue, and barely 0.5% of 2024 releases are viable businesses.
Fast Food
Diet Drugs Cut Fast-Food Sales
About 12 percent of US adults take appetite-cutting drugs, and each spends 8 percent less at the counter. That is roughly $4.5 billion in yearly US fast-food sales at risk — and the market mistook quieter headlines for a vanishing problem.
Fast Food
Beef and Coffee Reprice Permanently
The smallest US cattle herd since 1951, record coffee, and government-forecast record beef prices through 2027 point to a permanent reprice — not a passing spike. FASTMaster models $6.3bn a year at risk for US fast food.