Here’s what you missed over the past weeks in the creator economy.

These recent headlines offer a glimpse into the most important moves and news, and they are just the tip of the iceberg.

Across ownership, operations, and public discourse, creators are moving from participants in the commercial ecosystem to architects of it.

On March 4th, KSI, who has built a YouTube audience of over 17M subscribers and co-founded Prime Hydration, acquired a 20% stake in Dagenham and Redbridge F.C., a sixth-tier east London club. He framed the move as a full-circle moment: his early FIFA YouTube series "Race to Division One" followed Dagenham and Redbridge's climb through the football pyramid, and he is now attempting the same as an actual owner, with attendance at his first match day nearly doubling to 2,281.

Similarly, on February 26th, Cristiano Ronaldo acquired a 25% stake in UD Almería through CR7 Sports Investments, a subsidiary of his holding company CR7 SA created specifically to manage sport-sector equity. The impact on the club’s brand was immediate, with Almería's Instagram following surging from 400K to nearly 3M within hours of the announcement.

The clearest precedent for both deals is Wrexham AFC. Reynolds and McElhenney purchased the club in 2021 for around $2.5M, built an Emmy Award-winning documentary series around it, secured sponsorships with United Airlines, HP, and Meta Quest at rates no fifth-tier club would ordinarily command, and delivered three consecutive promotions to reach the Championship. In December 2025, they sold a stake of less than 10% to Apollo Sports Capital at a reported valuation of up to $475M, roughly 175x the original purchase price in under five years.

All three deals follow the same structural logic: individuals with global distribution acquired football equity and generated measurable commercial value within days. For the creator, the upside is threefold: they acquire an asset their own audience makes more valuable, gain a content series in the club's climb through the leagues, and build a legacy beyond their core career. For lower-league clubs, a single high-profile investment solves the chronic problem of obscurity immediately, triggering a compounding cycle of stronger sponsorships, better recruitment, and on-pitch results that attract further commercial interest.

On March 9th, George Clooney, Rande Gerber, and Mike Meldman, the trio who founded Casamigos tequila in 2013 and sold it to Diageo for around $1B in 2017, announced Crazy Mountain, a premium non-alcoholic lager retailing at $28 for a 12-pack, with a select US market rollout planned for later in 2026. The launch is the latest in an accelerating wave of celebrity entries into the non-alcoholic category, joining Tom Holland's Bero, Charlie Sheen's Wild AF, and John Mulaney's Years X, a concentration of activity that reflects the same demand shift.

The broader consumer shift away from alcohol is now measurable from both directions: roughly 54% of American adults drink, the lowest level in around three decades, while according to the Financial Times, the five largest listed spirits producers are sitting on $22B in ageing inventory, a decade-high, as demand collapses. The beneficiary of that shift is the non-alcoholic category, where US sales surged 26% and Athletic Brewing, the category’s leading independent brewer, reached an $800M valuation in 2024, validating the ceiling. For a team that has already demonstrated the ability to build a brand compelling enough to attract a billion-dollar acquirer, the category timing looks sound.

The common thread across the strongest celebrity entrants is that seasoned operators are running the business. Crazy Mountain has Steven Fechheimer, former CEO of New Belgium Brewing, in the role before the brand reached shelves. Bero reached a $100M valuation in early 2026 with CPG veteran John Herman as CEO and a brewmaster with four decades of experience; Wild AF was co-founded with operator-led brand builder The Silent Group and brewed by Harpoon Brewery; and Years was built through Pilot Project Brewing with Mulaney as co-owner. The remaining question for Crazy Mountain is whether Clooney's brand identity, built entirely around indulgence and lifestyle aspiration, can stretch to a product whose value proposition is drinking less, and the select-market rollout will show whether it matters.

On March 19, 2026, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni appeared on Pulp Podcast, a YouTube show co-hosted by Fedez and Davide Marra, making her the first sitting Italian head of government to appear on a creator-led podcast. The episode was recorded two days before the national referendum on judicial reform and covered the referendum, Italian foreign policy, and the government's security legislation.

The move mirrors the 2024 US presidential campaign, where Kamala Harris appeared on Call Her Daddy (1M views) and Donald Trump sat for a three-hour interview on The Joe Rogan Experience (61M views), bypassing traditional broadcast media to reach specific demographics.

The always great Riccardo Bassetto covers this topic extensively in his newsletter (find here), which we invite you to read for a deeper dive. The graph below, taken from his newsletter, illustrates the growing relevance of new media in political discourse and content consumption more broadly.

The numbers speak for themselves: the episode generated over 1.7M YouTube views in just four days, compared to the 1.3M average per episode that top Italian political talk shows like Otto e Mezzo and DiMartedì attract. The more important point is audience composition, as younger viewers have largely abandoned traditional TV, making creator-led formats the primary channel through which they can be reached at all.

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