Markiplier's 8.5% GoPro Stake & Publicis's Paris Grab

The Digital Dealflow

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Quartermast Advisors
September 03, 2026

Good Morning,

Publicis Groupe France acquired Point d'Orgue, the Paris influence marketing agency Carine Fernandez founded in 2016, folding roughly 40 staff into Influential France. Lovin Malta picked up Love Malta, the social-first lifestyle with 330,000 Instagram followers and 170,000 YouTube subscribers, for undisclosed terms.

On the capital side, Volition Capital led a $22M Series B into Levanta, the Seattle affiliate infrastructure company matching brands against 90,000-plus vetted creators on Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify, taking total funding past $43M. Next Coast Ventures led a $17M round into Workweek with Aperiam Ventures participating, bringing the B2B creator media company to $36.5M raised as it opens its ad network to outside practitioner creators.

Puck is in advanced talks for an all-cash investment from RedBird Capital Partners at a roughly $250M valuation, which would cash out TPG's growth arm, Standard Investments, and J. Rothschild Capital Management while leaving founder and journalist shares untouched. Nvidia is reportedly closing on Hugging Face for $12.9B, its largest deal ever against the $6.9B it paid for Mellanox.

GigaStar launched GigaStar Trading, an SEC-registered broker-dealer running a secondary market in creator revenue-share securities, opening with 19 creator businesses and clearing over $100,000 in volume across 1,000-plus investor accounts since late July.

Markiplier, disclosed an 8.5% stake in GoPro that makes him the camera company's largest shareholder- Warren Buffett or Gordon Geico

Quartermast Creator Economy Index:

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Layoff Watch:

  • WPP: Cutting up to 1,000 more jobs by year-end under CEO Cindy Rose, taking the total past 11,000 since the start of 2025 against a headcount of 97,388 at June 30.

  • Axios: Cut 11 newsroom roles and eliminated its data visualization team entirely, a group that peaked at 13 designers and developers, as it pivots toward subject-matter experts.

The Weekly Roundup

  1. YouTube Seals the Amazon Deal: US creators enrolled in both the YouTube Partner Program and Amazon's influencer programs can now tag Amazon products in videos and collect their 2% to 4% commission through their AdSense check, with over 1 million creators now on YouTube Shopping (YouTube).

  2. Reels Move to the Living Room: Instagram teamed with agency Special U.S. on Watch While, a campaign rebuilding Reels as connected-TV watch parties and its latest run at the living room after IGTV (Ad Age).

  3. Agencies Sell AI Discovery: Influencer and Profound partnered on a creator-first answer engine optimization product that maps which AI prompts drive consideration, builds creator programs against the gaps, then re-measures how brands get cited (Influencer Marketing Hub).

  4. K-Culture's $30B Runway: TikTok Korea and Kearney put the global economic impact of Korean culture on TikTok at $23.5B today and $30.1B by 2030, with direct US impact approaching $1.5B (Tubefilter).

  5. Later Crosses $300M: Later has now paid creators more than $300M cumulatively, with revenue more than doubling in two years and creator payouts up 71% year over year as it folds Mavely into the Later brand (PR Newswire).

  6. Hank Green Walls the Garden: Green launched ClockwiseTV in beta, a tablet app for 8-to-12-year-olds that re-edits existing catalogs from Complexly, MinutePhysics, and Evan and Katelyn and serves them ad-free for $39.99 the first year (Tubefilter).

  7. BBC News Chief Goes Creator: Deborah Turness, most recently CEO of BBC News and previously president of NBC News, joined Independent Talent Group to run Independent Talent Studio, building original brands and IP across video, podcasts, and social (Variety).

  8. Pinterest Loses Its CFO: Julia Donnelly resigned to join a private early-stage company and leaves October 30, with VP of finance Vikram Naidu stepping in on an interim basis while an external search runs (Bloomberg).

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