TOGETHER WITH

It’s Thursday and Threads has debuted yet another feature designed to woo users away from X: custom feeds. (Excuse us while we build an entire feed around the lore of Arcane.)

Today’s News

BY THE NUMBERS

Despite gains among its rivals, Twitch still accounts for 82% of streaming hours

The report: Streamlabs and Stream Hatchet have good news for Twitch. In their latest quarterly report on the streaming industry, the creator dashboard and its data partner found that Twitch accounted for more than 82% of all streaming hours during Q3. The Amazon-owned platform also played host to a whopping 85% of unique streaming channels and claimed roughly 60% of overall watchtime.

In other words: despite noticeable upticks for platforms like Kick and AfreecaTV, Twitch is still the undisputed leader among streamers.

The rivals: That doesn’t mean the 13-year-old platform should rest on its laurels. Three years ago, Kick didn’t exist and AfreecaTV had barely expanded out of its core Korean market. Now, Streamlabs’ latest report shows that YouTube Gaming, Kick, AfreecaTV, and CHZZK all claimed significant amounts of watchtime in Q3.

Kick’s rise has been particularly significant. The two-year-old platform’s total watch time has doubled year-over-year, reaching 533.9 million total hours in Q3 2024. One driver of that growth is sheer volume. The total number of streaming hours on Kick approached eight million during Q3 2024 after hovering around six million a year ago—an increase that points to the effectiveness of initiatives like the platform’s Incentive Program.

Still, those numbers pale in comparison to Twitch. The reigning champion of live streaming had 5.14 billion hours of watch time and 212 million total hours streamed in Q3 2024. YouTube Gaming came in a distant second with 1.94 billion hours of watch time and 14.5 million total hours streamed.

Kick will have to prove that it has real staying power if it hopes to truly compete. The platform’s number of unique channels appears to have plateaued after exceeding 500,000 during Q2 2023. The same stat dropped below 400,000 in the latest Streamlabs report (which is only 22 times less than Twitch’s 9.16 million unique streamers during the same timeframe). It’s a sign that Kick may need to offer more than lucrative exclusive contracts and a free-wheeling cultural ecosystem to keep streamers and viewers engaged.

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HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• A new antitrust suit accuses Netflix and Meta of colluding to “hobble” Facebook Watch as part of a “quid pro quo” agreement designed to limit competition in the video-streaming market. (Deadline)
  
  

• Elon Musk reportedly sought to acquire Substack shortly after purchasing Twitter, with the intention of merging the two platforms. (Newsweek)
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• Bluesky Digital Assets Corp—a crypto company unaffiliated with the same-named social media platform, Bluesky—has seen its stock value rise significantly in the aftermath of the X rival’s recent success. (Gizmodo)
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• TikTok’s parent company, Bytedance, has reportedly increased its valuation to $300 billion. (Yahoo! Finance)

CREATOR CURRENCY

AI avatars of creators are coming to the Chinese version of TikTok. Is the U.S. platform next?

The program: Chinese social media users will soon be able to chat with AI versions of their favorite creators. Douyin—aka ByteDance’s Chinese counterpart to TikTok—has launched the V Project, an initiative dedicated to the development of AI-generated creator lookalikes.

According to AIBase, creators who develop V chatbots will be able to outsource fan interactions to AI avatars capable of 24/7 communication and participation in group chats, live streams, and comment conversations. The avatars are developed via Doubao, a large language model under the ByteDance umbrella.

The context: Bytedance isn’t the first tech giant to jump on the idea of AI creator lookalikes. Meta created chatbots that resemble celebrities back in 2023, and later introduced a Creator AI program to Instagram. Google has also suggested that its LLM Gemini could be used to turn YouTubers into lookalike bots.

Individual creators have toyed with the idea of outsourcing fan interactions to chatbots, too. Last year, streamer Amouranth developed an “AI girlfriend” alongside tech company Forever Voices. The bot took in $34,000 of revenue during its first 24 hours of sales. Not long after, Amouranth introduced her “AI twin” to the Eva AI app.

The future: If ByteDance does bring some version of V to TikTok (a scenario that seems likely given the AI avatar capabilities of the app’s Symphony Creative Studio) it will first need to address the concerns of its creator community. Creators must agree to have their likenesses scraped before lookalike chatbots can be developed, and—despite the enthusiasm of individual streamers like Amouranth—many are still hesitant to embrace that process. Combined with rising public unease regarding the toxicity of parasocial relationships, surmounting that obstacle could be a difficult feat.

IN THE BANK

According to Visa, creators are now small businesses. Here’s why that matters:

The announcement: Visa has officially announced its intention to classify creators as small businesses. That change—which the credit card company revealed at Web Summit in Lisbon—will allow creators to take advantage of new financial tools.

Visa’s updated classification addresses a major pain point in the creator community. A study conducted by the banking giant found that two-thirds of creators feel that slow payments hinder the speed of their business development—a sign that traditional banking often still fails to recognize influencer career paths.

The context: Creator-focused financial companies have emerged in recent years to fill that gap. Karat, for instance, offers numerous financial services tailored to the creator economy and has worked with Visa to upgrade its credit card business. In an email to Tubefilter, Karat Co-Founder and Co-CEO Eric Wei stressed that creators do qualify as small business owners, with their job creation abilities, tax needs, and GDP contributions making them as legitimate as any traditional company.

For large firms like Visa, those contributions—and the explosive growth of the creator economy overall—are become increasingly impossible to ignore. The industry is expected to reach $500 billion by 2027. In 2022 alone, YouTube reportedly contributed $35 billion to the United States Gross Domestic Product while supporting the equivalent of 390,000 full-time jobs.

The future: As the creator profession continues to grow, it will continue to integrate with the global economy at large. We saw evidence of that shift during the 2024 election cycle, when creators wielded unprecedented political influence by interfacing with White House officials, endorsing candidates, and serving as the new faces of political media. Now, Visa’s changing classification suggests that the banking world is getting on board as well.

WATCH THIS 📺

The NBA is teaming up with Disney to “Dunk the Halls” this Christmas

The big game: ESPN and Disney are giving basketball fans an unexpected holiday gift: “the first real-time, animated NBA game.” That event—called Dunk the Halls—will accompany an IRL game between the San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks, who are set to go head-to-head at Madison Square Garden on Christmas Day.

The animated version will appeal to kiddos by featuring appearances from Disney favorites like Goofy, Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck. Check out the trailer here, or mark your calendars to tune in through Disney+ or ESPN+ on December 25.

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Today's newsletter is from: Emily Burton, Drew Baldwin, Sam Gutelle, and Josh Cohen.