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It’s Tuesday and Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is launching an unorthodox giveaway. The chat platform exec’s offer: free IVF treatments for women willing to add a sprinkle of his DNA into the equation.

Today’s News

TIKTOK X SPOTIFY

TikTok is becoming Spotify’s new recommendation engine

The integration: Spotify and TikTok are taking their partnership to the next level.

The two platforms have already joined forces to give users the ability to save songs to their Spotify libraries from within the TikTok app. Now, a new integration will turn TikTok into a veritable recommendation engine for songs, podcasts, and audiobooks on Spotify.

In essence, TikTok users will be able to share Spotify content in two ways:

1. By using TikTok’s editing tools to make videos that share tracks, albums, playlists, podcasts, or audiobooks.
   
   

2. By DMing one another direct links to music, podcasts, and audiobooks.

The competition: It’s worth noting that TikTok has no ambitions to compete with Spotify in the near future. At least not anymore. In September, its parent company Bytedance announced it will discontinue its standalone music service - the TikTok Music app - which never even became available in the United States. As the saying goes, if you can’t beat ‘em…collaborate.

The big picture: TikTok’s integration with Spotify is the latest milestone in its quest to become an inextricable link between people and companies for common transactions. The platform has already sealed partnerships and built tools to make itself a search engine, a marketplace for movie tickets, a travel promoter, and more. Now, it will help boost Spotify’s discoverability offerings for artists, podcasters, and authors.

That positioning could potentially pave the way for a broader partnership. If TikTok recommendations become a big enough deal for Spotify, the video app could theoretically negotiate its own financial cut—something like an affiliate marketing bonus for driving traffic. In the meantime, however, Spotify says users can look forward to “new features and integrations that connect artists and creators with millions of fans across the globe.”

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HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• Finnish mobile game publisher Supercell has teamed up with boutique agency David New York to launch Hammerless, a true crime mystery that exists within the world of Clash of Clans. (Tubefilter)
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• According to OpenAI, ChatGPT rejected over 250,000 requests to generate deepfaked images of Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, JD Vance, Joe Biden, and Tim Walz “in the month leading up to Election Day.” (Engadget)
  
  

• Bluesky has reportedly gained more than 700,000 new users in the last week, with a majority flooding in from the U.S. (The Verge)
  
  

• After 64 years, the Beatles are still making history. The band’s latest claim to fame: releasing the first AI-assisted song to earn a Grammy nomination. (Billboard)

LINK UP

YouTube’s latest weapon for upping Google Search traffic: hyperlinked comments

The dilemma: Spotify might be on board with TikTok’s mission to become a discoverability engine, but not everyone is happy about the platform’s growth—least of all Alphabet.

Google Search traffic is the single biggest source of revenue for the YouTube parent company, which made $49.4 billion in revenue from Search this past quarter alone. Now, for the first time in over a decade, it looks like Google’s share of the search market is about to drop below 50%. That decline has a lot to do with TikTok becoming Gen Z’s search engine and the rise of ChatGPT.

The (partial) solution: In response, Alphabet is looking for new ways to grow Google Search traffic—including through the launch of hyperlinked YouTube comments. Originally rolled out as a limited experiment in July 2023, the feature (which turns videos’ comment sections into buffets of links to Google Search result) is now appearing more widely. YouTube has said that hyperlinked comments are designed to “reduce friction” for users who want to learn more about the content they’re watching. Under a video about Fallout 76, for instance, the platform automatically hyperlinked the phrases “Fallout 76” and “bingo card” in a comment that read “Fallout 76 sponsoring a video in 2024 was not on my bingo card.”

While not always perfectly executed (we’re guessing most viewers don’t watch Fallout videos to learn about bingo), that approach could provide a huge traffic boost for Google Search. With hundreds of millions of comments across YouTube, thousands or even millions of users will likely click on the hyperlinked phrases every day. Much of that traffic will presumably be targeted, since users will (at least in theory) have already consumed video content about the topic they’re searching up. 

📈 INDUSTRY TRENDS

42% of Gen Zers watch anime weekly—so streaming services are using it to win them over

The stats: Gen Z viewers are really, really into East Asian media. In fact, 70% of the audience for Japanese shows and 60% of the audience for Korean shows consists of viewers under 30—and according to a recent study from Polygon, 42% of Gen Z respondents watch anime on a weekly basis.

The content: Streaming services are taking full advantage of that generational shift. As hubs like Netflix approach peak saturation in the United States, Gen Z’s interest in East Asian media has become a valuable asset for streamers seeking to draw in younger audiences. TVREV used data from Parrot Analytics to explore the streaming prowess of anime and found that Naruto is the most in-demand Japanese-language series on Netflix and Hulu in the U.S. My Hero Academia, meanwhile, ranks highest on the same measurement for Amazon Prime Video.

Those shows aren’t just useful for attracting new subscribers. According to Parrot, top anime series haul in massive amounts of revenue for platforms by retaining subscribers, too. The analytics firm found that Naruto is worth $21 million across Netflix and Hulu, while My Hero Academia accounts for a $15 million revenue contribution across four SVOD platforms. The longevity of those series likely has a lot to do with subscriber retention: between the original show and its sequels, Naruto has run for more than 1,000 episodes.

The paradox: Ironically, that longevity may also help to obscure the popularity of anime in the streaming world. In Netflix’s latest What We Watched report (which details viewership from the first half of 2024), no anime series ranked in the top 100. That shutout is likely due to the methods used to compile the report: since rankings are based on individual seasons, long-running classics like Naruto are spread throughout the list.

LISTEN UP 🎙️

This week on the podcast…

Talking politics: Last week’s election results are already shaking up the creator economy. On the latest installment of Creator Upload, hosts Josh Cohen and Lauren Schnipper outline the potential changes creators and industry professionals can expect to see over the next few years. Tune into the full episode for insights from special guests Kaya Yurieff (Team Leader, Creator Economy for The Information) and Tubefilter’s own Senior Editor, Sam Gutelle.

It’s all right here on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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