It’s Wednesday and X is going full TikTok with a new “React with Video” feature that superimposes a user’s response over the original post.

GAME ON

The program: Minecraft is finally playing the affiliate marketing game. By adding custom links to their content, creators who take part in a new program will be able to earn while moving up an engagement dashboard that highlights Minecraft’s most influential players.

The affiliate marketing program will be powered by impact.com’s Performance and Creator solutions, which will make it easier for players to monetize their followings.

The context: After acquiring Minecraft for $2.5 billion in 2014, Microsoft mostly took a laissez-faire approach to the sandbox title. Rather than meddling with a golden goose that had already spent years as the most popular game on the internet, Microsoft sat back and watched as creators like CaptainSparklez, Aphmau, and Technoblade helped the game attract millions of players and over one trillion views.

Then Roblox arrived on the gaming creator scene—and everything changed. The 20-year-old sandbox has since surpassed Minecraft in terms of daily players. In the process, it’s become a marketing powerhouse. Creators and brands have both capitalized on the popularity of Roblox experiences, and the ongoing consolidation in that space is making new campaigns more efficient and profitable than previous ones.

Minecraft started leveling up its own marketing ecosystem earlier this year, when it joined a Twitch-led “Tiny Takeover” that encouraged the platform’s affiliate-level partners to profit from their gameplay. Now, with an assist from impact.com, Minecraft is making it easier for brands to buy into its blocky worlds.

BACK ON TOP

The rebound: It’s hard to imagine MrBeast as a lagging creator—but for a time, the man known offline as Jimmy Donaldson wasn’t living up to his usual standard. Channels like BabyBillion had knocked him out of the top spot in our subscriber charts, and analysts noticed overall viewership decreases on the MrBeast channel. Coupled with big financial losses at Donaldson’s production company, things at Beast Industries looked like they might not be accelerating as far up and to the right as the company had hoped.

As we move into June, however, MrBeast’s willingness to take cues from other popular creators seems to have spurred a statistical renaissance. His primary channel, for instance, has now led both our viewership and subscriber rankings for three consecutive weeks. So, how was he able to pull off such a decisive rebound?

The context: In part, Donaldson reclaimed his spot at the top by being the ultimate student of YouTube. Clips published to his main channel over the last six weeks feature the same kind of cute animals, couple content, and challenges distributed by top Shorts stars.

Successfully tapping into YouTube’s biggest trends is no small feat, but it’s also worth noting that Donaldson has tools at his disposal that other creators just can’t match.

For one, he has both the financial resources and the following to drop big-budget videos that haul in 50 million views within three days of their initial upload dates. And while many creators post Shorts imploring viewers to subscribe, Donaldson’s most recent take on that promotional strategy involved an appearance from the actual CEO of YouTube.

That kind of scale and influence has allowed Donaldson to consolidate his lead as YouTube’s most-subscribed creator. During the last week of May, his primary channel added four million new subscribers, bringing it to a whopping total sub count of 494 million.

TOP 50 📈 MOST VIEWED

The trend: On YouTube’s top Shorts channels, men are still from Mars and women are still from Venus. Outdated or not, gender roles have become a popular subject matter for short-form videos—and channels that tap into those stereotypes have earned hundreds of millions of views by following one simple pattern.

The most-viewed Shorts lionizing men celebrate them for inventive solutions that bend or overtly break the rules. Women, on the other hand, are lauded for their ability to selflessly create order and establish calm within chaotic environments.

The case study: Hublot Baggins serves as a clear example of that trend. One of the channel’s top ten Shorts shows a male firefighter using an out-of-the-box strategy to catch a snake; another shows a mother cutting watermelon while her daughter selflessly serves the fruit to everyone but herself. Both videos have collected more than 125 million views each.

This dynamic of peacemaking women and rule-bending men persists across other YouTube channels that explore gender stereotypes. Unsurprisingly, the U.S.-based hub His Story offers a multitude of videos depicting men. Those clips often center around the same ingenuity and silliness as videos found on the Hublot Baggins channels. By contrast, when His Story Shorts focus on women, the storylines tend to explore themes like virtue and honesty.

Those gender roles may seem like old news, but they still have a serious pull on YouTube. During our last seven-day count, His Story earned 470 million weekly views to reach 34th place in the Global Top 50, while Hublot Baggins was right behind at #39 with 438.8 million weekly views.

WATCH THIS 👀

The YouTube debut: Last month, we wrote about Markiplier’s surprisingly complicated quest to sell his box office hit, Iron Lung, on YouTube. The long and short of it is that selling a movie on YouTube generally requires the filmmaker to be an officially approved aggregator—something that isn’t easy for individual creators to pull off.

To make it happen for Iron Lung, Markiplier ended up sealing an exclusive deal with the platform…and announcing to fans that his film would hit YouTube on May 31.

Instead, Iron Lung became available for rent and purchase (for $4.99 and $9.99) through YouTube Movies two days early (at least, for viewers in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand). So, why drop the film before its official YouTube launch date?

As Markiplier explains in a recent video, the decision was essentially made to allow for any needed troubleshooting—because, apparently, the process of selling films on YouTube doesn’t get less complicated after a movie is available on the platform. In fact, Markiplier noted that “even changing a thumbnail requires an entire new delivery through a third party” and getting to this point at all was “kind of a miracle.” Whew.

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