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It’s Wednesday and California is turning down the volume on streaming platform ads. Does this mean an end to jump scares between episodes of Wednesday?

Today’s News

RINGS OF POWER

Instagram is putting a ring on its creator community

The award: Platform awards are a pretty big deal in the creator community—especially when they include a physical trophy. YouTube, for instance, has long celebrated creators by sending them flashy plaques when they reached certain subscriber milestones. Earlier this year, Spotify (which is an aggressive YouTube competitor in the podcast space) started sending out creator milestone plaques of its own.

Now, Instagram is putting its own spin on that tradition with the debut of “Rings.” The twist: while everyone who hits a certain subscriber count on YouTube gets a plaque, Instagram won’t be awarding Rings based on set milestones. Instead, judges will select creators based on “spirit”:

The system: To find the creators who got the spirit, Instagram put together a judging panel of “legendary creatives” like Spike Lee, Marc Jacobs, Pat McGrath, Marques Brownlee, Yara Shahidi, Grace Wales Bonner, Ilona Maher, and Instagram head Adam Mosseri (among others). Each judge nominates their favorite creators, then collectively votes for the ones they think most deserve a ring.

The first wave of winners (who have yet to be named) will receive both a physical gold ring designed by Grace Wales Bonner and a virtual golden ring that shows up “on their profile and in the Stories section in Feed”. According to the platform, winners will also “have the ability to customize their profile backdrop color and put their own twist on the ‘like’ button–helping fuel their creativity in the year ahead.”

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HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• Meta says it has updated Facebook’s recommendations engine in order to show ”newer and more relevant reels.” (Meta)
  
  

• A new report from The Washington Post analyzes “TikTok watch histories from 1,100 users” in an effort to determine how the platform keeps users engaged. (The Washington Post)
  
  

• X will divide its Verified Organizations subscription tier into two distinct categories: Premium Business (marked by a gold checkmark) and Premium Organizations (marked by a grey checkmark). (TechCrunch)
  
  

• Mastadon is introducing new “Packs” to help users stock their feeds with content from specific types of accounts (i.e. “journalists”). (The Verge)

GOSPEL STATS

Top Branded Videos: Fire, chickens, and horrific entities

MrBeast has dominated Gospel Stats’ weekly ranking of top-viewed branded YouTube videos for a while now, with his primary and secondary channels regularly swapping spots at #1. This week, the creator’s flagship hub leads the pack with a video backed by a familiar sponsor: Jack Link’s.

🥇 #1. MrBeast x Jack Link’s: Would You Risk Dying For $500,000? (74M views)
MrBeast’s latest viral hit hasn’t just drawn in 74 million views; it’s also generated attention from concerned viewers thanks to its unusually high stakes. While cash-driven challenges are standard MrBeast fare, some viewers felt that daring a stuntman to escape a burning building was simply too risky.

Like many other MrBeast videos, the now-notorious challenge was backed by meat company Jack Link’s, which just released an official MrBeast-branded collection.

🥈 #2. Gabie Vigneault x Bloom: Cleaning the chicken coop with my favorite drink @bloomsups #bloompartner (14M views)
The stakes get substantially lower as you head further down Gospel Stats’ weekly ranking. Gabie Vigneault—a maker of cleaning and ASMR content who has just over one million subscribers—racked up a whopping 14 million views with a 52-second video about caring for chickens. Like many sponsored Shorts, this one is almost entirely dedicated to promoting the brand: in this case, supplement company Bloom.

🎰 #1,728. Spoogli x Morgan & Morgan: The Horrific Entities of Deep Appalachia… (75.5K views)
Spoogli promises to get into all things “unsettling and uncanny,” and his new Morgan & Morgan-sponsored deep-dive into Appalachia does just that. For its part, Morgan & Morgan has been sponsoring dozens of YouTube videos every week for months now as part of a strategy to reach a younger, digital-savvy audience. This week alone, the Orlando-based law firm sponsored at least 25 videos from creators across genres.

Check out the full branded ranking here and head over to Gospel Stats for more YouTube sponsorship insights.

PLATFORM HEADLINES

Steven Bartlett co-founded a new video podcast distribution platform

The platform: Diary of a CEO podcaster Steven Bartlett has unveiled his next venture: a video podcast hosting/distribution platform with AI baked in.

Called Flightcast, the hub was co-founded by Bartlett and the former MrBeast engineer/Thumbnail Test founder who calls himself “Rox Codes.” Over the last two years, it has secretly become the production bones of Diary of a CEO, which has 12 million YouTube subscribers and attracts around 30 million views/month.

In a launch video, Bartlett and Rox Codes say Flightcast was built in response to the needs of Barlett’s Diary team, who encountered numerous hurdles (like big files and long upload times) during production. Those kinds of issues have become a widespread plague for video podcasters who (for the most part) haven’t had access to the same upload/distribution tools as audio-only podcasters.

The offerings: To help streamline the production process for video podcasters, Flightcast lets users upload their episodes to it and then distributes that content across YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Before episodes go public, Flightcast fits them with AI transcriptions, titles, descriptions, and chapters, and uses an auto-clipping tool to cuts out chunks, edits them, and posts them on YouTube Shorts.

“And then,” Rox Codes says, “there’s AI on everything to help you analyze the data, to help you understand what’s working and…make recommendations as to what you should do.” The co-founder says Flightcast also has a chatbot and offers custom generation trained on individual creators’ content, meaning it can provide suggested titles/descrips/etc. “in your style.”

The question: Given the lack of tools currently available to video podcasters, we can see how those offerings would be of use. But in an era where generative AI grows ever more contentious, will Flightcast’s AI-heavy pitch turn off an increasingly wary creator community?

WATCH THIS 🎙️

What does “the golden age” of AI slop mean for edutainment channels?

“AI Slop is Killing Our Channel”: Over the last twelve years, Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell has delved into everything from the origins of allergies to the probability of alien civilizations. Now, the chart-topping edutainment channel is taking on another big subject: AI slop.

As the hub explained in a recent video, the impact of AI slop has already been felt by websites, artists, and creators across pretty much every corner of the internet—Kurzgesagt included. So, in “the golden age” of bots, how can a channel sustain itself while making educational content that requires hundreds of hours of research to produce?

Check out Kurzgesagt’s full video here to learn more—and find out how you can join the fight against AI slop.

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