Most creators treat content as output. Nick Jacklin treats it as intellectual property, and he thinks the distinction will determine who survives the next five years.
Nick Jacklin is Partner and President of Shorthand Studios, the creator services arm of Underscore Talent, a management company operating in the Creator Economy. He sat down with Net Influencer Senior Editor Ceci Carloni to discuss what it actually takes for creators to build sustainable businesses, why operating like a media company is no longer optional, and where the biggest opportunities and risks sit in 2026.
Nick spent 15 years in the space before launching Shorthand, moving from early digital content studios like Vuguru to business development roles at Maker Studios and Disney, then to EVP at Studio71, before co-founding Underscore’s service division. He works directly with hundreds of creators every year.
1. The Creator Economy Is Now Just the Economy
Five years ago, “Creator Economy” described a niche. Today, it describes the media industry.
“The Creator Economy is everywhere,” Nick said. “It is talked about as a bucket, a subset, but the Creator Economy is everywhere. The one commonality across all traditional Hollywood media companies that we talk to, and we talk to all of them, is creators is the thing they’re all trying to figure out.”
Platforms like Tubi and Samsung are putting creators at the top of their strategic priorities. Even companies where it ranks second or third still have it on the list. Nick’s point is that the separation between “creator content” and “media” no longer exists in any meaningful operational sense.
The category grew exponentially. A top YouTuber making one to three million dollars a year was once considered a ceiling. Nick works with creators doing ten to one hundred times that annually.
2. Single-Revenue Creators Are Running a High-Stakes Gamble
The old creator model, where brand deals drove almost all income, was always fragile. Nick’s argument is that it has become untenable.
“If you are a business reliant on one form of revenue from one place,” he said, “that is a precarious place to be.” He described the classic scenario: a TikTok creator whose only revenue comes from brand partnerships, with no subscriptions, no ad revenue, no live stream income. The business works until it doesn’t.
The risks compound. Creators dependent on a single channel face burnout from having to continuously produce more content in more formats to sustain platform favor. They have no enterprise value. When the algorithm shifts or when one platform loses a key demographic, there is nothing else holding the business up.
Shorthand’s thesis, developed over more than a decade, is built on the opposite of this model: multiple revenue streams, multiple platforms, multiple formats, all anchored by a coherent creative identity.
3. Operating Like a Media Company Means Building Teams, Not Just Channels
When Nick talks about creators operating like media companies, he does not mean launching more content verticals. He means organizational structure.
“They need to build teams or partners they trust to help them with that,” he said. “It’s very hard to do as a single person.” The typical creator lifecycle starts with one person handling ideation, filming, editing, and publishing. That model can generate early traction, but it caps growth and accelerates burnout.
The investment Shorthand made from the start was in editorial capacity. “Editing is a big time suck,” Nick noted. “We get asked all the time if we have editors. It’s actually what we built into Shorthand from day one.” The company runs specialized editing teams segmented by platform, with separate groups focused on YouTube, Facebook, and Snap, because the craft required for each is genuinely different.
The broader recommendation is to get comfortable with either hiring or outsourcing. “That’s not always easy for someone who’s used to doing everything themselves,” he acknowledged, but it is the condition for real scale.
4. Treating Content as IP Changes What Gets Built and How It Gets Monetized
The mindset shift Nick pushes most consistently is moving from “posts” to “intellectual property.” The difference is not semantic.
When a creator thinks in IP terms, format discipline follows. Nick’s studio won’t develop something that has a runway of seven or ten episodes. “Can we execute this once a week, essentially forever?” is the evaluation question. A pilot at Shorthand starts at 25 episodes minimum.
The example he keeps returning to is Kareem Rahma and Andrew Kuo’s “SubwayTakes.” “He always thought about it as IP,” Nick said. “He always thought about it as a format, very much built for digital and social, but with a creative process more akin to traditional development than YouTube of old.” The show required sustained investment before it compounded.
The payoff is extensibility. IP creates brand extension opportunities, platform migration options, and licensing potential. “If you think about it like IP, there’s brand extension. You can move to a different platform with that IP, or with an extension of it. It’s kind of world building.”
5. Creators Who Chase the Algorithm Are on a One-to-Three Year Clock
Nick’s assessment of purely algorithm-driven content strategies is direct: they work, but not for long.
“I think that is a short-term approach,” he said. “I think that is an approach that has a one-to-three year time horizon. It doesn’t build long-term value, it doesn’t build long-term community.” Platforms reprioritize content categories constantly. What Facebook rewards for text and photo content shifts independently of what it does for video. Creators without IP, teams, or diversified revenue have no buffer when those shifts happen.
“Your business lives and dies by the algorithm,” he said. “And they do change.”
6. The Platforms Still Being Underestimated
Nick tracks three areas he thinks the broader industry is not paying enough attention to.
YouTube first. “A lot of people the last five or six years have thought less about YouTube and more about vertical video platforms because that’s where a lot of brand work went,” he said. “I do believe that brand business is coming back to YouTube in a strong way.” Shorthand has built a meaningful business helping podcasts grow specifically on YouTube.
Connected TV is the second. FAST channels get attention, but Nick believes the execution is largely wrong. Most operators are trying to maximize the number of channels rather than building marketing strategies that actually drive viewership to individual ones. “It doesn’t actually work that way.” Shorthand takes a more selective approach.
Paywalls and subscription platforms are the third. Substack, Patreon, and equivalents have been available for years but creators have largely operated without support structures. “When we can help with marketing, pricing support, and community building, in partnership with the creator focused on the creative, we can have a huge impact together,” Nick said.
7. Data Access Has Changed the Job, But Human Judgment Still Runs the Strategy
Ten years ago, interpreting platform data required a technology team of 100 people. Today, Nick’s team can stand up the same infrastructure as a managed service. The access has become table stakes.
But Nick is skeptical of AI as a replacement for editorial judgment. “We have not found that AI editing tools are necessarily right for building premium brands,” he said. “You can use AI to surface data in new ways, but you really need the best people using that information to create the right strategies.”
The data itself has become more actionable on shorter timescales. What was once a monthly or quarterly review process is now daily. The competitive advantage Shorthand has is aggregated signal. Working across hundreds of creators, the company can identify category-level shifts before any individual creator would see them.
Nick’s overall read on the current moment is bullish but unsentimental. The economics available to creators today are categorically larger than anything that existed five years ago. The complexity is also larger.
“Don’t be afraid to partner,” he said. “It takes time to build that trust and create the team that you deserve, but it’s absolutely achievable.”
The question for creators is whether they treat the next platform shift as a disruption or as a design requirement. The ones building IP, teams, and diversified revenue streams are already treating it as the latter.
Listen to the full conversation on “The Big Three” podcast.
Jonathan is a South African content creator, photographer and videographer with 25 years of experience in journalism and print media design. He is interested in new developments in AI content creation and covers a broad spectrum of topics within the creator economy.
Most creators treat content as output. Nick Jacklin treats it as intellectual property, and he thinks the distinction will determine who survives the next five years.
Nick Jacklin is Partner and President of Shorthand Studios, the creator services arm of Underscore Talent, a management company operating in the Creator Economy. He sat down with Net Influencer Senior Editor Ceci Carloni to discuss what it actually takes for creators to build sustainable businesses, why operating like a media company is no longer optional, and where the biggest opportunities and risks sit in 2026.
Nick spent 15 years in the space before launching Shorthand, moving from early digital content studios like Vuguru to business development roles at Maker Studios and Disney, then to EVP at Studio71, before co-founding Underscore’s service division. He works directly with hundreds of creators every year.
1. The Creator Economy Is Now Just the Economy
Five years ago, “Creator Economy” described a niche. Today, it describes the media industry.
“The Creator Economy is everywhere,” Nick said. “It is talked about as a bucket, a subset, but the Creator Economy is everywhere. The one commonality across all traditional Hollywood media companies that we talk to, and we talk to all of them, is creators is the thing they’re all trying to figure out.”
Platforms like Tubi and Samsung are putting creators at the top of their strategic priorities. Even companies where it ranks second or third still have it on the list. Nick’s point is that the separation between “creator content” and “media” no longer exists in any meaningful operational sense.
The category grew exponentially. A top YouTuber making one to three million dollars a year was once considered a ceiling. Nick works with creators doing ten to one hundred times that annually.
2. Single-Revenue Creators Are Running a High-Stakes Gamble
The old creator model, where brand deals drove almost all income, was always fragile. Nick’s argument is that it has become untenable.
“If you are a business reliant on one form of revenue from one place,” he said, “that is a precarious place to be.” He described the classic scenario: a TikTok creator whose only revenue comes from brand partnerships, with no subscriptions, no ad revenue, no live stream income. The business works until it doesn’t.
The risks compound. Creators dependent on a single channel face burnout from having to continuously produce more content in more formats to sustain platform favor. They have no enterprise value. When the algorithm shifts or when one platform loses a key demographic, there is nothing else holding the business up.
Shorthand’s thesis, developed over more than a decade, is built on the opposite of this model: multiple revenue streams, multiple platforms, multiple formats, all anchored by a coherent creative identity.
3. Operating Like a Media Company Means Building Teams, Not Just Channels
When Nick talks about creators operating like media companies, he does not mean launching more content verticals. He means organizational structure.
“They need to build teams or partners they trust to help them with that,” he said. “It’s very hard to do as a single person.” The typical creator lifecycle starts with one person handling ideation, filming, editing, and publishing. That model can generate early traction, but it caps growth and accelerates burnout.
The investment Shorthand made from the start was in editorial capacity. “Editing is a big time suck,” Nick noted. “We get asked all the time if we have editors. It’s actually what we built into Shorthand from day one.” The company runs specialized editing teams segmented by platform, with separate groups focused on YouTube, Facebook, and Snap, because the craft required for each is genuinely different.
The broader recommendation is to get comfortable with either hiring or outsourcing. “That’s not always easy for someone who’s used to doing everything themselves,” he acknowledged, but it is the condition for real scale.
4. Treating Content as IP Changes What Gets Built and How It Gets Monetized
The mindset shift Nick pushes most consistently is moving from “posts” to “intellectual property.” The difference is not semantic.
When a creator thinks in IP terms, format discipline follows. Nick’s studio won’t develop something that has a runway of seven or ten episodes. “Can we execute this once a week, essentially forever?” is the evaluation question. A pilot at Shorthand starts at 25 episodes minimum.
The example he keeps returning to is Kareem Rahma and Andrew Kuo’s “SubwayTakes.” “He always thought about it as IP,” Nick said. “He always thought about it as a format, very much built for digital and social, but with a creative process more akin to traditional development than YouTube of old.” The show required sustained investment before it compounded.
The payoff is extensibility. IP creates brand extension opportunities, platform migration options, and licensing potential. “If you think about it like IP, there’s brand extension. You can move to a different platform with that IP, or with an extension of it. It’s kind of world building.”
5. Creators Who Chase the Algorithm Are on a One-to-Three Year Clock
Nick’s assessment of purely algorithm-driven content strategies is direct: they work, but not for long.
“I think that is a short-term approach,” he said. “I think that is an approach that has a one-to-three year time horizon. It doesn’t build long-term value, it doesn’t build long-term community.” Platforms reprioritize content categories constantly. What Facebook rewards for text and photo content shifts independently of what it does for video. Creators without IP, teams, or diversified revenue have no buffer when those shifts happen.
“Your business lives and dies by the algorithm,” he said. “And they do change.”
6. The Platforms Still Being Underestimated
Nick tracks three areas he thinks the broader industry is not paying enough attention to.
YouTube first. “A lot of people the last five or six years have thought less about YouTube and more about vertical video platforms because that’s where a lot of brand work went,” he said. “I do believe that brand business is coming back to YouTube in a strong way.” Shorthand has built a meaningful business helping podcasts grow specifically on YouTube.
Connected TV is the second. FAST channels get attention, but Nick believes the execution is largely wrong. Most operators are trying to maximize the number of channels rather than building marketing strategies that actually drive viewership to individual ones. “It doesn’t actually work that way.” Shorthand takes a more selective approach.
Paywalls and subscription platforms are the third. Substack, Patreon, and equivalents have been available for years but creators have largely operated without support structures. “When we can help with marketing, pricing support, and community building, in partnership with the creator focused on the creative, we can have a huge impact together,” Nick said.
7. Data Access Has Changed the Job, But Human Judgment Still Runs the Strategy
Ten years ago, interpreting platform data required a technology team of 100 people. Today, Nick’s team can stand up the same infrastructure as a managed service. The access has become table stakes.
But Nick is skeptical of AI as a replacement for editorial judgment. “We have not found that AI editing tools are necessarily right for building premium brands,” he said. “You can use AI to surface data in new ways, but you really need the best people using that information to create the right strategies.”
The data itself has become more actionable on shorter timescales. What was once a monthly or quarterly review process is now daily. The competitive advantage Shorthand has is aggregated signal. Working across hundreds of creators, the company can identify category-level shifts before any individual creator would see them.
Nick’s overall read on the current moment is bullish but unsentimental. The economics available to creators today are categorically larger than anything that existed five years ago. The complexity is also larger.
“Don’t be afraid to partner,” he said. “It takes time to build that trust and create the team that you deserve, but it’s absolutely achievable.”
The question for creators is whether they treat the next platform shift as a disruption or as a design requirement. The ones building IP, teams, and diversified revenue streams are already treating it as the latter.
Listen to the full conversation on “The Big Three” podcast.
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