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It’s Thursday and a new Instagram experiment is giving users the heebie-jeebies. After all, who expects to stumble across ads featuring an AI-generated copy of their own face?

Today’s News

CREATOR COMEBACK?

David Dobrik is vlogging on YouTube again

The context: David Dobrik’s years-long vlogging hiatus has come to an end. The creator—who rose to fame in the 2010s alongside Liza Koshy and “Vlog Squad” creators like Jason Nash—returned to his eponymous YouTube channel on January 7 with the upload of a 2024 retrospective vlog.

That video comes roughly three years after a series of sexual assault allegations against Vlog Squad members led Dobrik to lose his sponsorships, his ad revenue, and his position at social media platform Dispo. During the same period, the creator had a bitter falling out with former Vlog Squad member Jeff Wittek over an on-set eye injury.

By 2024, Dobrik was facing legal action from Wittek and lamenting the shelving of a Casey Neistat documentary about his life—but he still had the attention of diehard fans. His pizza parlor, Doughbrik’s, drew four-hour lines at its grand opening. Around the same time, Dobrik branched out to become one of Snapchat’s top creators.

The return: Now, the creator is revisiting one of the central elements of his pre-scandal career: vlogging. His 2024 recap video documents cross-country adventures with pals like Ilya Fedorovich and Natalie Noel, as well as an extreme “body transformation” wager with YouTube star MrBeast. After just 24 hours, the vlog has collected more than 4 million views. If that number continues to climb, we’re guessing Dobrik’s 17 million YouTube subscribers will have more content to look forward to in 2025.

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HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• December’s ranking of 100 most-subscribed-to U.S. YouTube channels includes several hubs dedicated to sandbox games, with The Noob Roblox and BeamNG Heroes scoring spots at #46 and #72. (Tubefilter)
  
  

• A recent survey conducted by Numerator found that TikTok users are “51% more likely to say social media is the most influential ad touchpoint” than other consumers. (Numerator)
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• According to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, Meta is “going to be adding political content to recommendations” across Instagram and Threads. (Adam Mosseri via Threads)
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• Delta has sealed an “exclusive” deal with YouTube that will allow it to offer free in-flight YouTube Premium and YouTube Music services to members of its SkyMiles loyalty program. (Variety)

BIG INVESTMENT

Investors just sealed a $265 million funding round for live shopping platform Whatnot

The funding: Live shopping is projected to become a $100 billion business this year—and Whatnot is at the epicenter of that ecommerce boom. The platform, which gives sellers a space to auction off collectibles like sneakers and cards, has raised $265 million for a Series E funding round that pinpointed its value at nearly $5 billion.

As reported by Bloomberg, Whatnot’s Series E was co-led by Greycroft Partners, DST Global, and Avra. In total, the ecommerce platform has raised $746 million of venture capital since its 2019.launch

The plan: As live shopping continues to grow in the United States, Whatnot’s unique focus on collectibles, its ability to transcend that niche, and its fresh injection of funding will help it scale up. According to Whatnot Co-Founder and CEO Grant LaFontaine, the platform plans to deploy its new capital to support divisions like engineering and customer services while targeting expansion into countries like Australia. New shopping categories, including one that caters to the rising popularity of golf on social media, are also on the way.

In the meantime, Whatnot will continue to oversee thousands of sellers across the eight countries in which it currently operates. In its 2024 State of Livestream Selling Report, Whatnot claimed that its top 500 sellers had earned at least $1 million on the platform. Two-thirds of sellers were reported to earn at least $10,000 per month.

SHORT AND SWEET

YouTube is testing another tool that helps creators turn long-form content into Shorts

The tool: YouTube is doubling down on its mission to turn every creator into a multiformat star. According to a Google Support page on “test features and experiments,” a new tool gives “some” YouTube users who post English-language content the ability to “Create a video highlight” by selecting an option in the video editor tool on the desktop version of YouTube Studio. That feature is designed to streamline the clipping process so creators can “easily cut out engaging segments from long-form videos on YouTube and instantly publish them as separate 16:9 videos” (per Google Support).

Allowing creators to cut long-form uploads into short-form highlights is nothing new for YouTube (or for rivals like Twitch, where Clips have long been used to show off stream highlights). The ability to create clips from videos and live streams predates the launch of YouTube Shorts, and YouTube officially released a Shorts-compatible clipping tool in 2022. By 2024, the platform had carved out dedicated spaces on creator channels to spotlight Clips.

The context: YouTube’s efforts to support the creation of short-form highlights have paid off. Thanks to the platform’s promotion of Clips, creators like Mark Rober have been able to reach new audiences on Shorts by cutting down memorable moments from longer uploads. The rise of Clips has also brought in significant VOD viewership for stars like Kai Cenat and iShowSpeed, who typically rely on streaming content. Both creators’ YouTube highlight hubs currently rank among the platform’s 100 most-subscribed channels on a month-to-month basis.

WATCH THIS 📺

World of Warcraft is having a moment on Twitch

The guild: World of Warcraft is seeing a resurgence on Twitch–and a big chunk of that traffic is thanks to OnlyFangs. Led by creator Sodapoppin, the streaming guild is fully in-character, meaning members are expected to roleplay the entire time they’re logged in.

The stats: OnlyFangs’ immersive style of gameplay has been a hit on Twitch. Sodapoppin currently streams around 12 hours of gameplay per day, and brings in an average of ~20,000 viewers. According to Streams Charts, those viewers are watching between 250,000 and 370,000 hours of his content every single day. In the last 30 days alone, viewers have watched over 7 million hours of WoW content from Sodapoppin, and he’s gained over 20,000 new followers.

Ready to enter the OnlyFangs universe? Check out the guild’s latest highlights here before heading over to Sodapoppin’s Twitch channel.

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