It's Wednesday and brands are finding ways to get more placements within Hollywood movies and TV shows. These days, they’ll let any old car stand in for a time machine — it doesn’t even need to have gullwing doors.

Today’s News

CREATOR COMMOTION

It’s no longer enough for Sam and Colby’s fans to watch their adventures. Time to live them.

The escape room: Sam and Colby are no longer content with just putting themselves (and their fellow content creators) into spooky situations.

They want to give everyone a scare.

To do it, the YouTube duo with 14 million subscribers and 20 to 30 million monthly views is launching their very own escape room: Asylum—Room 152, which brings guests in as the newest patients of Clearview Hospital. There, they’ll meet head psychiatrist Dr. Baker, who we’re sure will take very, very good care of them. To escape the room, the “patients” will have to unravel Dr. Baker’s secrets—and outwit the mysterious entity tied to him.

The experience is hosted in Los Angeles venue Escape Hotel, an intensely themed escape/dinner theater biz with several different escape rooms. So far, it says, only 30% of people have solved Room 152 successfully. (The other 70% were, of course, eaten by a demon.)

The plan: In an announcement, Sam and Colby said they’ve wanted to do an escape room for years, and that bringing this one to fans is a “dream come true.” Room 152 is based on their own experiences at the Beechworth Insane Asylum in Victoria, Australia, and it’s stocked with easter eggs from other videos, too.

While this is Sam and Colby’s first escape room, it’s far from their first direct-to-fans endeavor. For a couple years now, they’ve worked with movie theater chain Cinemark to bring feature-length documentaries to the big screen. In 2023, they sold out 168 theaters with the first two episodes of their Conjuring house documentary series, and last year, their 97-minute film Legends of the Paranormal had to be expanded from 260 screens to 350 thanks to fan demand.

Now, we’ll see how many fans are willing to check in to Room 152…and how many make it out alive.

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• AMP turned T-Pain into their knight in shining cowboy hat with an announcement for their surprise summer subathon. (Tubefilter)
  

• Threads DMs are now separate from Instagram. Meta is making its X competitor simpler to use while creating more separation between its properties at the same time. (TechCrunch)
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• Dhar Mann is leveling up his content operation through strategic hires, new content initiatives, and much more. Here are some of his thoughts about his plan to build the next Disney. (TheWrap)
  
  

• There’s new research out regarding TikTok’s effect on political polarization. You’re telling me that social media is an echo chamber? Color me shocked. (Fast Company)

VTUBER MANIA

U.S. gamers are changing VTuber culture

The data: The PR and marketing agency Big Games Machine has compiled a new raft of data regarding the habits of U.S.-based gamers who watch at least 30 minutes of YouTube per week.

Some of the report’s topline findings are to be expected. Among the 1,050 respondents who participated in the survey, tutorials were the most commonly watched genre of gaming video. 47% of the sample claimed to watch that content category.

In an era defined by the breadth and diversity of available entertainment options, mid-sized channels were another top draw. The surveyed gamers were most likely to choose mid-sized channels with fewer than one million YouTube subscribers as their preferred channel size to watch.

The anomaly: The data gets a bit more groundbreaking once VTubers get involved. In Asia, virtual creators reach predominantly male audiences. The Japanese VTuber agency hololive has reported that 89% of its viewership comes from men.

But as VTubers begin to captivate viewers in the West, their demographic distributions are looking a little different. Big Games Machine found a gender imbalance in VTuber appreciation in the U.S. 23% of female survey respondents said they watch that particular category, compared to 14% of men.

On the flipside, men were more likely to prefer categories like esports. 14% of male respondents said they enjoy competitive gaming content, compared to 6% of women.

The logic: The most obvious theory that could explain why women prefer VTubers has to do with the gender of the virtual creators themselves. Last year, data from Streams Charts showed that 70% of active VTubers are female.

But that’s far from the whole story. Women in the U.S. also seem more drawn to the big personalities of VTuber characters. Big Games Machine found that women are more likely than men to seek out gaming content on TikTok’s social feed, whereas men are more likely to hang out on Kick.

Factors that inform the East Asian VTuber market, such as kawaii culture, are also less pronounced in the West. The phenomenon that blew up in Japan is now a global force — even if its expansion isn’t drawing the expected types of fan.

NEW RECIPES

Hold up. Let The New York Times cook.

The expansion: The New York Times already gets 456 million yearly visits on its NYT Cooking hub. Will a new slate of original content push that number even higher?

The Times is testing that theory with a slew of new programs, including some star vehicles for its stable of camera-ready celebrity chefs. Tanya Sichynsky has become a trusted source for meatless recipes thanks to her newsletter The Veggie, which is being adapted into a series. And Vaughn Vreeland will parlay his charming character into a baking show set to launch later this year.

One home for these new shows is the NYT Cooking YouTube channel, which now reaches more than one million subscribers. That hub is the home of Cooking 101, a new instructional series led by a rotating cast of hosts. Samin Nosrat of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat fame is up first.

The backstory: The Gray Lady wouldn’t have been able to assemble such a formidable lineup of kitchen talent without an assist from a different culinary publication. The Bon Appetit Test Kitchen earned hundreds of millions of YouTube viewers before several internal scandals (some of which were broken by The New York Times) derailed the long-running magazine’s burgeoning video efforts.

The drama led to an exodus of chefs, and the Times soon scooped up Bon Appetit alums like Claire Saffitz and Sohla El-Waylly. Saffitz’s guide to “perfect croissants” is currently the most-watched long-form clip on the NYT Cooking YouTube channel.

Sichynsky, who came to NYT from the Washington Post, and Vreeland, a former BuzzFeed Tasty producer, are two more gourmands recruited from across the digital food landscape. The NYT Cooking team is basically the Avengers, but with Saffitz’s croissants in place of Thor’s hammer.

WATCH THIS

Letterboxd rings in M3GAN 2.0 with the titular doll’s four faves

The background: Movie review platform Letterboxd is well known for its presence on red carpets, where its staffers ask Hollywood celebs to list their four favorite films. A visit to the platform’s YouTube channel reveals hundreds of “four favorites” videos (many of which I watched during an epic binge).

The twist: The preferences of movie makers are fun, but what about the preferences of movie characters? Letterboxd put a spin on its signature format by asking the titular doll from the M3GAN franchise to deliver her four faves. The commenters seem to think she has good taste, but they should be careful. M3GAN is only trying to put us all at ease.

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