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- YouTube doc hits streaming 🎥
It's Monday and Google is starting off the week with high hopes. Its #1 goal: convincing employees to pay for an on-campus hotel room instead of sleeping (and working) from the comfort of their own homes.
SCREEN TIME
This hard-hitting YouTube documentary is coming to a streaming platform near you
Starting tomorrow, Alex Winter‘s documentary about YouTube’s pervasive influence will arrive on streaming platforms like iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, and Vudu. The film—titled The YouTube Effect—premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival before running at select Alamo Drafthouse locations over the summer.
Now, The YouTube Effect will finally be available to the wider public. Here are some reasons to tune in:
1. Winter’s political angle sets his film apart from other docs.
In an interview with Ain’t It Cool News, Winter—who you may recognize as Bill from the Bill & Ted franchise—spoke about his desire to break up Google and YouTube:
“I think they’re doing tremendous good and I think there’s a capability here for them to work out most of the most significant problems. Some of those problems are societal and they’ll never be able to work them out. But the scale is a problem, I think, and the monopolized aspect of the way the business runs is a problem.”
2. Top execs and influencers weigh in on-screen.
That includes Smosh’s Anthony Padilla, Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints, and corporate YouTube veterans—including Co-Founder Steven Chen and former CEO Susan Wojcicki—all of whom discuss the scope of YouTube’s global impact.
3. Per Variety‘s Brent Lang, The YouTube Effect “takes a tough look” at YouTube’s role in influencing current events and elections. The film itself is named for YouTube’s critical impact on eyewitness journalism. According to Lang, Winter’s documentary tracks the video platform’s connection to “everything from the Jan. 6 riot to the 2019 New Zealand mosque shooting by promoting election denialism and white supremacy.”
HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰
YouTuber Mari Takahashi is teaming up with Fail Army to host 50 vs. 50, a gamified fail competition that will be distributed across FailArmy’s FAST channels. (Tubefilter)
Video app Triller has filed an S-1 form with the SEC in order to become a publicly-traded company. (Tubefilter)
Creator services company Beacons has launched a new database to help creators and managers discover one another. (Tubefilter)
Twitch streamer Kai Cenat has reportedly been charged with inciting a riot following last Friday’s tumultuous giveaway at Union Square Park. (The Verge)
DATA • MILLIONAIRES 📈
This creator got her start by roasting her snack-stealing relatives
The 2020 quarantine was bad enough all on its own—but then Pinky Patel’s family members-slash-roommates started stealing her snacks. Obviously, the now-viral creator couldn’t stand for it. So, she did the only thing she could do without wreaking havoc on her home life: she roasted her “roommates” on TikTok.
Needless to say, Patel is now a beloved comedy creator with more than 5 million followers.
Despite her current success, the creator didn’t initially expect to gain such an extensive following; she just wanted to let off some steam about her relatives. But as time went on, Patel realized that she actually had a lot of “dummy-shaming” to get off her chest—and not just about her relatives, but about irritating strangers and annoying acquaintances, too. She wasn’t the only one:
“I thought maybe only a handful of people would understand it, that it would just resonate with a couple of people in my bubble here. As the days and months and years progressed, I realized there’s a lot of people that feel the same exact way as me, but don’t want to say it.”
It’s now been two years since Patel got her start on TikTok. In that time, the comedian’s signature brand of “Pinkysplaining” (as her fans call it) has captured the attention of millions of multigenerational followers across TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Patel has plenty of offline fans, too. In fact, she’s now on her second comedy tour—meaning she’s busy “making women, people, whoever has the same life experiences as me, laugh” all across the country.
IT’S A SMALL WORLD
The creator economy is shaking things up all around the world. Here’s the latest in global news:
INDIA: YouTube Shorts gives Josh a run for its money.
Last year, an Indian video platform called Josh raised a whopping $805 million Series J round. Now, YouTube Shorts is gaining popularity with Josh’s target audience—the non-English speaking “Bharat” community—and its local rival seems to be suffering subscriber attrition as a result.
INDONESIA: A TikTok group cleans up the water.
An Indonesian TikTok group called Pandawara is removing trash from rivers and beaches—and going viral in the process. During a recent cleanup effort, over 3,000 volunteers helped Pandawara remove 300 tons of waste from a beach on Sumatra.
SENEGAL: Partisan clashes lead indirectly to a TikTok ban.
Senegal’s opposition party, Pastef, has leveraged social media in its bid to challenge the country’s ruling government. Now, the powers that be are fighting back with a ban on TikTok:
The TikTok application is the social network favored by people with bad intentions to spread hateful and subversive messages.
EUROPEAN UNION: European TikTok users take back the power.
Thanks to the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), TikTok users in E.U. territories will soon be able to opt out of the app’s addictive recommendation algorithm by “turning off personalization.”
LISTEN UP 🎙️
This week on the podcast…
The Streamy Awards are just around the corner! With the August 27 show fast approaching, Creator Upload hosts Joshua Cohen and Lauren Schnipper sat down to discuss the main players and platforms at the center of the creatorsphere.
Tune into this week’s episode to hear all about YouTube’s latest Shorts updates, the big MrBeast Burger lawsuit, and Meta’s video app victory. It’s all right here on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
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Today's newsletter is from: Emily Burton, Sam Gutelle, and Josh Cohen. Drew Baldwin helped edit, too. It's a team effort.