It’s Friday and a startup is offering volunteers $50 a pop to let its AI practice reading human minds. Anything goes in the gig economy, right?

GOING LIVE

The feature: Nearly a year after it was first teased, Practice Mode for Vertical Live is here. The new feature allows creators who are still getting the hang of streaming to take a trial run of YouTube’s Vertical Live format (aka the Shorts version of TikTok LIVE).

Vertical Live brings streaming content to the Shorts feed while simultaneously letting Live creators take advantage of revenue streams and other monetization features. The potential of that combination is clear, but some creators might be intimidated by the idea of going live in such an intimate environment. That’s where Practice Mode comes in.

As revealed by YouTube Creator Liaison Rene Ritchie, Practice Mode gives creators time to get their ducks in a row before welcoming viewers into their Vertical Live stream. As Ritchie puts it, if you’re “not 100% fully confident about handling everything from chat to polls, stickers to green screens, and just the stream,” then Practice Mode is the place where you can “try things out” in a “zero-pressure environment.”

YouTube announced Practice Mode at its Made On event last year. That presentation included a host of new features, so it follows that creators may need time to familiarize themselves with the Vertical Live suite before actually going live.

The context: From a philosophical standpoint, Practice Mode resembles Trial Reels, the Instagram feature that lets creators test short-form content among a small group of viewers before pushing it out widely. Trial Reels became a popular growth hack, which led to increased adoption within the Instagram community.

Practice Mode is functionally different from Trial Reels, so it’s unlikely to become the hot new audience-building tool for YouTubers. At the same time, if the feature helps timid creators claim more monetization, then maybe it can be classified as a growth hack.

POLL 📝

Please do us a solid and answer these two questions:

SHOPPING SPREE

The boom: Five years ago, TikTok Shop‘s annual gross merchandise value (GMV) totaled less than $1 billion. In 2026, the ecommerce hub is on pace to increase that number a hundredfold. According to data from Momentum Works and Tabcut, TikTok Shop’s 2026 GMV has already surpassed $50 billion, with U.S. sales leading the way.

Momentum Works and Tabcut reported that TikTok Shop’s total GMV reached $50.3 billion during the first half of 2026. That number represents a year-over-year increase of 92%. Slightly more than half of that value flowed through the Shop tab, while approximately 40% was attributed to video. The remaining 8% came from live-streaming sales.

Altogether, Momentum Works projected that TikTok Shop GMV will top out at $123.5 billion this year.

The U.S. market: Once upon a time, East Asia and Southeast Asia were ByteDance’s most lucrative ecommerce markets, but the U.S. surpassed those regions in 2024—and it hasn’t looked back. In 2026, TikTok Shop U.S. has seen its GMV double year-over-year; so far, the total 2026 GMV for TikTok Shop U.S. sits at $11.8 billion. The next five countries in the TikTok Shop GMV ranking are all in Southeast Asia.

The competition: Last year, Shop sales got big enough for the platform to rival eBay’s GMV—but even after so much growth, TikTok’s ecommerce hub still has a ways to go before it tops the industry’s leaders.

Amazon’s global GMV, for example, reaches about $200 billion per quarter, while Walmart’s U.S. ecommerce reportedly totals $150 billion per year. Those numbers might seem like far-off targets for TikTok Shop, but its first-half GMV figures show us how quickly its sales are accelerating. 

RISE OF THE BOTS

The bot cost: It’s no secret that social engagement is up for sale. Services for supplying fake likes, views, comments, and follows have been around as long as social media has. These days, most platforms have systems to catch fake engagement, and collectively delete billions of bogus accounts each year.

That’s a good thing, and to be clear, we don’t endorse paying for bots. But if you were to buy fake engagement in 2026, how much would it cost?

According to a study from Surfshark, it’s actually “very affordable.” The VPN/antivirus/scam protection company found that…

The takeaway: As Surfshark notes, the steep cost difference here indicates that comments are harder and/or more time-consuming to fake than views, while some platforms are easier or more challenging for different services to deliver on.

Surfshark concluded that views are the least trustworthy metric for gauging engagement across the board, since they’re the cheapest and most easily faked. Expensive options like comments “may serve as a stronger indicator of authenticity than views, although it should not be considered reliable on its own,” the company said.

WATCH THIS 👀

The easter egg: The hubbub around Jimothy may have died down since his rise to virality in July, but some fans are still wondering how Seattle’s favorite raccoon made his way to Roku City.

A Jimothy icon appeared on the digital streaming platform’s screensaver just days after he emerged as the internet’s latest animal sensation, leading to a flood of Reels and TikToks from delighted viewers.

Damon Van Deusen, Roku's Vice President, Global Brand and Creative, told TechRadar that Jimothy was quickly identified as a must-add for Roku City by the company’s “Rapid Response Easter Egg Team.” Personally, we can’t think of anything we’d rather see skulking around on our screens.

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