This Week: Happy Birthday YouTube! 20 years ago, on Feb 14, 2005, the domain name YouTube.Com was registered. Here’s to 20 more years of innovation and creator payouts! Today’s newsletter looks at YouTube, disruptions on the horizon, and safe spaces to explore as well. Plus, our regular mix of top stories, Quibis, and lots more creator economy insight.
I typically post Monday morning – but today’s a holiday in the US. But I didn’t want to wait until Tuesday. So I split the difference!
Hi, I’m Jim Louderback and this is my weekly creator economy newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you are either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.
If the latter – and you want to subscribe, get it here!
BIGGER REALLY IS BETTER
Quick takes on Neal Mohan’s annual letter to the community, featuring 4 “Big Bets”.
- They’re Not Really Bets. Should have been called “Big Facts”.
- Glowing Rectangles Unite! Wall-mounted rectangles have replaced pocketable rectangles as the top viewing surface for Big Red in the US. YouTube turned 20 last week – and now it is officially old media.
- Epicenter of Culture: This sounds sneakily similar to Double-T’s assertion that “Culture starts on TikTok”.
- YouTubers Are Now Hollywood Startups: This has been happening for a while. I found Slow Ventures’ new $60M fund focused on entrepreneurs FLEXING their creator muscles much more interesting (congrats @megan Lightcap).
- AI Cometh: Nothing to see here – AI has already arrived, and if you aren’t using it to create better with less – or more – then you’re already behind. Of course, not all AI works as promised (see next story).
SHORTS AI UNDERWHELMS
Shorts creators can now use the overhyped (but otherwise unavailable) Veo2 AI video generator from Google for creating backgrounds and clips. But it was underwhelming in my tests. I tried to make a happy birthday YouTube Short, but it failed on both creating the background and the clip side. Check out my final, awful short here. Pretty anti-climactic. I’m still waiting to clear the beta waitlist for the overall product. But based on these results, I’m not holding my breath.
YOUTUBE BY THE NUMBERS – 15B+ Videos, Most Have Less Than 500 Views, and Only 1 in 200 is Tagged As 18+
Although YouTube won’t give us insight into what’s really going on inside the platform, that hasn’t stopped researchers from doing their own digging. Using random character generation and extreme scraping, they’ve created a predictive analysis of 20 years of YouTube videos. Fun facts – there are about 15 billion videos on YouTube, but less than 1% ever crack 100,000 views and only 1 out of every 500 or so videos is monetized in any way. More than half feature shaky-cam video – which will decline as Ai advances (my Pixel 8 Pro has great stabilization, FWIW). And the vast majority of videos have no likes or comments. Interestingly, YouTube is more akin to Archive.Org than ABC, NBC or BBC. Hats off to the researchers at UMass for pulling all this together – you can keep up on their findings at Tubestats.Org. (HT @Paul Greenberg)
SCENARIOS OF DOOM
If YouTube is the past, then what’s the future? A lot of smart minds have been asking the right questions, while most of our entrenched media looks askance. Just last week @Shelly Palmer explored why Hollywood gets AI wrong – arguing that it’s not a tool it’s a storytelling shift. @Brad Berens found some common ground, but mostly disagreed, insisting all the best art comes from collaboration.
No one really knows what’s going to happen. Luckily @Doug Shapiro rides to the rescue, as he lays out why scenario planning is important and develops 4 plausible scenarios for 2030 that sit at the intersection of AI and Acceptance. Shapiro then takes a stab at what might happen via a “messy blob of likelihood”. His analysis and conclusions are surprisingly similar to what we theorized back in 2008 while building Revision3, as we mapped out the future of creators and on-line video. We knew technology would continue to make it cheaper for anyone to make and publish videos globally without gatekeepers – but didn’t know whether consumers would broadly adopt vlogs and creators in lieu of TV anchors and soap operas. I’m firmly in the upper right corner of the blog, just as I was back then. Technology will advance, and many consumers will mostly embrace it. And many creators will be disrupted too, alongside traditional media.
A PLACE FOR CREATORS
Whatever happens, we’ll still need real spaces. YouTube famously built its YouTube Spaces around the world as a place for creators to connect, learn and collaborate. Alas, the experiment didn’t survive Covid. But creators need community more than ever. Last week the mantle shifted to Whalar Group, who launched their first “Lighthouse” – a physical co-working space for creators that combines the vision of YouTube Spaces with the congeniality and sensibility of SoHo House. Check out my exclusive video tour from last week’s first open house at the Venice California Lighthouse – and expect the New York version to debut later this spring or summer. At $5,750 for an annual membership, it’s not cheap. But the facility is well worth it, according to Ben Relles, a former YouTube exec and creator who is mostly leaning into GenAI today. Likening it to a gym membership, Relles plans to bulk up his creator muscles via the 20 hours of studio credit that comes with the membership. I just wish there was one near me in San Francisco!
- Related: There’s also a 20-year YouTube anniversary party coming up at The Lighthouse – but it’s a private affair.
- Disclosure: Whalar Group sponsors this newsletter – more on the launch below.
SPONSOR: The Lighthouse, part of Whalar Group, has launched its first I.R.L. Creator Campus in Venice, CA, redefining creative spaces for the Creator Generation. With founding partners Shopify, iHeartMedia, and Samsung, plus a partnership with Tribeca, the campus offers studios, events, and industry connections to empower Creators. Brooklyn and London locations will follow. Read more in Fast Company: https://www.fastcompany.com/91277913/whalar-group-wants-to-take-the-creator-economy-into-its-next-chapter-with-the-lighthouse.
QUIBIS
YOUTUBE
- Inside Studio: @Peter Yang sat down with YouTube Director of Product @Ebi Atawodi to talk about the creative vision behind YouTube Studio and more. Worth a read or listen.
- Be Safe Out There: VidIQ highlights a dangerous creator scam making the rounds. More details here.
META
- Big Boy Pants: Big Blue’s CTO suggests that employees should just quit if they disagree with company policies.
- Bet Over Your Head: Meta collaborated with 150 gambling sites to secretly target knowns gamblers with Facebook Ads without first getting consent.
- Cruella de Zuk: The 5% RIF is underway, although it appears that most weren’t performance related.
TIKTOK
- Get It While It’s Hot: TikTok is available again to download in the US from Apple and Google app store. Unclear what changed, as the liability remains – given that H.R.7521 is still a law – and penalties will still be enforceable for a year after President Trump presumably leaves office.
- Hair Extensions: The 75 day reprieve could be extended, says President Trump, although he shared very few details on what’s up.
- 50 Creators To Watch: TikTok releases it’s highly curated list of 50 global creators on the rise. Odd fact that might only interest me: they shared each creator’s city and country, except for those from the US – where they only shared the state (although Dubai is both city and emirate).
OTHER CREATOR ECONOMY
- Think Harder: Low sugar soda company Poppi amplified their super bowl commercial by sending expensive Poppi laden vending machines to 30 creators. A somewhat predictable buyer backlash ensued.
- Bye Bye Birdie: Like everyone else, I’m waiting to see what happens next with our beloved Duo Keyshauna Renee Lingo.
- STOP SNARF! That’s what Buzzfeed wants to do with its new social media platform focused on creativity and connection, not addiction. This from the company that taught us how to go viral on Facebook with active emotions – including disgust, outrage and anger. Snowball and hell come to mind. Read CEO Peretti’s SNARF manifesto – which oddly involves more AI.
- Naija Creates: New platform will showcase Nigeria’s creator economy in London this summer – but hopefully US and beyond soon!
- Creators Are Founders: Interesting take from @Emily Herrera – Creators are founders – and content is their first product. Ties into Slow’s fund launch, highlighted above. Figures, since Emily spent time at Slow.
- Creators Are Wanted: Thanks to Net Influencer for spending time with me exploring how Dubai wants to be a global center for the creator economy.
- Wakey Wakey: Why Netflix can’t ignore creators from @Mike Shields. TLDR, YouTube.
- Filmify: That might have been a better name for the new startup building “Shopify for filmmakers”. But Olyn will have to do. Also Nebula streaming service expands its creator and indie filmmaker cred.
- Big Money: Congrats to my friends at Uscreen for raising $150M to help creators own their audience.
- Beastly Performance? A supposed screenshot of MR Beast’s YouTube studio page was “leaked” and then debunked by Viewstats CEO @Chucky Appleby.
CREATOR TECH – AI, WEB3, VR, MORE
- Firefly AI Video: Adobe makes Firefly’s AI video generation capabilities available to everyone. It probably won’t be the best, but because Adobe indemnifies its customers, it will be the safest.
- Humanizing Social: Thought-provoking new essay from @Hugo Amsellem predicts that AI chat will kill the feed, much as the feed axed the profile. He calls it a “Social Renaissance” and explores our voice-first, multi-faceted future. What comes after voice? IMO: direct mind-AI connections.
- Training Isn’t Fair Use: That’s what a US court just ruled, in a blow to AI companies training on web-based content, but a positive for creators. Expect this to be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.
- DeepSeek Ban: Korean bans the new AI app for data privacy and security reasons.
- Grand Theft Creator: Rockstar Games wants to make GTA6 the next big creator platform.
Where’s Jim? Glad to be back in the bay area for a few weeks but headed to Nantucket and New York on Sunday. I’ll be at my friend Andrew’s Outsider Art Fair in NYC in Feb 27-Mar1 – see you there! Also loving @Kevin Kelly’s insightful 50-years of travel wisdom. THANKS for the street-food tip Kevin – it worked great in Yogyakarta and Surabaya last May. Headed to SXSW after that, speaking about the creator economy on March 8th!
100% written by me – no human or AI ghostwriters were involved in the production (except for the cover art!).
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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.
Let me know what you think – email me at jim@louderback.com. Thanks for reading and see you around the internet.
