TOGETHER WITH

It’s Wednesday and Oreo is Willy Wonka-fying AI. The cookie’s parent company says its food scientists now use an AI tool to brainstorm new goodies with prompts like “vanilla intensity” and “in-mouth saltiness.”

UNEXPECTED ALLIES

TikTok’s final hail mary to stop the ban: An in-person meeting with Donald Trump

The meeting: As it braces for an upcoming U.S. ban, TikTok is making the most of Donald Trump’s apparent goodwill. Hours after the platform filed an official appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, CEO Shou Zi Chew reportedly met with the president-elect at his Mar-a-Lago estate (per CNN).

Details from the meeting haven’t yet been made public, but Trump reiterated on Monday that he plans to “take a look at TikTok” (and presumably the upcoming “divest-or-ban” law) once he returns to the Oval Office:

The catch: There’s one more stumbling block TikTok needs to eliminate before Trump can attempt to overturn the divest-or-ban law (if he decides to do so). The decree enacted by President Biden—which forces parent company ByteDance to either divest TikTok to a non-Chinese owner or accept a U.S. ban—is set to go into effect on January 19, one day before Trump’s inauguration. If TikTok wants to beat the ban, it will need to get that start date pushed back until after Trump is in office.

To that end, the platform has officially petitioned the Supreme Court to delay the divest-or-ban law so that the high court has a chance to rule on it before it goes into effect. It’s unclear whether that petition will be granted. Anly a few weeks ago, a panel of three lower court judges ruled that the ban-or-divest law’s January 19 start date can go ahead as planned and determined that the decree is not unconstitutional.

🔆 SPONSORED 🔆

Year in Review: Viral Nation scored major awards and global partnerships in 2024

From launching creator pajama lines to earning global awards, Viral Nation made major waves this year.

Check out Viral Nation’s biggest wins of 2024:

🏆 Awards Round-up: Recognized by Adweek, SXSW, and More 🏆
Viral Nation numbered among Adweek's fastest-growing agencies and Deloitte Technology’s Fast 500. Other honors included the SXSW Innovation Award for Social Media and Digiday, Ava, Netty, and Merit awards for campaigns with Chegg and Audible.

⭐ Talent Representation: Product Lines, Brand Deals, and Audience Growth ⭐
Viral Nation fostered creators’ careers in 2024 by…

• Partnering with Wind Sun Sky to grow the McCarty and Like Nastya's IPs

• Making Stephanie Pena's PJ line a reality

• Helping Terrence Bradshaw grow from 100K Instagram followers to 876K+

• Signing the Montana Boyz, the Rapping Chef, Priyanka Naik, and others

🇫🇷 Global Partnerships: Bringing Creators to Cannes Lions 🇫🇷 
Viral Nation amplified creator voices worldwide by launching the LIONS Creators program at The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

As 2025 approaches, Viral Nation is excited to support creators with lucrative brand partnerships, cross-platform syndication, product development, and more.

Jump into 2025 with Viral Nation →

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• Former UFC star Conor McGregor has confirmed his plans to face off against Logan Paul as part of “a boxing exhibition in India.” (Tubefilter)
  
  

• YouTube is joining forces with the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) to develop controls that will help celebrities and athletes identify and report AI deepfakes of their likeness. (The Verge)
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• According to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, Threads will “soon start testing” a tool that will allow creators to schedule posts. (Engadget)
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• The Irish Data Protection Committee has hit Meta with a $263 million fine in response to a personal data breach that affected Facebook users in 2018. (Engadget)

FEELING BLUE

Blue-collar stars are pioneering a new era of content creation

The paradigm shift: When Michael Berkowitz of management company Greenlight Group signed Jordan Howlett in 2021, the TikToker was working full-time flipping pizzas—and that’s exactly what his 2 million followers wanted to hear about.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, one subset of people was trapped at home and seeking connection through content—but another group had to keep clocking in. Those essential workers (nurses, teachers, restaurant staff, etc.) found that people were interested in their daily lives.

Berkowitz, who launched Greenlight with Doug Landers in 2020, believed that shift marked a new era for the $250 billion content creation industry: one in which blue-collar workers could find devoted audiences online.

The creators: That’s where Greenlight’s roster come in. Along with Howlett, the company has signed creators like Landen Purifoy (who began posting while working as a full-time piano player for his local church) and Hafu Go (who started out making videos about college life). Since joining Greenlight, all three creators have seen impressive growth:

• In addition to collaborating with brands like Domino’s, Howlett has gone from 2 million followers on TikTok to to 35 million across platforms, and was recently named a Forbes Top Creator.
  
  

• Purifoy, meanwhile, has grown from 1 million TikTok followers to 8.5 million on TikTok and 10.6 million on YouTube, and has secured partnerships with brands like Sony.
  
  

• Go has risen from 500,000 subscribers on YouTube to over 10 million subscribers, while also sustaining a long-term ecommerce partnership Odoo.

The question: Why are stars like Howlett, Purifoy, and Go so successful on social media? Landers says “what makes blue-collar creators special is that they are both aspirational and relatable”—and according to Greenlight, brands are generally willing to pay big bucks to tap into that appeal:

TRAINING WHEELS

YouTube will let creators consent to AI training (and opt them out by default)

The toggle: One of YouTube’s first AI safeguards is making its debut. A new “third-party training” toggle on the YouTube Studio dashboard will allow creators to submit their content to AI developers—if they choose to do so. By default, videos will be opted out of AI training.

Creators who do decide to share their content can either allow all third parties to use their videos for training, or can pick out specific companies from a list and grant training access to those firms only. So far, the list includes familiar tech giants like Apple, Meta, and Amazon, innovators in the generative AI space (Nvidia, OpenAI), and notable upstarts (Anthropic, Complexity). (A word of warning: if creators choose to give blanket approval to third-party trainers, that applies to all companies—not just the 18 on the list.)

The impact: YouTube’s new tool comes at a pivotal time, as many creators have expressed frustration with big tech firms for repurposing their content without consent. But will the platform’s third-party training toggle—which resembles other creator protections developed within the AI world—make a significant impact on data scraping?

Unauthorized AI scraping on YouTube was already prohibited in the platform’s Terms of Service before the debut of its AI training toggle, but that didn’t seem to stop developers from obtaining unauthorized YouTube content through other means. (A widely-circulated data set called “The Pile,” for instance, includes captions from a significant number of YouTube videos and Marques Brownlee’s plant is making appearances in Sora-generated videos.)

A YouTube rep told TechCrunch that the company is unable to determine whether the new toggle will lead to any retroactive enforcement for training that has already occurred—meaning it’s unclear whether there will be any change to the chilly state of affairs between YouTube creators and AI developers.

WATCH THIS 📺

Twitch has a VOD problem

The video: A recent video from Moistcr1tikal highlights one of the most frustrating issues Twitch streamers face: a lack of monetization for VODs.

In his new upload, the creator breaks down his exact earnings from his best-performing streams on both Twitch and YouTube—and the difference is staggering. In total, Moistcr!tikal made $11,700 from his best-performing Twitch stream (where he watched his esports team win the Rocket League Spring Major), and $84,000 from his best-performing YouTube stream (where he played Bethesda‘s most recent game, Starfield).

The problem: The reason for that great divide is YouTube and Twitch’s different approaches to VODs. If we only consider what Moistcr1tikal earned while broadcasting live, his YouTube stream made just $1,600. The four-hour recording of that stream, however, scored 4.7 million views and brought in over $80,000. Meanwhile, over on Twitch, the VOD of Moistcr1tikal’s Rocket League Spring Major stream faced the same fate as any other VOD on the platform: deletion 60 days after broadcast, with no monetization in the interim.

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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.