July 28, 2026

Presented By

Attention passengers! We’ve got a Sunday Special about all things transportation arriving in your inbox in five days, and we want to hear about the most memorable conversation you’ve ever had with a rideshare or taxi driver. Whether they regaled you with tales about the streets of Berlin on the night the wall came down or gave an elaborate account of their former gig as Taylor Swift’s bodyguard—we’re all ears.

You can commit the oral lore you received to writing here. Our favorite responses will be featured in Sunday’s newsletter.

—Abby Rubenstein, Sam Klebanov, Dave Lozo, Matty Merritt, Neal Freyman

In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into:

The rise of microinfluencers
KFC’s history (and maybe its secrets) on the auction block
What a difference a quiet place to work makes

Markets

Nasdaq

24,932.08

-0.17%

S&P

7,413.18

+0.02%

Dow

52,210.08

+0.51%

10-Year

4.641%

-4.0 bps

Bitcoin

$64,811.99

+0.03%

Nvidia

$196.51

-4.99%

Data is provided by

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 6:00pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean.

Markets: Stocks were as mixed yesterday as your feelings about whether eating a salad is healthy right now. The S&P 500 and the Dow rose as oil prices fell, while the Nasdaq was dragged down by flagging chipmakers. Nvidia in particular took a hit as investors worried about its circular financing deals, giving Apple the chance to reclaim the world’s most valuable company crown.

Markets Sponsored by Cytonics

Investment subject to termination: Backed by Stanford and Scripps Research, Cytonics is developing the first and only potential cure for osteoarthritis. Join 7,500+ shareholders and invest before the window closes.

Not-so-wide web

You can now make money off your 500 followers

Illustration of person looking at phone screen with small people crawling over it

Niv Bavarsky

If your dream career involves a ring light, but you can’t get millions of people to like and subscribe, your moment has arrived. Big brands are increasingly looking to do business with small-time influencers, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Research firm Emarketer forecasts that US-based influencers will earn $21 billion this year and…

Around 45% of brand spending on influencer marketing will go to creators with less than 20,000 followers, compared with 19.5% in 2021.
Nearly 20% of spending will go to “nanoinfluencers” with less than 5,000 followers, compared with a measly 3.1% five years ago.

It’s not just brands with tiny budgets going micro: Companies like Target, American Eagle, and Soul Cycle are among those working with smaller creators—some with as few as 500 followers, per WSJ.

Why are brands thinking small?

Like everything suddenly becoming pistachio-flavored, you can blame it on the algorithm. Since most of what you see in your feed now doesn’t come from accounts you follow, sponsoring a creator with a big following no longer guarantees views.

Meanwhile, the little guys are driving engagement in a big way. Growth marketing firm ATTN found that microinfluencers average a 3.2% engagement rate, while those with 1+ million followers average a 1.1% rate. Accounts with big followings can generate significantly more revenue for brand partners, but they also cost as much as 18x more to partner with, according to Bloomberg.

But maybe don’t quit your day job yet: Evangelizing a brand to your small but mighty band of followers probably isn’t a shortcut to livestreaming from inside a private jet. Compensation for smaller influencers can often just be discounts, $10 gift cards, or some freebies, the WSJ noted. And unlike a steady but less glamorous office job, the size of your paycheck from influencing can vary each month. More than half of the 3,000 full-time creators surveyed by Influencer Marketing Hub last year said they earned below a living wage.—AR