The Mail Cart: Friday, Apr. 3rd

👋 Welcome to The Mail Cart. This is Warner, founder of AvA. Connect with me here

😵‍💫 One of the most important media deal in years just went down, and welcome to the future of the industry.

📝 Euphoria is debuting their new season at Coachella. WME sells their sports agency 160over90 for a major profit. TBPN goes OpenAI & more.

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⭐ Everyone is obsessed with media again

The rocket ship TBPN, a technology focused 3-hour daily livestream show, just sold to OpenAI in one of the strangest and most fascinating media deals in recent memory.

John Coogan and Jordi Hays, the tech duo behind TBPN, launched the show 18 months ago, did $5m in ads last year, and were on track to hit $30M from 29 sponsors this year.

What Coogan and Hays built this fast is simply absurd. In less than two years, they created a media property that felt native to the internet, native to tech, and native to the moment we are in: live, fast, opinionated, highly bookable, and built around trust instead of polish. That is incredibly hard to do, and even harder to scale.

Yesterday, in a shocking move, they sold to OpenAI.

It’s a massive win for the duo. At least financially (obviously). The 11-person TBPN team walked away with a total comp package that probably sits in the hundreds of million $$ territory, given OpenAI totally shut down their entire F1-style ad operation that 6x’d in year 2.

The silver lining is the TBPN team will be given full editorial freedom to continue to book guests of their choice, but the show will be sure to change. It has to.

‼️ Why does this matter?

🧠 Live will keep winning because it feels human. In a world of overproduced podcasts and AI slop, real-time conversation & interaction creates trust that polished content can’t.

🧠 TBPN proved that niche media with owned distribution can become strategic and wildly profitable. Niches capture the highest-value attention: defined, active, informed, & influential viewers.

🧠 OpenAI bought TBPN for credibility, distribution, and a to control the narrative around tech and AI. They won’t be the last company willing to pay up for that kind of asset.

Colin & Samir had a great breakdown on the cost part of live streaming vs. traditional TV.

❝

“Owning the cool show in a billion dollar niche now means you become an asset they want to buy to build out the tv network they in reality are running simply by being on these platforms”

-Adam Faze

I started my career at WME in music before pivoting to Live Nation. Then the pandemic hit and, after the entire department got furloughed, I made a bet on the world of live streaming.

I joined a then-rocket ship called Looped, the first interactive livestream platform, partnering with major award shows to Rhett & Link’s first late night stream to sports leagues, concerts and every creator in between. It, like every live streaming platform (shoutout Moment House) came massively crashing down to earth in a fireball, but my bet on the format will now be more personal.

With every new thing we release, I ask myself:

Am I creating content for the first 100 followers?
Is this bringing value to our community?
Will this empower the next generation?
Are these tools I wish I had when I was struggling to land my first job?
Am I am fucking sell out? No, not yet, unless we sell to you know who..

📽️ So I’m going live every Wednesday at 12:30 PM PT on our YouTube until I get canceled, replaced by AI, or die.

First up: Vivian Yu (Your Rich BFF) and a TON more names shortly.

⭐ Euphoria is debuting their 3rd season at… (checks notes) Coachella?

HBO Max (or whatever it’s called now) struck gold with the success of Euphoria, and they’re taking IRL experiences to the next level with this move. Wristbands are required for the event, which will be streamed at 11:59pm PST and it will be on a first come first served basis.

Euphoria was listed as a sponsor on Coachella’s website, so you gotta imagine some serious $$ was ponied up for the ~exposure~.

⭐ WME just sold their sports agency 160over90 to Publicis for ~$600 million

They acquired the 160over90 for $200 million in 2018, and the company has since worked on campaigns for the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the FIFA World Cup. Big move.

💡Why? WME was taken private by Silver Lake (very intense PE) they are running the PE playbook: separate the different units across the conglomerate

Starting with spinning out TKO group (UFC + WWE)

⭐ SeatGeek launches a new ChatGPT integration that allows users to buy tickets inside of the chat bot

How very 2025 of you. Can’t wait to hear AGENTIC COMMERCE… gives me crypto vibes ₿

⭐ TikTok’s distribution service SoundOn announces new partnership with ACRCloud to detect copyrighted works

⭐ Instagram houses the most music super fans across social media platforms.

Credit: Luminate

⭐ ‘Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ posted the biggest opening day of the year so far with $34.5 million, beating ‘Project Hail Mary’ who had $33.1 million

The award for coolest thing we saw this week:

🏢 John Summit teaming up with LinkedIn & Spotify to throw a pop up office party on Wall Street in NYC