TOGETHER WITH

It’s Monday and YouTube is making it easier than ever to avoid cleaning your room. After all, why tidy up when you can just generate a fresh background for your Shorts?

Today’s News

SHORT AND SWEET

Portal A has spent $1 million trying to make premium short-form work. So, is it working?

The predecessor: Remember Quibi? Founded by DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, the premium short-form streaming service raised nearly $2 billion from major Hollywood studios—and then absolutely tanked. Within six months of launch, Quibi had announced plans to cease operations. At the time, the message was clear: viewers weren’t ready for a platform dedicated to ten-minute chunks of high-profile, professional-produced content.

In the four years since, however, short content has skyrocketed in popularity platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts . So…are viewers ready to give premium short-form video another try?

The next evolution: Portal A is willing to bet on it. The digital media studio has spent $1 million over the past two years through Moonshots, a program that pays the production costs for creators and celebs to make premium short-form shows for their own social media channels. In exchange, Portal A doesn’t take a cut of creators’ ad revenue, but it does share ownership of series IPs, and will get 50-80% of a show’s sale price if it’s picked up by a streamer/network.

That system has already spawned some success. According to Portal A co-founder and President Zach Blume, Alexis G. Zall‘s Moonshots series, Maybe Today, Satan, “opened doors” for a partnership with Snapchat that subsequently led to more deals with the platform that have brought in “north of $5 million dollars in revenue” for the company.

In 2023, Portal launched a nine-show slate fronted by stars like Olympian Bella Sims. One year later, the company continues to go all in on premium short-form. Its latest projects include mixologist Wootak Kim’s Signature Drink, athlete-slash-YouTuber Drew Joiner’s Fit Check, and film producer Jaeki Cho’s Third Cultures. Bloom says short-form, creator-led Moonshots will be the company’s “exclusive focus heading into 2025.”

So, how has Moonshots survived where Quibi failed? There are of course a lot of financial and technological reasons. But when it comes to the actual programming, Blume says lower production costs and talent selection have proven to be key differentiators:

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As the world’s #1 AI video clipping platform, OpusClip has helped 8 million creators and brands create viral Shorts, TikToks, and Reels with engaging AI voiceovers, custom captions, virality scores, title optimization, and more. 

Now, OpusClip has unveiled its very own library of free music.

OpusClip tools like transitions and b-roll already make it easy to turn long-form content into polished, social media-ready Shorts—but music is a whole new ball game.

1. B.Y.O.B or hit the library:  OpusClip makes it easy to add music of any kind to video content. Bring your own beat by uploading music, or choose from a wide selection of sounds on the OpusClip platform.

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Want to add another finishing touch to your videos? With AI voiceovers, transitions, b-roll, and custom captions, OpusClip makes sure your videos are always social media-ready.

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HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• TikTok and the National PTA are joining forces to empower local Parent Teacher Student Associations with funding, interactive prompts, and other resources. (Tubefilter)
  

• Apple Podcasts has revealed its most popular U.S. shows of 2024. At the top of the pile: The Daily, Crime Junkie, and The Joe Rogan Experience. (TechRadar)
  
  

• According to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, Threads is the latest platform to test out “AI-powered summaries of what people are discussing.” (TechCrunch)
  ​

• LinkedIn is pivoting away from native live audio with the retirement of its standalone Audio Events feature. (Engadget)

AND THE AWARD GOES TO…

This Dubai creator summit will give $1 million to a creator who makes “content for good”

The award: In January, over 5,000 content creators will gather in Dubai for the third annual 1 Billion Followers Summit—and one of them will walk away with a $1 million award.

According to New Media Academy (aka the UAE-based organizer behind the summit), the inaugural One Billion Award “recognizes those who leave a lasting legacy of positive change” and will deliver $1 million to a single creator whose content fits the theme “Content for Good.”

The details: Submissions for the award are open here until November 30. Creators can submit themselves or be nominated by third parties—but either way, submissions must include details about the nominee’s projects and how they’ve contributed positively to their communities with “informative content, caring values and messages of social good” (per New Media Academy).

The winner will be announced during the closing ceremony of the 1 Billion Followers Summit, which runs January 11-13 at the Museum of the Future in the Emirates Towers. A group of judges will select 10 finalists, and then a public vote will select the ultimate winner from among those 10. (Tickets for the summit are available here.)

The context: Plenty of creators fit the bill for an award honoring positive change. For nearly 20 years, YouTubers, Twitch streamers, TikTokers, and others have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for charity. Some organizations, like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, have even been able to hinge portions of their annual fundraising goals on creators’ efforts.

Twitch‘s top female streamer is a key example of that trend: Ironmouse’s recent monthlong subathon raised an estimated $561,750 for the Immune Deficiency Foundation (and broke a Twitch record in the process).

1 Billion Followers Summit is a Tubefilter partner.

‘TIS THE SEASON

As seen on TikTok Shop: A new IRL store is selling your fave FYP finds

The pop-up: Outlandish is striking a balance between the comfort (and nostalgia?) of IRL retail and the virality of TikTok Shop livestreams. The ecommerce company has launched a Santa Monica-based pop-up that offers a multifaceted experience for customers: at the ground level, shoppers can check out brightly lit stalls where sellers are streaming to viewers on TikTok. On the second floor, they can purchase the items featured in those broadcasts.

“I want people that come in to not feel like they’re in a studio, but to feel like they’re in a space where they can pop in the live stream,” Outlandish CEO William August told Business Insider. “They can enjoy the experience. They can grab some free samples, and they can buy in-person. That’s why our livestream rooms are not blocked off.”

The context: The timing of Outlandish’s L.A. pop-up makes sense. As TikTok Shop grows up in the West, both TikTok parent company ByteDance and official Shop partners like Outlandish—which launched in 2018 as an agency in China—are trying to promote Asian-style ecommerce streams within an American setting. Holiday shopping is an important part of that mission: in addition to carving out studio space in L.A. and educating sellers on Asian live shopping techniques, TikTok is making a massive, star-studded ecommerce push to capitalize on the season of giving.

LISTEN UP 🎙️

This week on the podcast…

The rise of GenAI: Creator economy experts Josh Cohen and Lauren Schnipper are back in the studio and bantering over this week’s top industry headlines.

Tune into the latest episode of Creator Upload to find out all about Instagram’s new redo, get the lowdown on Netflix’s big boxing match, and hear the latest news on the promising(?) evolution of generative AI in Hollywood.

It’s all right here on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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