Goalhanger X Creator Venture Launches With Marina Hyde's Always On

Goalhanger has launched Goalhanger X, a creator venture built to develop complete media businesses around individual presenters and writers, and its first project is Always On with Marina Hyde. The company announced the creator venture on October 12, saying each project will start from a creator's voice and the relationship that creator already has with an audience. Goalhanger will supply format development, production, audience growth, membership work and commercial partnerships. The announcement was reported by Advanced Television, which carried Goalhanger's launch statement in full.

Hyde is a useful first signing for a creator venture of this kind. She wrote for The Guardian for 25 years and published her final column for the paper a little over a week before the launch, according to Press Gazette. Her last collection of Guardian columns, What a Time to Be Alive!, has also just been published. Alongside the new project, she will keep co-hosting The Rest Is Entertainment with Richard Osman, the audio and video show the pair have made since November 2023, covering media, books, television, film and music.

What the creator venture will build around each name

Goalhanger described the creator venture as a long-term structure rather than a single show deal. Each venture is built around one creator and can grow across publishing, social platforms, audio, video, membership, live events and new intellectual property. That gives a creator several ways to reach the same audience during a week, and several products to sell around the work, instead of relying on one programme and one slot. The company said its role is to provide the creative, audience and commercial infrastructure around a creator's vision while keeping the creator at the centre of the project.

Co-founder Jack Davenport said the creator venture is meant for people with a distinctive voice and a loyal audience who could work in more than one format. In reported remarks carried by Advanced Television, Davenport said Hyde could plausibly host programmes across the company's existing range, which spans sport, politics, history and entertainment, because she moves quickly between mocking a technology executive and writing seriously about a political or cultural story. He said partnering with her to launch Always On is the start of a larger change for the business, and that Goalhanger wants to give her room to build a body of work around whatever she finds interesting, funny or important.

Always On starts with columns, a YouTube show and social clips

Always On is live from day one across several formats at once. Hyde will write regular columns on Substack, present a new YouTube show and post original social content, and the project will then expand into further audio, video and digital formats. Press Gazette reported that the Substack will be free at launch, with a paid subscriber tier to follow carrying member-only features and extra content. Goalhanger said the brand is a window into the stories Hyde notices, from small details and public performances to the odd connections between them, and that she wants to respond to the news in whichever format suits a story, whether that is writing, video, a podcast or social posts.

The format mix matters because it changes who controls the audience relationship. A newspaper columnist reaches readers through a paper's website and print pages. A creator venture of this type puts the columns, the programme and the clips under one brand that the creator part-owns, with membership income available later. Hyde joked in the launch statement that the name Always On is a tribute to the strain the schedule will put on her, a line that also describes the publishing rhythm the brand is promising readers and viewers.

Advertisers are offered the whole brand, not single posts

For advertisers, the creator venture changes what is for sale. Goalhanger said brands can join a connected editorial world across many formats and audience touchpoints instead of buying individual posts, sponsorships or placements. Press Gazette listed the likely inventory: sponsorship of written content, creator-led branded campaigns, social partnerships, bespoke audio and video formats, live events, membership benefits and intellectual property partnerships around longer work. Earlier this month the company also announced an in-house advertising sales operation covering audio, video, social media, newsletters, live events and branded content, according to Press Gazette, so the creator venture arrives with a sales team already being built to sell it.

The launch lands in a market where established writers and presenters increasingly test whether their audiences will follow them off a big platform. Gen Z readers have already seen that pattern play out with online personalities, from the creator fallout covered in our Mikayla Nogueira interview coverage to the way social platforms themselves are being studied in the Bradford social media trial. Hyde brings an older media profile to the same shift. Press Gazette noted that she won the Comment Journalism prize at the British Journalism Awards in 2019, 2020 and 2021, which gives the new creator venture a launch name with a long record in print as well as a current podcast audience.

Goalhanger has not announced the next names for Goalhanger X, and it has given no launch date for the paid Always On tier. For now the creator venture stands or falls on a simple test: whether Hyde's Guardian readers and her podcast listeners follow her to a Substack, a YouTube channel and a social feed run under her own brand. The first columns and the first YouTube episode will show how much of that audience makes the move.