Beastly Shake Up

This Week: I’m sorry I’m not covering the Met Gala.  I really don’t care.  But I got you covered on everything else.

Night Falls on MrBeast:  MrBeast and his long-time management company, Night Media, have mostly split up.  The Reed Duscher-founded agency will still work on Feastables, but everything else is coming in-house or perhaps to a big 3 agency - or one willing to relocate to North Carolina.   While surely disruptive to Night Media, it’s not like they haven’t been through this before.  They managed Dude Perfect through their early years, but the Dudes brought it all in house a few years ago.  As creators evolve into big media companies, many naturally outgrow traditional management and representation.  Charli D’Amelio did it – bringing in top digital agent Greg Goodfried to be CEO. MrBeast hired industry vet Marc Hustvedt as President three years ago, and this feels like a logical next step.  Night will continue to grow its roster of budding superstars, including Kai Cenat, Dream and Safiya Nygaard.  Night’s premise – that today’s creators are akin to yesterday’s sports celebrities - is alive and well (although I’m still unclear on Rooster Teeth).  But sometimes your creators become big media companies and you have to adapt.  

Related: This is even better news for full-time creators.  Why?  Because as more creator-led companies become Unicorns, more growth capital becomes available. The latest from last week:

• Old friend Ian Schafer and Issa Rea launched Ensemble, an incubator and agency for emerging creators.

• Gumroad launched a fund that will pay creators cash today for a revshare down the road.

Open AI’s “Robots of Dawn” Moment:  SciFi writer Issac Asimov famously released the “Three Laws of Robotics” in 1942, codifying how to protect humanity from sentient robots.  OpenAI just publicly released its own take – called “Model Spec” (aside, marketing anyone?).  It starts with the overarching rule that its AI must “follow the Model Spec” and gets even more specific from there.  There’s a short section on protecting creators, encouraging fairness and kindness and a focus on being thorough and efficient.  It’s a brief but interesting first draft, and I applaud OpenAI for their first attempts at transparency.  But it’s a bit hazy on the whole Asimov’s First Law thing: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” 

• Related: This – and some of the other OpenAI stories below, are all a part of the “Sam Altman playbook”.  (HT Brad Berens, Ph.D.)

Apple Crushes Creators:  Apple’s not typically a tone-deaf org – and it has built great creator tools for most of its life.  That’s what makes the latest iPad ad, where the means of creation get squished into a digital AI soup that, presumably, resides in their hardware.  An outcry led to apologies and ad pulling, but the question remains:  perhaps Apple isn’t your default creativity partner anymore.  Not sure what will take its place, but the times they seem to be a-changing.

More Bad Research:  Glossy’s latest “research report” ($) analyzed 15 Instagram influencers and came up with supposedly broadly applicable insights around engagement, attention and more.  But it’s the research equivalent of Prime Hydration – quick buzz, followed by an epic crash – and factually devoid of any projectable conclusions.  15 out of 10.2 million influencers is NOT a representative sample.  Glossy compounds the pop by segmenting those 15 into “micro” and “macro” groups and presenting even more dubious comparisons.  As a focus group it works – and delivers good insight on these 15 creators.  But don’t bet your company on the results.

• Aside – what is a “micro” influencer?  Glossy’s research claims its anyone with less 500,000 followers/subs but Sprout Social says it’s 10k-100k.  I lean more towards Sprout here, but I’d like a real definition.

The Search for a Third Space:  Good story on the hunt for “third places” as a way to combat the loneliness epidemic.  It contextually validates Whalar’s Lighthouse, Billion Dollar Boy’s membership program and grass-roots creator meetup efforts globally – like Lucky Lopez’ Taco Tuesday in Las Vegas and Brett Dashevsky’s Creator Economy NYC.

QUIBIS:    

YOUTUBE

• YouTube adds a simple way to boost your posts.

• Anyone who calls Steve Zaragoza Tom Bombadil deserves a link.  Google is Sauron.  Worth reading.

• Top YouTube creators dish about streaming, TV and more.

• Tips from MrBeast’s thumbnail wiz Chucky.

META

• Mets tests cross-posting from Instagram to Threads – I like this in abstract, but does it foreshadow a future merge?

• Instagram’s Creator Marketplace gets an AI upgrade as it tries to compete with TikTok’s version.

• Instagram’s latest hiccup should incent you to create your own “Content Vault”, says Melissa Laurie.

• Meta shares concrete examples of how its open-source AI models are being adopted.

TIKTOK US SALE/BAN

• Unsurprisingly, TikTok takes the US to court over the divestiture/ban, focusing on freedom of speech.  I still believe the Espionage Act of 1917 will prevail.

• NPR says that if TikTok gets shut down, creators will go the way of Dinosaurs.  Really.  An “extinction event”.  Who writes this stuff?

• Peter Kafka ruminates on the apparent lack of TikTok buyers.

• Might seem global, but TikTok is Chinese at its core.

TIKTOK NEWS

• TikTok will automatically label more content as AI – using emerging watermark standards.  Good move TikTok, but I wonder what sort of challenge process will be built for creators?

• Hank Green chats with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, says TikTok hasn’t updated his revshare dashboard in months.

• TikTok rolls out new co-branded research exploring the extent of product discovery on Double-T.

OTHER CREATOR ECONOMY

• The New Yorker explores our attention deficit pandemic – and veers into “The Birds”.

• Substack has a “pivot to video” moment as it entices TikTok stars to glom on.

• Kai Cenat won’t be prosecuted for his NYC meetup that got out of hand.

• I can’t wait for more stories about taking acid and going to the Westminster Dog Show – but I’m not sure this relaunch will work.

• This feels like the beginning of a Creator-Brand bubble.

• Beautycon’s back – new version debuts in LA this November.

• UTA combines creator teams under new agency umbrella – co-locates them with Medialink in new space.

• Great to see Drake and Kendrick Lamar releasing copyright claims to help creators comment, react and propel their content.  Could this be a model going forward?

• Congrats to Phil Ranta and the rest of the Fixated team on their launch of a new agency that will lean into creators, content and experiences on Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft and beyond.

• Related: Phil launches a newsletter focused on insight from the “managers manager” POV.

CREATOR TECH – AI, WEB3, VR, MORE

• OpenAI may launch search engine today (or maybe not, I’m publishing from Indonesia, apologies for being time-zoned).

• OpenAI also has plans to fight deepfakes.  Casey Newton explains what it’s all about.

• Open AI says it will launch tools in 2025 to enable creators opt out of its models.  Bit late, isn’t it?

• SocialFi moves forward as Roll rolls out DeFi week.

RESEARCH:

•  Most employees are using AI, no matter what their employers say about it – new research from LinkedIn and Microsoft

SPONSOR THIS NEWSLETTER: Want to reach 28,000 leaders in the creator economy? check out Inside the Creator’s sponsorship packages and/or email me at [email protected]

100% written by me – no human or AI ghostwriters were involved.

Like this free newsletter?  Buy me a coffee and say thanks!  Or let’s do a meetup in your town – anywhere in the US or even around the world.

I've built and sold multiple creator economy startups to top media companies - including Discovery and Paramount. Subscribe here on LinkedIn to get this newsletter every Monday.

Thanks for reading and see you around the internet.