It’s Thursday and the internet is losing it over this human refrigerator designed to help people beat the heat on summer days.

DISNEY X TIKTOK

The deal: Disney is giving TikTokers the right to use likenesses and scenes from franchises like Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, and FX in short-form videos.

Thanks to a landmark agreement between the Mouse House and TikTok, creators on the platform will gain access to “hundreds of films and series from Disney’s vast library of enduring franchises and beloved IP” (per Disney).

That agreement will initially be piloted in the U.S.—where the first creator-made videos featuring Disney IP are expected to arrive “in the coming months”—before being expanded to other regions.

The motivations: Disney’s TikTok deal is a win-win. Creators will be able to bring a professional touch to film- and TV-oriented videos, while Disney will gain fresh content for its Verts hub. The TikTok-style format launched earlier this year on Disney+ and has since become the Mouse House’s entry point into the creator economy.

Forging stronger connections with creators is a necessary move if Disney wants to keep up with the competition. Netflix’s spending spree has brought scads of creator videos to its shores, while Amazon Prime Video has formed an alliance with MrBeast.

Disney is doubly incentivized to buy into creators because of its status as a film and TV company. Through secret screenings and viral clip channels, TikTokers have become dominant forces in the world of film criticism—and some creators have even become Hollywood hitmakers themselves. According to TikTok, its users shared an average of 6.5 million film and TV-related posts per day in 2025.

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PLATFORM NEWS

The plan: The #redditstories genre is thriving on short-form platforms. By pairing text-to-speech recitations of popular Reddit threads with unrelated footage, creators across TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts are hauling in millions of views. According to TechCrunch, nearly ten million posts on TikTok alone have been tagged with the phrase #redditstories.

Reddit HQ wants in on all that traffic—so it’s developing a strategy to move the #redditstories genre back to the platform where it all started.

During Reddit’s Q2 2026 earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman revealed that his product team is hard at work on a “video Reddit” experience that would let users listen to posts and comments as a form of background engagement. Huffman said that a test version of that player will be ready for a rollout later this year.

As for Reddit’s quarterly results, the platform’s revenue rose 61% year-over-year to reach $805 million, exceeding Wall Street expectations.

The context: If Reddit can turn thread recitations into a viable format, it could absorb a lot of traffic that currently flows through other platforms—solving a problem that has persisted in different forms since the platform’s heyday.

In the early 2010s, back when Reddit was still known as “the front page of the internet,” YouTube embeds were the dominant form of media on subreddits like /r/videos. The 2017 launch of an in-house player gave Reddit native video traffic. Within a year, that product was delivering 1.4 billion monthly views.

More recently, Reddit has adopted formats that first rose to prominence elsewhere. A TikTok-esque Watch tab arrived as a dedicated hub for video content, and the platform has also given users the ability to turn their comments into videos (a feature that now accounts for over 10% of Reddit’s video posts). Going forward, the platform’s “video Reddit” experience will help it keep moving down the path to complete TikTok-ification.

CREATOR RESEARCH

The Research tab: YouTube is testing a video ideation tool that could change the game for creators looking to optimize their content.

Called Research, the new tab within YouTube Studio is an experiment being tested with “a small number of users,” a YouTube spokesperson tells Tubefilter. When a creator clicks into the tab, they’ll see a collection of videos from other creators, along with public data like subscriber counts, views, and upload dates.

We first heard about the Research tab from Mario Joos, who describes himself as a Retention Director for YouTubers with over 100 million subscribers, including MrBeast, the Stokes Twins, and Alan Chikin Chow.

In a LinkedIn post, Joos noted that creators have historically had to rely on third-party tools for ideating and gauging interest in new content. YouTube does have its own AI-powered “Inspiration” tab, but Joos says he and his creators haven’t found it very useful.

The context: This new Research tab is different, thanks in large part to two key features. First, there’s the outlier multiplier—a number that rates how well a video performed compared to a creator’s other content (e.g. 4x, 20x, 100x). If creators narrow their search to a very recent publication window, they can use multipliers to potentially see things like burgeoning trends and up-and-coming video formats. 

But even if certain trends draw significant viewership, they might not be in a specific creator’s wheelhouse. That’s where the “Watched by my viewers” filter comes in.

Joos said this one feature—which only displays videos that see significant viewership from a creator’s established audience—“is where YouTube wins over any other tool,” and that it is a “massive” opportunity for creators.

At least for now, however, that opportunity isn’t open to most creators. A YouTube spokesperson told us there’s currently no information available about a potential wider rollout for Research.

WATCH THIS 👀

The long haul: Since the arrival of Shorts in 2020, the format has become a dominant force in our weekly YouTube charts. But that doesn’t mean long-form videos are dying out. In fact, according to recent research from Ben Grubbs (a former YouTube exec who co-manages Creator Sports Capital), they’re thriving—especially in the world of sports content.

Channels like the golf hub Good Good have turned the format into the foundation of a reliable business model. Grubbs pegs the average runtime of a Good Good upload at 84 minutes—a length tailor-made for consumption on TV screens.

Per Grubbs, 61% of Good Good watch time comes on TVs, and the average Good Good TV viewer watches for nearly twice as long as the average viewer on any other screen.

Because of that, Grubbs claims that “effectively all advertising monetization” on Good Good comes from long-form content. Check out one of the channel’s latest 2-hour videos here to see the Good Good crew in action.

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