On a Friday in September 2011, a tweet went out from the What's Trending account saying Steve Jobs had died.

It was wrong. The post read, "Reports say that Steve Jobs has passed away. Stay tuned for more updates." It was deleted fast, but not before it was widely retweeted. Worse, some news organizations attributed the unchecked tweet to CBS.

The show was streaming on CBSNews.com at the time. CBS News executives moved the next day to oust Shira Lazar and What's Trending from the site, and instructed CBS Interactive to remove all material related to her and the show. The relationship was four months old, and the show had no newsgathering partnership with CBS News at all.

It didn't matter. The biggest distribution partner she had was gone in roughly 24 hours.

"It was really a heartbreak for me," Lazar told Digiday this week, fifteen years on.

She is also, as of July, one of TIME's 100 most influential digital voices of 2026.

The part that should scare you

Every coach reading this has a version of CBS.

It's the referral partner who sends half your clients. The one mastermind host who puts you on stage twice a year. The Instagram account. The agency that runs your ads. The platform that decided, for reasons nobody explained, that your reach is fine.

Lazar's version just happened in public, with a news cycle attached.

What she did next is the actual case study. She didn't rebuild the partnership. She rebuilt the distribution.

She kept building the show, first for YouTube and then adapting it for each new social platform as audiences moved. It now runs across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, covering everything from creators and celebrities to AI scammers and video games. In the immediate aftermath of the CBS split, the show carried on independently through partnerships with Ustream and Livestream.

What's Trending now has its own standalone site and around 4 million followers across platforms, with nearly 2 million on TikTok, according to Lazar.

Five revenue lines, one face

Here is the structure most coaching businesses never get to.

Lazar said What's Trending's revenue spans platform advertising and brand partnerships, licensing, distribution and events. The business has pushed past publishing into influencer marketing, branded creative services, licensing, distribution and leadership events.

That's five streams that don't rise and fall together. Platform ad revenue is volatile. Brand deals are relationship-driven. Licensing and distribution are contractual. Events are cash up front.

The translation for a coaching practice isn't complicated: one-to-one clients, group programs, corporate contracts, paid speaking, licensed curriculum. Most coaches have one of those and call the other four someday.

The events line is real, not decorative. What's Trending has hosted SXSW's Creatorpalooza, held brand lunches at Cannes Lions, and helped organize AI Creator Day with TheWrap. Nearly 400 creators, AI experts and brands turned up at UCLA for that first AI Creator Day.

And there's a distribution layer under all of it. Longstanding relationships with MSN, Spotify and Screenvision push its content beyond social platforms, though Lazar didn't share details.

The numbers, honestly

This is where most creator-economy profiles get vague. Lazar didn't.

Annual revenue has ranged from the mid-six figures in a "challenging year" to low seven figures in "stronger years," run largely by a team of three people who each wear several hats as on-camera talent, editors, social marketers and writers, with no significant outside investment or heavy infrastructure.

Three people. Seven figures in the good years. Mid-six in the bad ones.

She's been even blunter about it before. In an earlier interview with Creator Spotlight, Lazar said the company has "brought in seven figures some years and basically zero other years."

And the single most useful number in this entire story is this one: at one point What's Trending was making $30,000 a month on Facebook alone, and then one month the check was $1,000.

That is what platform dependency actually looks like on a bank statement. Not a slow decline. A cliff.

What survived

Notice what didn't change across fifteen years, five platforms, a public humiliation and a 97 percent drop in one income line.

The face. Lazar launched What's Trending in 2011 as a creator-driven media brand with her as the face, and that's still the asset. Platforms got swapped. Revenue lines got added. The person at the center stayed the same.

That's the thing coaches already have and routinely under-build. You are the durable layer. The funnel, the platform, the referral partner, the agency are all rented.

There's a reputational footnote worth keeping, too. It's unclear who actually wrote the Jobs tweet, and Wikipedia's account attributes it to a junior staffer. Lazar apologized publicly anyway, twice, including from her personal account: "On behalf of all of us at @disruptgroup we sincerely apologize for the inaccuracy of what was tweeted earlier today." A formal apology ran live at the top of the next show.

Not everyone thought it was a fireable offense. It happened regardless.

Fifteen years later the scoreboard reads differently. Publishers including CNN, Bustle and The Washington Post are now embracing creator-led media, which is the model Lazar was running when CBS deleted her from its website.