TikTok Fiddles and Burns

 This Week: So much TikTok action last week!  I’m happy to add Whalar to my sponsorship roster. Plus, my Open Sauce industry day lineup is amazing. Please come June 14^th in SF (or you could go to Chonkfest instead).

TikTok’s Busy Week: Is DoubleT fiddling while Rome burns? Feels a bit that way, as a raft of new products and marketing initiatives rolled out at TikTok World 2024 last Wednesday, along with more creator and user news too. The cavalcade of announcements reflects a company madly practicing SNAFU triage while brands and creators decamp to competing platforms “just in case”. Meanwhile, the financial hit from the ban/sale has forced belt tightening too, as 1,000 plus layoffs come to the global ops team – which will decimate user support and employee morale too.

Harvard Business School “Discovers” Nano Influencers: Add HBS to the growing chorus of academics “proving” that when it comes to creators, micro and nano beat macro. Big creators get all the hype, but smaller creators are the true disrupters – with “profound implications for the innovation strategies of established companies”. HBS advises you to toss your traditional models and adopt these 4 sustainable growth strategies – including creator collaboration and rethinking the value chain. HBS also attempts to value the global creator economy. Their best guess? 40 million “economically consequential” creators (defined as actively reaching at least 1,000 followers) influence $130 billion in purchasing decisions annually.

AdTech “Discovers” the Creator Economy: It’s always valuable to peruse Luma’s research – even if you don’t care about AdTech. Their latest “State of Digital 2024” has a fascinating look at the Creator Economy through the MarTech lens, highlighting the opportunity for automating down-funnel monetization. The research also explores the impending “cookieless” world and shopping and retail data too. Both put creators in the driver’s seat with attributable reach and first-party data. Luma CEO @Terry Kawaja is a long-time creator and was a regular VidCon speaker pre-Covid. He knows his stuff.

When does a CEO Become an Influencer? In the UK, apparently, at 1M IG followers. Tala CEO Grace Beverley found this out the hard way, when British authorities nabbed her for promoting Tala without disclosure. How is that different from Richard Branson doing the same? Or Caspar Lee and Ben Jeffries from Influencer.Com. I’m 100% in favor of disclosure, but the rules need to be clearly drawn and uniformly applied. There’s literally no difference between Kim Kardashian and Grace Beverley – aside from scale.

• Related: Mexico struggling with an influencer to politician pipeline.

SPONSOR: Whalar Links Up with LinkedIn: Whalar has been named LinkedIn’s marketing partner for creators. Whalar will bring its expertise, innovation, and creative content solutions to support both brands and creators alike. Read all about it here!

Orca Launches its Own Retailer: Originally envisioned as the technology and infrastructure to power creator-first livestream commerce, Orca just jumped into the retailer space too. Partnering with nine different brands, Orca will now compete with its customers as it builds “Bleu Beauty” into a curated family of products stream-sold online. CEO Max Benator explained to me that this was a natural evolution. “Our goal is to drive sales of products through engaging, entertaining content. Whether we do that on a services basis, by selling our own inventory or as a hybrid. It’s all accretive toward our mission.” Perhaps vertical integration offers the best opportunity for success in the live shopping space in the US. Could a stable of in-house creators – beyond those hosts dedicated to Bleu – be the next likely step? Benator says no, but I could see it happening.

• Related: Rex Woodbury lays out the 10 macro-forces shaping commerce today.

OpenAI and WSJ Just Killed News (?): Lots of handwringing around social with the announcement of News Corp’s $250M 5-year deal with OpenAI. Just as the internet disrupted magazines (I was running magazines at the time), AI will change the news landscape. Perplexity, OpenAI and others will serve up the “What Happened” part of news, disrupting those sources that act as wire services – along with Twitter and other news focused platforms. But it’s an opportunity for creators, as the “What it Means” news analysis role will increasingly be filled by creator-journalists like Cleo Abram, Johnny Harris and Coffezilla. I mourn the upcoming disruption of traditional news gathering organizations. But there’s an opportunity for truth to emerge as filtered by journalist creators and responsible AI – and we should support these journalists and technologies as they emerge. And dismiss those who claim to be but are not. Foundations, J-Schools, and journalism conferences need to embrace this new world or risk being left behind.

QUIBIS:

YOUTUBE

• YouTube updates its search algorithm to incorporate a type of deep-linking into segments of longer videos.
• YouTube is once again testing its terrible redesign. Just say no.
• Did Sora train on YouTube? It’s under investigation at Big Red.
• More transparency into what portion of a video triggers demonetization – and perhaps a way to edit them out in the future.
• Super Chat replies and AI generated instrumental tracks also underway.
• YouTube highlights top inventor-creators – you’ll see more like this at Open Sauce!

META

• Most important Instagram metric? According to Mosseri it’s “send rate”.
• Snap and BeReal infected with the MetaCopy virus.
• A paid tier for Meta.AI is under development. I wonder if it’ll enable premium discussions with “Bru”, “Zach” and “Coco”.
• “Just pay creators Meta”, says @Simon Owens, “or they’ll all leave.” He’s right.

TIKTOK

• TikTok announces 50 “Change Makers” – global creators focused on positive impacts. The platform will help accelerate their growth and impact.
• You can now be certified as a “Media Buyer” on TikTok. You have to pass a two-hour proctored exam to win the badge.
• Canada’s intelligence chief tells Canadians to avoid TikTok.
• TikTok wants the US courts to rule on the proposed ban/sale by early December.
• New desktop-based floating playback window launches. So much for workplace productivity.
• State affiliated media curtailed on TikTok. This makes me wonder, “why did it take so long?”.
• New “Symphony” and “TikTok One” provide streamlined access to advertiser tools and AI.

OTHER CREATOR ECONOMY

• Linktree passes 50M users (that’s a lot!) and expands shopping.
• Doug Shapiro on why AI will probably finish off the disruption of traditional media started by the internet
• Can “old media” launch a digitally relevant platform? Not sure the question is even relevant, but Fox and Gordon Ramsay are giving it a try with “Bite”.
• Brand Army has a kidsploitation problem (along with similar services), but they are working hard to fix it.
• Great discussion with the Duolingo brand team on creating content that resonates.
• ShopMy hopes to do “creator gifting at scale” with their new Lookbooks product.
• Pinterest releases a “how to reach GenZ guide” that’s broadly relevant beyond Pinterest too.
• LinkedIn’s the latest to auto-flag AI generated content – but won’t let users do it themselves.
• Sprout Social says it’s “Time to Hire an Influencer Marketing Manager”. I’ll go a step further and say it’s time to hire a creator to do the job.
• I mentioned Skibidi Toilet to a savvy group of video marketers last week, but less than half knew about it. Boy, will they be confused in the toy aisle this fall.
• Another creator details who pays and how much. YouTube wins again.
• I might never go out in public again. Well, no, that’s a lie. Film me all you like – any press is good press.

CREATOR TECH – AI, WEB3, VR, MORE

• Hell hath no fury like a Johansson scorned.
• Pattern matching the current AI hype cycle with prior AI bubbles. A compelling argument for why we’re on a sigmoid curve and not an exponential one.
• So much for protecting humanity from our robot overlords. OpenAI counters with a 10-point plan to keep us all safe.
• 15 years of Minecraft! 15 days of maps, free stuff, backgrounds and more. So swing your sword and celebrate.
• Interesting interview with the President of Signal on privacy.

RESEARCH

• EMarketer finds that LinkedIn has become a home for GenZ due to its “refreshing professional atmosphere”.
• Epidemic Sound released its 2^nd annual “State of the Creator Economy” in the US report, with data from March – and follow ups with TikTok creators in May. Nearly two thirds of “monetizing creators” worry about losing money if TikTok is banned, while more than half now consider themselves full time.
• TikTok’s aging up. YouGov’s latest survey – presumably paid for by TikTok – details how to reach these 25+ “Oldtokers”. Could this drive GenZ and GenA to greener pastures, untrammeled by the olds?

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.