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Today’s News

SHOPPING SPREE

TikTok Shop generated $500M in U.S. sales over Black Friday weekend

The stateside haul: Black Friday has become a pivotal holiday for the ecommerce industry. In 2025, the shopping mania of Black Friday weekend delivered an especially big win for TikTok Shop, which set new sales records in both the U.S. and the U.K.

Last year, Shop generated $100 million of U.S. sales on Black Friday alone, with at least one lucky creator hauling in $2 million from a single shoppable stream.

The ecommerce hub’s 2025 holiday performance was even more impressive: by amassing $500 million of U.S. sales between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Shop averaged $125 million of daily sales over the four-day period.

The U.K. numbers: TikTok’s shopping operation also blew past expectations in the U.K., where it earned its “biggest sales day in its UK history.” On Black Friday, Shop sellers in the U.K. sold 27 items every second.

One partial explanation for Shop’s growth is the platform’s apparent mission to maximize earnings by offering more luxury goods. (After all, if you can get Kim Kardashian to sell Skims products on live stream, you’re probably going to attract some high-end clientele.) But data from the U.K. suggests that smaller vendors are also part of TikTok’s ecommerce boom. The total number of U.K. sellers who generated sales during the Black Friday period, for instance, went up 85% year-over-year.

Ultimately, Shop’s success is based on its ability to turn out new shoppers at all price points. That’s how the platform amassed $19 billion in quarterly sales, and its 2026 outlook is looking even rosier.

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• Meta seems poised to reduce its Reality Labs budget by up to 30% as it moves away from investments in the metaverse. (Gizmodo)
  
  

• The Russian government has reportedly blocked local access to Roblox, FaceTime, and Snapchat. (Engadget)
  
  

• Meta says it is taking steps to make it “easier to access 24/7 account support on Facebook and Instagram” via the addition of a “centralized support hub” and “smarter” account recovery processes. (Meta)
  
  

• TikTok has unveiled a Nearby feed designed to help users “discover and connect with local content, creators, and businesses wherever you are.” (TikTok Newsroom)

GAME ON

Roblox is breaking into esports with a $50K Creator Showdown

The big event: Yesterday afternoon, Roblox entered the world of esports with the Creator Showdown. It’s a a $50,000 live gauntlet that transported eight popular creators from the screen to sunny Los Angeles.

The headliner in the Showdown’s player lineup was Caylus, who YouTube recently ranked as its second-biggest creator of 2025 (trailing only MrBeast). He was joined by Katrina Buno, Steak, Foltyn, MeEnyu, Cakemiix, IBella, and Nico, while Robloxer Bundun hosted the event alongside esports commentator aEvilCat.

The participants, who competed in teams of two, were tested across a variety of Roblox games in genres like survival, third-person shooter, platforming, and soccer. Fans who looked on from virtual entertainment hub The Block were given the opportunity to claim exclusive items and tasked with selecting the final game in the Showdown.

The context: Despite Roblox’s staggering growth and the evolution of native IPs like Grow a Garden into multimedia franchises, the platform’s competitive scene is still in its early days.

Events like the Creator Showdown offer Roblox an opportunity to cast a wider net and bring new types of players into its community—but breaking into esports is a risky move. The state of the esports industry is as fraught as it has ever been, with major teams struggling to stay afloat, notable games losing players, and investors reluctant to risk any more capital.

Still, if any entity in the gaming world can reverse those trends, it’s Roblox. The platform’s ad offerings are becoming more sophisticated, player numbers are booming, and it’s on track to pay out more than $1 billion to its creator community in 2025.

BEAST MODE

Beast Industries’ next moves: Brand-creator matchmaking, a phone, and maybe an IPO

The mission: Jimmy Donaldson (aka MrBeast) wants to turn Beast Industries into the biggest creator-led enterprise we’ve ever seen. At the New York Times‘ DealBook Summit, Donaldson and Beast Industries CEO Jeffrey Housenbold sat down with DealBook Founder Andrew Ross Sorkin to outline the three-pronged structure driving Beast Industries’ expansion.

The three prongs: The best-known of those prongs encompasses the MrBeast content empire, which reaches 453 million subscribers through its primary YouTube hub and currently accounts for half of Beast Industries’ revenue.

The other two prongs are all about diversification. A division dedicated to consumer goods—which includes MrBeast’s consumables brand Feastables—will soon add a mobile phone company into the mix.

The third head of Beast Industries is a newly announced platform that will play matchmaker between creators and major corporate sponsors. Housenbold said that his team is “building a two-sided marketplace in a global creator platform, matching creators with Fortune 1000 marketers who want to be able to access the creator influencer economy in an efficient way.”

Beast Industries doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel to break into that industry, which currently includes companies like Agentio and ShopMy. Just like ViewStats is “stats platform plus MrBeast” and Vyro is “clipping tool plus MrBeast,” the creator could attract users to a matchmaking service by presenting it as a gateway to his own trade secrets.

Of course, all that diversification would require some hefty contributions from investors. Will they show up to provide the capital needed to drive a $5 billion company into its next phase of growth? And will the public ever get a piece of the action through an IPO?

Housenbold offered a tentative yes on the latter front, confirming that “at some point, we want to be able to give the 1.4 billion unique people around the world who have watched Jimmy’s content the last 90 days a chance to be owners of the company.”

WATCH THIS 👀

This art exhibit reimagines tech billionaires as robot dogs

Regular Animals: Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos might want to steer clear of this year’s Art Basel Miami event. The 2025 edition of the iconic art fair features a striking (and intentionally unsettling) exhibit from digital artist Beeple, who created robot dogs bearing the hyperrealistic faces of tech billionaires like Elon Musk.

If that visualization isn’t a clear enough statement for you, each bot in the Regular Animals exhibit also poops out "a piece of AI-generated art” every few seconds. Check out an interview with Beeple here for more insight into his creative thought process—and a closer look at his zoo of billionaire bots.

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