TOGETHER WITH

It's Tuesday and if you’ve been paying into the NPC trend, we have good news: the streamer behind the “ice cream so good” catchphrase is turning her viral soundbite into a song.

FOOD FIGHT

MrBeast wants to shut down MrBeast Burger—but first, he might need to win a lawsuit

MrBeast Burger was an immediate success when it launched in 2020. The ghost kitchen venture—which resulted from a partnership between MrBeast and Virtual Dining Concepts—consistently earned rave reviews from quarantine-bound customers…until it didn’t.

According to a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York by MrBeast’s team, Virtual Dining Concepts became so concerned with “rapidly expanding the business” that it stopped focusing “on controlling the quality of the MrBeast Burger customer experience and products.” The suit, which lists Beast Investments as the plaintiff, claims that quality control suggestions from MrBeast (aka Jimmy Donaldson) “fell on deaf ears.”

Donaldson hopes that a court order will allow him to shutter MrBeast Burger for good.

YouTube’s most-subscribed individual creator tweeted in June about his desire to close the chain, citing quality control as a major issue. In a (now deleted) follow-up post, MrBeast claimed that “the company I partnered with won’t let me stop.” Virtual Dining Concepts’ (alleged) determination to keep MrBeast Burger open makes sense: by establishing 1,000 virtual locations during the first year of the chain’s operation, the Florida-based company improved its own fortunes, raising a $20 million Series A round in 2021. Its leverage of MrBeast’s personal brand may have played a significant role in that success.

According to Beast Investments, Virtual Dining Concepts continued to use Donaldson’s likeness as a promotional tool without the YouTuber’s approval—even as diners continually blamed him for MrBeast Burger’s declining quality. To resolve that issue (and the myriad of others included in their newly-filed complaint), Donaldson and his team have requested a jury trial. Check out Tubefilter’s full article for extra insight into that upcoming food fight.

🔆 SPONSORED 🔆

Spotter is investing $1 billion in the world’s top YouTubers. They’ve already paid out $775 million and counting.

Find funding for your next major business move—without sacrificing your creative freedom. As a leading creator company since 2019, Spotter has already paid out $775 million in immediate funding to more than 1,160 channel partners. Here’s how it works:

Upfront Funds + Total Creative Control 
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Everything You Need to Grow Your Brand 
With deals ranging from $100,000 to $50 million, the possibilities are endless. Here’s how top creators like MissDarcei and Airrack have spent their Spotter funds:

Exclusive YouTube Insights & Optimization Resources 
Spotter understands that creating a world-changing catalog requires more than just capital. That’s why their team of optimization experts provides ​invaluable performance insights​ to better inform creators’ content strategy.

Visit Spotter’s website today to discover what your deal could look like.

​Fund your future with Spotter →​

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• The next chapter of the Misfits Boxing event series will feature both KSI and Logan Paul, with the former creator facing off against Tommy Fury. (Tubefilter)
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• According to self-proclaimed “leaker” Alessandro Palluzi, Instagram’s upcoming AI features could include labels informing users which images are “generated by Meta AI.” (Engadget)
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• Elon Musk’s lawyer has reportedly threatened to sue the Center for Countering Digital Hate over allegations that the research group falsified claims about Twitter at the behest of its rivals. (Gizmodo)
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• The BBC has established its own “experimental” server on Mastodon, a decentralized Twitter alternative. (The Verge)

DATA • GOSPEL STATS 📈

The Barbenheimer buzz is doing big things for branded videos

At the end of January, YouTube viewers can expect a flood of football clips. In October, spooky content is king. And in July 2023?

All eyes were on Barbie and Oppenheimer.

Non-sponsored YouTube videos weren’t the only clips to jump aboard the Barbenheimer train. Branded clips took advantage of the buzz, too—and this one from Veritasium managed to score millions of views in the process. In just under 33 minutes, "Why Oppenheimer Deserves His Own Movie" offered viewers a detailed defense of its titular point. According to the education-themed channel, J. Robert Oppenheimer “forever changed the course of history” by giving humanity “a way to destroy itself”—a notorious accomplishment that could very well make him “the most important physicist to have ever lived.”

The last two-or-so minutes of Veritasium’s video, however, focused on a very different type of “human-driven” destruction: climate change. As creator Derek Muller smoothly put it, “this is where this video’s sponsor, Wren, comes in.”

Whether or not you buy Wren’s promise to help users "fund carbon removal, offsets, climate policy, and conservation—all in one subscription,” Veritasium’s branded video was a hit. The channel dropped its Oppenheimer-themed clip on July 18 (3 days before the film’s release) and saw a nearly immediate influx of views. The grand total: “Why Oppenheimer Deserves His Own Movie" brought in 8 million views between July 18 and July 24—a 50% increase over the channel’s 90-day average of 5.4 million views per video. Pretty nuclear results, don’t you think?

Of course, Veritasium’s video wasn’t the only branded clip to make waves in July. For more in-depth data, check out Gospel Stats.

FEELING BLUE

A customizable Twitter alternative just debuted its own Discover feed

When Bluesky’s core team sat down together, engineer Paul Frazee says, they asked themselves one simple question: ‘How do we make a better experience than what Twitter did?’ The answer: “a fundamentally more positive experience” where users “get more of what you want, less of what you don’t want, and it’s less emotionally chaotic.”

For Bluesky, which is backed by Jack Dorsey and other longtime Twitter execs, a big part of that positive experience is user choice. The app’s emphasis on customization is the motivating factor behind its decentralized structure, which allows users to build and share their own themed feeds—and it’s also why Bluesky’s new TikTok-esque Discover feed is 100% optional:

The FYP-like Discover page replaces a preexisting product named What’s Hot and pulls each user’s feeds together on a central hub. As a blog post from Bluesky explains, Discover is a mix of trending posts, updates from your follows, and content that exists “near your social graph.” The optional aspect of that feed may be attractive to users fleeing the-app-formerly-known-as-Twitter—but as Helen Lewis noted in The Atlantic, Bluesky “has been notoriously stingy with its invite code.”

The invite list may get a little more flexible as the dust settles. But for now, the Twitter alternative is still riding the wave of users that have continued to pour in since the platform hit the App Store earlier this year.

WATCH THIS 📺

Ludwig and YouTube are teaming up to discover the next all-star gaming creator

Ludwig’s latest announcement was prefaced by one simple question: “who is the goat gamer?” The answer to that inquiry will be determined by a month-long, live-streamed competition called World’s Greatest, which will pit potential champs against each other in two-hour scrim sessions involving games like Street Fighter 6, Trackmania, XDefiant, Tetris, Minecraft, Genshin Impact, LEGO 2K Drive, Fortnite, Rocket League, and Fall Guys.

For more details, get Tubefilter’s take on the big competition here.

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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.