Five years

LL Media is five years old this month.

In 2018 this was one person, a spreadsheet, and a conviction that creators were being paid roughly a third of what they were worth. The first year was mostly reading other people’s contracts for free to find out how bad they were. They were bad.

Five years later we represent creators across six platforms and negotiate with brands who, in 2018, would not have returned the email. We have argued down exclusivity windows, chased invoices that were ninety days late, killed deals that would have embarrassed the people we represent, and built storefronts for creators who had been told merch was not worth the trouble. It was worth the trouble.

Thank you to every creator who let us handle the ugly half of their business, and to every brand who treated a solo creator like a real media partner. Both of those things were less common in 2018 than they are now, and we are glad to have been slightly wrong about how long it would take.

Here is to the next five.