It's Friday and, as it turns out, those OnlyFans-streaming smart glasses might appeal to wearers for a slightly less eyebrow-raising reason: an escape from cloud processing.

PLATFORM UPDATES

The Memberships: The global podcast industry raked in $9.2 billion last year, up 27% from 2024. That’s a neat chunk of change—and, unsurprisingly, Spotify aims to scoop up as much of it as possible.

At its third annual Investor Day, VP and Global Head of Podcasts Roman Wasenmüller said Spotify’s podcast ambitions are in their second year of profitability. The platform wants to continue that streak, so it’s wooing creators with a new feature called Memberships.

Like YouTube’s take on the product (aka Channel Memberships), Spotify’s goal with Memberships is to give creators more direct access to their fans. That’s a smart move if the platform is hoping to keep up with competitors like YouTube—which allows creators to offer paywalled VIP access and content—and Patreon, which is the #1 driver of consumer revenue for podcasts.

To court creators who are already settled into membership programs on other platforms, Spotify will allow users to mirror-distribute any paywalled membership content through its Spotify Open Access portal. It’s unclear yet if Spotify will take a cut of the subscription revenue creators make through Memberships.

The AI podcasts: Memberships wasn’t Spotify’s only big reveal from Investor Day. The platform also announced the launch of “Personal Podcasts,” an AI tool that will “generate short, private, personalized audio directly inside Spotify.”

According to TheWrap, Personal Podcasts will let users write prompts, add outside text, PDFs, or links for context, and choose a voice. The LLM will then crunch up all that info and spit out something to listen to. Spotify said it added the generator “after seeing strong demand from users creating custom audio with their own agents and saving it to Spotify.”

Personal Podcasts will soon be available in beta for Premium U.S. subscribers.

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

PLAY TIME

The brand: Growing a YouTube channel to 50 million subscribers and over 41 billion lifetime views is no small feat, but Genevieve’s Playhouse has pulled it off—all while remaining a family business.

While Robert Mann has gotten help from agencies while scaling his content enterprise, he’s nevertheless retained creative control over the brand inspired by his daughter’s toy-toting adventures, and has been choosy about bringing in outside partners. The creator told Tubefilter that “it’s only recently that we’ve entertained doing stuff like the toy line and the cartoon.”

The toy line in question was built out of a partnership with Bonkers Toys, a company that has already inked retail pacts with creator partners ranging from Addison Rae to Skibidi Toilet. Now, Bonkers is stocking big-box shelves with Genevieve-inspired playthings.

YouTube is a key promotional tool for that toy line. Brightly colored episodes of a new Genevieve’s Playhouse cartoon series, for instance, show off the figurines kids can buy at stores like Walmart.

The support system: An undertaking of this size is a major transition for Mann, but the creator made sure to break into retail his way. “We won’t tell people to go buy our toys,” he told Tubefilter. “I never made anything I wouldn’t be comfortable with my own daughter watching.”

That level of precaution defined Genevieve’s Playhouse long before the Bonkers deal, but the brand has nevertheless encountered its share of moderation-related issues over the years. To gain access to an “intermediary” who could “interface with YouTube,” Mann ultimately linked up with creator agency Underscore Talent.

That brings us to the setup that underpins Genevieve’s Playhouse to this day. The brand remains more independent than many of its contemporaries, but Mann has assembled a small group of trusted partners—including Bonkers Toys and Underscore Talent—to help Genevieve’s Playhouse go beyond its YouTube roots.

BY THE NUMBERS

The report: On the heels of a study examining political polarization on social media feeds, a fresh batch of research is shedding light on gender-based disparities. A report published in Cornell University‘s arXiv database shows that recommendation algorithms treat male and female accounts differently—especially in the realm of political content.

The researchers behind that report created 160 virtual accounts. Half of those were seeded with “male-coded” categories (like cars, sports, and gaming) and the other half with “female-coded” categories (like how-to and style). Each account also received a baseline seed of political content regardless of gender coding.

Then, the researchers turned on the recommendation pipeline. In total, the accounts were exposed to more than 500,000 algorithmic recs.

That sample revealed some modest—but significant—gender differences.

The results: Since all accounts were seeded with political content, they all received political recommendations, but 56% of that content was served to female-coded accounts. The topics of those recs also varied based on gender, with male-coded accounts more likely to see content based around issues like crime and military defense, and female-coded accounts more likely to get posts related to international affairs and cultural concerns.

The report also indicated that “male-coded users were steered toward a narrower set of confrontational domestic-order issues, whereas female-coded users were exposed to a broader informational environment populated by more multidimensional, moderate, and establishment-oriented macro and public-policy issues.”

In other words, the spread of political issues served to female-coded accounts was more varied, while male-coded accounts had more siloed experiences that honed in on certain issues. That means gender differences on social media don’t just relate to the content of algorithmic recommendations, but to the diversity of those recs as well.

The Twitch series: Zohran Mamdani‘s social media presence played a crucial role in his campaign to become New York City’s Mayor. Now, he’s taking that digital-first approach with him to Gracie Mansion. In a new Twitch show titled Talk With The People, Mamdani answers questions from his constituents while confronting the issues that matter most to New Yorkers.

The first episode of that series went live on a Twitch account tied to Mamdani’s mayoral status yesterday afternoon, and was simulcast across his accounts on platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

According to the episode’s description on YouTube, the launch of Talk With The People makes Mamdani “the first elected official to launch a regularly occurring, multi-platform interactive streaming series.”

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