It's Monday and a recent study found that AI chatbots are still “easily distinguishable” from real people when conversing on social media. The giveaway: they’re too nice.

Today’s News

BEAST MODE

MrBeast is opening his own theme park in Saudi Arabia

The big announcement: MrBeast is opening a theme park in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Beast Land will welcome guests from November 13 to December 27, and—according to Jimmy Donaldson himself—will feature “custom games modeled after our videos that don’t exist ANYWHERE else and will have the world’s largest prize wall.”

Those games will include activities like Tower Siege, which Donaldson says will challenge park visitors to “load balls into real catapults and…land them in these giant 60 foot tubes for points.” No images of Beast Land have been released just yet, but visitors can expect to encounter typical theme park rollercoasters and rides.

Entry into the park starts at just $7. For $25 more, visitors get access to the games and three rides, while a $66 “Beast Mode+” ticket will let you do everything.

The context: Donaldson’s Beast Land announcement comes amid increasing scrutiny of creator activity in Saudi Arabia. Just last month, the participation of several celebrities in the country’s comedy festival drew public backlash, with critics highlighting the Saudi government’s record of human rights violations and calling on creators to prioritize ethics when collaborating with governmental entities.

In response to similar criticisms, Donaldson justified the location of Beast Land by noting that he wanted to give his “big middle eastern fan base [sic]” a “chance to participate.”

Beast Land is part of a deal Donaldson signed with Saudi Arabia’s annual Riyadh Season festival back in May. According to Saudi Gazette, that deal involves “introduc[ing] global attractions such as MrBeast Park and one-of-a-kind challenges,” as well as “MrBeast’s participation in the Season’s opening ceremony.”

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• Max Cohen posted his first TikTok video in January 2024. Less than two years later, he’s creating content full-time, has signed with Viral Nation, and is in the midst of a stand-up comedy tour. (Tubefilter - Partner Story)
  
  

• Denmark is reportedly moving forward with a plan to ban users under the age of 15 from social media. (Associated Press News)
  

  
  

• Netflix will bring immersive fan experiences—including two activities themed around Stranger Things and Squid Games—to its Dallas Netflix House location starting December 11. (Gizmodo)
  
  

• Seven families have filed lawsuits against OpenAI over ChatGPT’s alleged role in reinforcing psychiatric delusions and suicidal behaviors. (TechCrunch)

TIKTOK TALK

At $19B in quarterly sales, TikTok Shop now rivals eBay

The shopping spree: It’s only been two years since TikTok Shop’s U.S. launch, but the Bytedance-owned operation already claims enough quarterly sales to rival a 30-year-old ecommerce platform.

That claim comes from analytics firm EchoTik, which compared TikTok Shop’s gross merchandise value (GMV) to that of eBay. As of now, the latter platform still comes out on top—but only barely. eBay generated $20.1 billion of quarterly sales between July and September of this year, while TikTok Shop’s GMV over the same period reached $19 billion.

Even with the threat of a federal ban looming over TikTok’s U.S. operations for all of 2025, Americans still provided the biggest chunk of Shop’s quarterly sales. U.S. consumers accounted for between $4 billion and $4.5 billion in the three-month period, a number that more than doubled year-over-year.

The context: The astonishing part of EchoTik’s findings isn’t the relative sales figures themselves; it’s the rapid pace at which TikTok Shop has caught up to a multi-billion-dollar, publicly traded social shopping empire. eBay has the advantage of a decades-long head start, establishing its e-commerce presence long before anyone conceived of the term “creator economy.”

And yet—thanks to a strong consumer base in Asia, an aggressive overseas expansion plan, and regulatory victories in the U.S.—TikTok Shop has rapidly gained on its veteran rival in terms of sales. In 2024, Shop’s GMV for the entire year topped out at $33.2 billion, and that figure itself was reportedly a massive 3X increase over the previous year.

STREAMING BIG

U.S. households like streaming over 2x as much as paid TV

The stats: According to Parks Associates, 91% of U.S. internet households now pay for at least one streaming subscription.

That landmark stat comes from the firm’s upcoming S.O.S. State of Streaming report, which will be distributed in full at its Future of Video: Business of Streaming conference later this month.

In the meantime, Parks Associates has shared enough data to illustrate the deep level of penetration streaming has achieved within the U.S. When it comes to widespread adoption, streaming services are thoroughly dominating more traditional rivals: the firm found that just 41% of surveyed households are signed up for traditional pay TV—a whopping 50 percentage points behind the rate of streaming adoption.

The average household in the sample pays for six streaming subscriptions, spending about $109 per month to do so.

The complication: At this point, streaming represents the TV-watching experience better than linear networks do. In addition to the stats presented by Parks Associates, it soaks up a larger share of ad dollars and has a better reputation than cable among Gen Z consumers.

That level of saturation, however, isn’t without its complications. On the one hand, high subscriber counts open the door for aggressive strategies, such as Netflix’s decision to crack down on password sharing and introduce an ad-supported plan. But at the same time, deep inroads into national populations make it harder to acquire new subscribers. That conundrum poses a significant challenge for streaming platforms—especially during earnings season.

LISTEN UP 🎙️

Last week on the podcast…

Third-quarter reveals: Some major revelations have already come out of Big Tech’s Q3 2025 reports. On the latest installment of Creator Upload, hosts Joshua Cohen and Lauren Schnipper dove into some of the most impactful announcements of the quarter, from Meta’s claim that Reels now has a $50 billion annual run rate to YouTube’s revelation that Shorts are making money per watch hour than long-form videos.

Check out the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for more details.

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