This Week: 4 more fascinating studies – one from new sponsor PaperCup and the other three at the end. Come to my Meetup Wednesday in Baltimore! Details here. It’s the last week of September 2023 and here’s what you need to know.
New Editing and AI tools from YouTube: Big red resisted making editors for years – and its tools today are rudimentary at best. But with TikTok and Shorts come changes. There’s a new mobile editor in beta, and it promises easier editing, automatic captioning and much more. It’s currently being tested on android devices only. New AI-based tools are also on the way, with improved YouTube Studio insights, AI generated fake backgrounds, better audio search and what sounds like rudimentary auto-dubbing. They’re also building a chat-bot front-end to remix or create new videos. Phil Ranta unpacks the pros and cons. Let a zillion Mr. Beasts bloom – and this officially marks the start of the AI-Tool Explosion diaspora.
Blackmagic Uplevels Your iPhone Camera – for FREE! Feeling FOMO over YouTube’s new (for now) Android-only editing tool? You’ve got an early Halloween treat courtesy of my favorite Australian tools and gear vendor. The new – and completely free- Blackmagic Camera for IOS adds serious professional capabilities to your devices, letting you custom tune your video shots just like a $10,000 studio camera. I tested it on my iPad mini and it brings advanced camera and film techniques to everyone. It even saves your video to the cloud for easy transfer and collaboration. Everyone shooting on iPhones should download this NOW. And as an Android user, I’m the one with serious FOMO over here. My Pixel has been deprecated.
Twitter May Go Paid: Lots of hand wringing over Elon Musk’s threat to paywall the whole darn site. Overall, it’s not a bad idea, open-to-everyone social networks haven’t exactly been a panacea for our fragile world. But my real question is how much per month? I’d pay a dollar. Two maybe. But five is too much. And how will they price it globally, where relative values are different. But even if they charge, it’s still not (relatively) a lot of money. Assume 100M users pay a dollar. That’s $1.2B annually, about the same as Twitter raked in during its last quarter as a public company. That’s probably the best you can expect as higher prices mean less payors. Related, Snapchat now has over 5M paying users generating around $240M annually. Good, but it’s still just over 1% of monthly users.
SPONSOR: AI dubbing startup Papercup uses machine learning to localize videos using AI voices that sound indistinguishable from real human speech.
Creators and brands use the technology to reach new global audiences quickly, affordably, and scalably. Audiences demand high-quality audio and with Papercup’s premium AI voices, the dubbed content matches the quality of the original. Conversely poorly dubbed tracks will destroy watch time.
Creators uploading Papercup-dubbed language tracks into YouTube’s multi-language feature reach 1 million views 5x faster than dedicated language channels.
Want to know more? Check out Papercup’s report debunking the most common AI dubbing myths.
The Next Big Social Crypto Thing: It’s called Friend.Tech and it’s the tip of a social crypto spear. I just signed up with my twitter handle (JLOUDERB), and quickly had 8 “holders” of my personal key, which gives you access to my chat room. It’s what Bradley Miles, CEO of Roll, calls a “social bonding curve platform”. It could be the next big social network. Or (as another user told me yesterday) a Ponzi scheme. But the underlying tech is fascinating. Welcome to the “Blockchain as a Service” era. You can easily deploy one using Conduit, Route3 and Caldera among others. That enables apps like Friend.Tech to spin up quickly too (see Post.Tech). The more apps that deploy on your chain, the more you make via transaction fees. Another plus: creators and followers also extend across on-chain apps. Imagine Reddit, TikTok and Tumblr on a single chain; you and your fans could easily extend across all three.
It’s likely the next big gold-rush, as Friend.Tech is generating high six figure fees every day and the chains will make even more. Users too. For example, within 10 minutes I was already being enticed with a 3,3 strategy to game the system, driving up my “key price”. Bots abound. Other similar social crypto efforts have flamed out, leaving early adopters counting their coins and latecomers crying. But this feels different. Creators including FaZe Banks and Steve Aoki have already arrived and I expect more to show up soon. Keep it on your radar, and if you have $20 or so to burn, jump in and try it yourself (you’ll need an invite code though).
Related: I created 75 digital NFTs last week as part of Virtualness’ Gratitude on Chain initiative. The bulk of the items give buyers a free drink at any (and every) Inside the Creator Economy meetup they attend (the next one is Wednesday in Baltimore), along with pricier options if you’d like to bring a meetup to your town. You can read more about why I did it here.
QUIBIS:
YOUTUBE
- YouTube highlights two of its key techs – Sarah Ali and Cielo de la Paz.
- The “Ad Blocker Battle” accelerates – this is still good for creators.
- Nice Beeb profile on DanTDM.
META
- Facebook changed its logo. World yawned.
- Fake profiles come to Facebook. No word yet as to how I can collapse my existing ones together.
- Meta launches paid verification for businesses. Probably worth it, even though some creators aren’t happy ($).
TIKTOK
- TikTok testing a Google search integration
- They are also testing new ways to label AI generated content and will rebrand affected filters with “AI” too.
- Ban or no Ban? TT and US resume negotiations.
- “Pay us $368M”, EU demands. “You made kids data public.”
- I’m watching you, Wazowski. Always watching. Always. Roz = MyRTO.
OTHER CREATOR ECONOMY
- Will Mr. Beast make a video recreating this official Squid Games spin-off as well?
- Nice think piece from @Cayman Rojas, LinkedIn’s star creator partner manager.
- Creators, picket lines and the SAG-AFTRA strike, 70 days in. Flash – writer’s strike likely over!
- The No Fun League gives creators access to its back catalog. What could possibly go wrong?
- Unity backtracks on its crazily stupid pricing plan. Bill Young explains the thoughts behind the madness.
- The justice department released a batch of emails and other docs from the google anti-trust case. Then they went away. I wonder why?
- Scary post on LinkedIn automation – but with good insight. And now I know where all those awful DMs come from.
- New ways to invest in creators / the creator economy – Creator Science launches a Syndicate, and Karat launches an investing community. Plus a new capital infusion boosts Electrify to $85M – earmarked for YouTubers.
- Kast Media has been ripping off podcasters. Aside, is Coffeezilla becoming the Ronan Farrow of YouTube?
- Discord’s new “Server Shops” go into beta. I’m ready to buy!
- Trend time – 3 that you need to know about.
- An MCN by any other name? Collectives rule the college NIL world.
- Sales shakeup at Snap – Wilk out, Harris in.
GENERATIVE AI
- Musicians hope to extend “likeness” laws to voice, thus derailing AI-based voice cloning efforts.
- 5,000 AI-generated audiobooks launched by Project Gutenberg – quality uneven but it’s the flapping butterfly that will turn into a tornado.
- Another AI video generator app. My standard test didn’t deliver anything impressive, but YMMMV.
- New Dall-E 3 launches and integrates into ChatGPT.
- Can you guess the first NFT collection to debut as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon? No, it’s not an ape, it’s a cat.
- Tana Mongeau and Matt Steffanina are going virtual as Afterparty raises $5M!
TIPS
- 5 Dumb Tricks from Ed Film Booth on how to pause your brain and make better videos.
- 10 ways to embrace simplicity in communication – great tips from BBC creator Ros Atkins.
RESEARCH:
- Gen Video analyzes top Tech Creators – what makes them tick and how brands should work with them.
- Morning Consult claims more than half of GenZ aspire to be creators – but the report costs $1,100 (for a monthly sub), so I didn’t vet it.
- Wavemaker dives into GenX and social media – finding they’re online, on TikTok, and underserved by advertisers. Much like the “Boomers are relevant” studies from 10 years ago.
Thanks for reading and see you around the internet. Send me a note with your feedback, or post in the comments! Feel free to share this with anyone you think might be interested, and if someone forwarded this to you, you can sign up and subscribe on LinkedIn for free here!
If you’re interested in working together as a sponsor to reach the leaders in the creator economy, check out Inside the Creator’s sponsorship packages and/or email me at jim@louderback.com
And don’t forget to listen to The Creator Feed – the weekly podcast Renee Teeley and I produce – get it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Stitcher!