TOGETHER WITH

It’s Monday and if you’re craving free pizza, look no further than TikTok. Pizza Hut’s latest hype campaign offers free combos to all UAE-base users—as long as they’re willing to post one little promotional video.

🗞️ Today’s News 🗞️

• Kamala Harris makes her Twitch debut

• Dropout’s latest show invites TikTok stars to the kitchen

• The launch of a VTuber community app reveals the dark side of fandom

• YouTube’s biggest kids channel gets its first live-action spinoff

• This week on the podcast…

STREAMING BIG 🇺🇸

Kamala Harris is officially on Twitch. Will she put her account to good use?

The launch: Kamala Harris has made her Twitch debut. The VP’s account sprung into action on Thursday with a livestream of her August 22 DNC address, which drew roughly 1,000 concurrent viewers. Four days later, Harris’ account numbers around 8,500 followers.

The context: That total puts Harris a long way behind her Republican opponent. Since getting his Twitch account unbanned a month ago, Donald Trump has grown his follower count to over 172,000 and teamed up with streamers like Adin Ross.

Arranging similar collaborations would be a smart move for the Harris campaign. So far, the clips available on the VP’s account include one of her campaign ads and a snippet of her DNC speech—but it’s possible more creator-focused content is on the way. Twitch record-breaker Kai Cenat alleged on stream that he’s already turned down calls from the Harris campaign (although the validity of that claim has been called into question).

Harris wouldn’t be the first Democratic political candidate to woo Gen Z viewers by joining forces with popular streamers. After all, who doesn’t remember AOC’s iconic, pandemic-era Among Us stream with HasanAbi?

🔆 SPONSORED 🔆

One conversation at VidSummit changed everything for HopeScope. What will this year’s event do for your career?

These days, HopeScope is a top YouTuber with 5M subscribers, ~50M monthly views, and a broad range of content. But in 2020, HopeScope was an athleisure reviewer on the edge of creative burnout.

Then VidSummit founder Derral Eves posed a question that changed everything: ‘Why do people watch your videos?'”

Armed with the knowledge that viewers valued her unique insight, HopeScope began posting viral reviews, hauls, and vlogs far outside her usual niche—and quickly rose to become one of YouTube’s top creators.

Now, HopeScope plans to unravel the secrets of her success at VidSummit 2024—a can’t-miss creator event coming to Dallas from Sept. 3-5.

As a keynote speaker, HopeScope will join industry pros like Colin & Samir, Marissa Hill, EYstreem, and MatPat to share exclusive insights on audience growth, monetization, AI, and more. Do you have your ticket to VidSummit?

Claim your spot →

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• Dropout—aka the brand previously known as CollegeHumor—has announced Gastronauts, an upcoming cooking show that will feature talent from TV and TikTok. (Tubefilter)
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• According to The Verge, X employees have been instructed to submit 1-page summaries of their potential impact of the company if they want to be considered as recipients for stock grants. (The Verge)

• Threads is testing out experimental posts that disappear 24 hours after being uploaded. (Engadget)
  
  

• Telegram cofounder Pavel Durov was reportedly arrested in France over the weekend in connection to the app’s lack of moderation. (Gizmodo)

FANDOM GONE WRONG

A VTuber fan app launched last week. It took 1 day for things to get out of hand.

The launch: It’s safe to say that the international launch of Holoplus—a fan-gathering app from Tokyo-based VTuber agency Hololive—didn’t go according to plan. Although the app was designed to foster community-based discussions of VTubers and events like last weekend’s big concert, its lack of moderation left the door open for less innocuous content.

Some trolls took to posting spam and NSFW; others doxxed Hololive’s talent by sharing candid IRL photos of them (a taboo in the VTuber space, where most creators appear as avatars and don’t share their real-life names).

The response: By the next morning, Hololive had locked the app and frozen the ability to post. Holoplus was relaunched a few hours later with all doxxing, NSFW content, and spam removed—and a new system of forum moderation firmly in place. Posts that violate Holoplus’ TOS are now being removed, although the app’s parent company has yet to release a statement.

The context: The surprising part of this situation isn’t that doxxing and spam quickly overtook Holoplus; it’s that the app was ever unmoderated to begin with.

While fandoms are often overwhelming positive, doxxing and swatting have become more common over the past few years. VTubers are especially frequent targets, since (as we saw with Dream) some viewers will do just about anything to discover what masked creators’ faces look like.

As a result, the protection of talent via swift moderation and well-enforced TOS should be agencies’ and platforms’ top concern. Twitch, for instance, has cracked down on harassment over the last year by updating its policies to explicitly condemn behaviors like doxxing and swatting.

GOING LIVE (ACTION)

YouTube’s biggest kids channel is launching its first live-action spinoff

The show: CoComelon is going live-action.

Come fall, fans of YouTube’s most-watched kids’ channel—which counts more than 186 billion lifetime views—will be able to tune into a spin-off called Melon Patch Classroom. The edutainment-style series will center around Ms. Appleberry, a preschool teacher first introduced in one of CoComelon’s billion-view sing-alongs.

Kids can also expect to meet live-action versions of other CoComelon characters, some of whom made their IRL debut during the franchise’s cross-country U.S. tour.

The context: Melon Patch Classroom will feature the signature blend of music and comedy that has made CoComelon one of the most-viewed channels on YouTube and led it to become Netflix’s 58th-most-watched offering in the first half of 2023.

CoComelon’s streaming and social media prominence isn’t the only indicator that Melon Patch Classroom will be a hit (although it’s a big one). The channel’s parent company, Moonbug, has already proven its ability to turn live-action, kid-friendly properties into multiplatform franchises with potential for significant retail revenue. That’s what it did with Blippi, the popular YouTube channel that has spawned a handful of character-driven spinoffs—and we’d be surprised if this expansion of the CoComelon universe doesn’t lead to a similar level of cross-market success.

LISTEN UP 🎙️

This week on the podcast…

Very demure, very mindful: Creator Upload hosts Josh Cohen and Lauren Schnipper always keep things demure—especially when there’s a week worth of TikTok trends and industry-shaking deals to dissect. The duo’s latest creator economy breakdown touches on everything from the rise of TikTok’s newest femininomenon to SiriusXM’s $125M bid to join Alex Cooper’s Daddy Gang.

Find out more 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.