It’s Wednesday and Spotify is celebrating 20 years of streaming with its biggest Wrapped yet—one that covers users’ entire listening history.

ON THE GO

The travel hub: If your For You Page is filled with exciting locales from around the world, a new hub is here to replace your FOMO with a dream getaway.

Through TikTok Go—a platform built on influencer recs and powered by partnerships with major booking services—travel videos will link directly to sites like Booking.com, Expedia, and Viator. Without leaving the app, users will be able to view details and check availability for hotels and attractions on their FYPs.

The official announcement of TikTok Go came from TikTok USDS Joint Venture, the entity formed out of the deal brokered by President Trump.

The context: TikTok’s travel industry aspirations are nothing new. Beginning in 2024, a Southwest Airlines campaign allowed TikTok users to buy plane tickets in the app. Then, in 2025, TikTok Go emerged as a sort of affiliate marketing platform through which creators could earn rewards by filming videos in specific locales or hotel rooms. A Booking.com integration gave viewers even more opportunities to get in on the travel planning.

Gen Z-facing travel content has also gotten a boost thanks to creators like iShowSpeed, who has embarked on world tours that highlight local attractions. Expedia’s partnership with Speed authored a new playbook for Gen Z-facing travel promotions, and TikTok is now writing its own chapter.

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

TOP 50 • MOST SUBSCRIBED

The creator: Once upon a time, viral YouTube challenges were as simple as stacking a lot of cups or mastering tricky basketball shots. Decades later, however, creators hoping to stand out in today’s competitive YouTube environment face the herculean task of outdoing 20 years of one-upsmanship.

Enter Nat Cervera. The Mexican creator offers a wide variety of videos on her namesake YouTube channel, but her extreme challenges pull in more views than her other Shorts. If anyone plans on completing a more impressive feat than her, they’ll need to find a salt hotter than the world’s hottest salt or extend her all-day Disney movie marathon into a 48-hour event.

The virality of those challenges has helped Cervera secure collaborations with the biggest stars on YouTube and beyond. Fellow Mexican chart topper Ricky Limón, for instance, shows up in one of her most popular Shorts.

The stats: Extreme challenges may be effective at drawing viewers, but they aren’t free of controversy. Creators like Norme have already pushed the genre so far that it has spawned ethical concerns. How long will it be before human limitations turn unprecedented endurance-based accomplishments into a thing of the past?

That may be a question at the forefront of some creators’ minds, but Cervera’s efforts to learn Korean in an hour and make shockingly large food items land on the more benign end of the challenge spectrum. Fans seem happy enough with those videos, too; in total, Cervera added 230,000 new subscribers during the week that was, pushing her from 85th place in our subscriber ranking all the way up to 27th.

TOP 50 • MOST VIEWED

The news boom: In recent months, Indian channels have accounted for about half of all entrants in our weekly ranking of the top 50 most-viewed YouTube channels.

That trend largely stems from the war in Iran. As we noted in April, India is one of the countries most affected by the conflict. Many of its ships travel through the Strait of Hormuz, and the global fuel crisis has altered life for the country’s residents.

As a result, most of the Indian channels making their Global Top 50 debuts are news hubs. While South Asian family channels like Anaya Kandhal and KL BRO Biju Rithvik still occupy their usual spots near the top of the ranking, they’ve been joined by popular stations like ABP NEWS and NDTV India.

The channel: Both of those news outlets offer headlines in Hindi, but News18 MP Chhattisgarh—an offshoot of chart regular News18—takes a different approach. In particular, the secondary News18 channel serves residents of Chhattisgarh, an Indian state defined by its namesake language.

News18 MP Chhattisgarh earned 354.4 million weekly views during the first full week of May, propelling it to #44 in the Global Top 50. While Chhattisgarh happens to be a hotbed for Indian YouTube creators, that traffic is most likely tied to the channel’s ability to reach speakers of the state’s primary local language. YouTube offers a rare outlet for regional languages that are otherwise marginalized in the national media landscape, and both small creators and large media organizations are taking advantage of that opportunity.

WATCH THIS 👀

The collab: We wrote last week about the launch of a Kickstarter campaign for Dropout’s upcoming Game Changer: Home Edition board game. So far, that campaign has blown past its $40,000 goal by about $3.6 million (and counting).

A multimillion-dollar fundraising total is nothing to sneeze at, but Dropout isn’t resting on its laurels. To promote Game Changer: Home Edition, the company sponsored a Smosh video that pitted Smoshers Arasha Lalani and Angela Giarratana against Dropout stars Katie Marovitch and Rekha Shankar.

Check out their playthrough of the game here.

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