It’s Monday and schadenfreude-fueled viewers have generated nearly 62 billion views for The Turn, a YouTube channel that offers Shorts of drivers trying (and failing) to navigate a hairpin curve.

GUESTS OF HONOR

This year’s Creators in Action gala will honor Jay Shetty and Malik Ducard

For the second year running, the Saban Community Clinic’s Creators in Action gala will recognize two creator economy trailblazers.

The gala: Creators in Action is put on by the largest provider of free and reduced-cost health care in Los Angeles. Last year’s event—which honored YouTube duo Rhett & Link—raised more than $100,000 to fund the Saban Community Clinic’s services.

• The 2024 Creators in Action gala is set to take place on June 3 at The Studio by Tishman Speyer in Beverly Hills.

The honorees: This year’s big event will honor On Purpose host Jay Shetty—who released a New York Times bestselling book, Think Like A Monk, before launching a talent agency called House of 1212—and ten-year YouTube vet Mailk Ducard.

• Ducard served as Global Head of Family and Learning at YouTube until 2021, when he departed to join Pinterest. Since then, the industry pro has opened doors for creators by devising an influencer-friendly content strategy.

Why it matters: Events like this one demonstrate the power of creators and creator industry professionals to make waves in the world of philanthropy. In a statement, Candle Media Chief Development Officer and 2024 Creators in Action chair Brent Weinstein noted that the gala’s organizers were “overwhelmed with the awareness and engagement that resulted from our inaugural Creators in Action Event.”

• Creators have repeatedly leveraged their global visibility and massive digital audiences to raise funding for important causes. The MrBallen Foundation, for instance, has given a total of $1 million to victims of violent crime, while the Sidemen’s 2023 charity soccer match raised £2.4 million for organizations like Rays of Sunshine.

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• ChatGPT developer OpenAI has been negotiating with film studios in the hopes of integrating its generative model, Sora, into Hollywood productions. (Tubefilter)
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• Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn have called on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify intelligence related to TikTok and ByteDance. (Engadget)
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• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says live sports scores are coming to Threads. First up: NBA game updates. (TechCrunch)
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• Trump Media & Technology Group—aka the parent company of the Truth Social app founded by Donald Trump—is gearing up to make its Wall Street debut as a $5 billion company. (The New York Times)

COLUMNS • MILLIONAIRES 📈

This multi-platform creator has been in hustle mode since elementary school

How it started: Before Tristan Clausen was a creator, he was “the chip guy.” He started hustling in fifth grade by filming YouTube videos and pivoted the next year to selling duct tape wallets. By high school, he’d graduated to passing around chips and Hot Cheetos—hence the ‘chip guy’ title.

• Clausen never let go of that entrepreneurial spirit. Although his childhood YouTube career didn’t produce promising results, he decided to take another run at social media when COVID-19 struck.
  
  

• TikTok was the obvious place to start. Clausen began posting with “the intention of being a streamer and doing gaming content” and almost instantly went viral. His first upload attracted 300,000 views; his second brought in one million followers within a week.
  
  

• Clausen capitalized on that short-form success to build an impressive Twitch platform. Not long after, he turned his attention to YouTube—but not before spending “hundreds of hours” learning the ins and outs of the platform.

 How it’s going: That hard work has paid off in a big way. Clausen’s first post-research YouTube upload (an Omegle reaction video) recently hit 3 million views, and his fast-paced TikTok vlogs have earned him more than 177 million likes. In total, the creator now claims 8 million followers across social media.

What’s up next: Clausen is ready to expand his team. With his audience growing rapidly across multiple channels, the creator and his long-term editor are eager to build out a network of “thumbnail artists, editors, all types of people that make it so we can focus on what we’re good at.”

• Check out our full interview with Clausen here to find out more about his social media journey.

THAT’S SHOW BUSINESS

At 14.5 million, Joe Rogan’s show has almost 3x more followers than any other podcast on Spotify

The numbers: Joe Rogan may be one of Spotify’s most controversial creators, but he also appears to be its most popular draw. According to Bloomberg (which used a new Spotify test feature to identify top creator follower counts), Rogan’s show has nearly three times more followers than the next runner-up.

• The Joe Rogan Experience’s grand total: 14.5 million followers.
  
  

• That number is even more impressive when compared to the show’s closest competitors. Bloomberg‘s list contains several creator-led programs—including Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy (3.7 million followers) and Emma Chamberlain’s Anything Goes (3.1 million)—but none claim more than 5 million followers.
  

The fine print: Spotify has pointed out that a podcast’s follower count only
“represents the number of users who have decided to ‘follow’ a show” rather than the “total audience or the performance of an episode.”

• Bloomberg’s report seems to back up that qualifier: as the publication noted, the left-wing political podcast Chapo Trap House collects a six-digit monthly sum on Patreon despite counting just 127,000 Spotify followers.

The context: In 2020, Spotify paid $100 million for exclusive rights to The Joe Rogan Experience. The streamer has since stood by Rogan’s podcast through multiple misinformation-related controversies, illustrating its years-long commitment to distinguishing itself in the podcast market by offering high-profile exclusives.

• Now, however, Rogan’s podcast is no longer a Spotify exclusive—and the platform’s strategy seems to be shifting as it pivots to incorporate video podcasts and full-length music videos. As The Joe Rogan Experience trucks on, the podcast industry will have to wait and see how those changes affect Spotify’s (and Rogan’s) bottom lines.

LISTEN UP 🎙️

This week on the podcast…

The big show: In the latest episode of Creator Upload, hosts Joshua Cohen and Lauren Schnipper team up to discuss MrBeast’s $100 million deal with Amazon—and his mission to produce “the biggest reality competition series ever.”

• That new partnership is off to a rollicking start. According to Amazon, Beast Games is already set to break a world record by offering the biggest single prize in the history of TV and streaming: $5 million.

Listen in: Find out more about MrBeast’s upcoming Amazon series by tuning into Creator Upload 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.