It’s Thursday and Mark Zuckerberg’s unorthodox approach to cattle ranching is raising some serious environmental concerns. (For the record, though—if we were cows, we’d be cool with a diet of macadamia nuts and beer.)

ROUND THREE

Twitch is laying off 35% of its workforce

2024 is off to a rough start for Twitch. According to Bloomberg, the streaming platform is letting go of approximately 500 staffers, or around 35% of its workforce.

The context: The last twelve months haven’t been easy for Twitch. Between complaints from well-known creators and growing competition from Kick, the platform has been forced to take some extreme measures—including two previous rounds of layoffs and a complete departure from South Korea due to “prohibitively expensive” operating costs.

• Disruption among Twitch’s upper ranks hasn’t helped matters. Since March, the platform has dealt with the resignation of former CEO Emmett Shear, the onboarding of new CEO Dan Clancy, and the exit of Chief Revenue Officer Walker Jacobs.

The bigger picture: Twitch isn’t the only Amazon-owned company facing massive layoffs. Amazon exec Mike Hopkins told staffers earlier this week that restructuring efforts will affect hundreds of Prime Video and MGM Studios as the ecommerce giant attempts to cut costs.

• Overall, Amazon has gone through nine rounds of layoffs since November 2022 (per layoffs.fyi)—an indication that Twitch’s own job cuts are part of a more systemic issue.
  
  

• TikTok’s ecommerce ambitions could soon pose a challenge. As Amazon struggles to cut costs, its Bytedance-owned rival aims to increase Shop’s annual U.S. revenue to $17.5 billion in 2024.

Going forward: Twitch will need to tread lightly to ensure that cost-cutting measures don’t affect the experience of its creator community. Over the past year, apparent efforts to tap into streamers’ revenue have prompted significant backlash—and led multiple high-profile streamers to make lucrative deals with Kick.

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• YouTube has joined forces with orgs like Mass General Brigham and the Mexican Red Cross to stock First Aid Information Shelves with potentially life-saving videos. (Tubefilter)
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• Former CNN anchor Don Lemon will discuss politics, culture, sports, and entertainment in a 30-minute original series that will stream three times a week on X. (Tubefilter)
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• OpenAI’s new store allows users to build, sell, and buy custom GPT chatbots. (Engadget)
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• According to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, Netflix Games saw a 180% year-over-year increase in downloads in 2023. (TechCrunch)

COLUMNS • CREATORS ON THE RISE 📈

Jessica McCabe is ready to take her ADHD toolbox into the real world

In 2015, Jessica McCabe had a realization: “I was living at home with my mom and going, ‘Wait a second, I was a gifted kid. Wasn’t I supposed to be successful?’”

How it started: After trying for years to keep up with her peers, McCabe decided that instead “maybe I could put that amount of effort into figuring out what was getting in my way.”

• She had been diagnosed with ADHD at 12, but had never truly considered what being neurodivergent actually meant. So, McCabe decided to throw herself into research—and to make sure she didn’t lose track of her findings, she began making YouTube videos.
  
  

• It wasn’t long before the creator’s channel began making a difference. After just eight months on YouTube, expert organizations like CHADD (Children and Adults with ADD/ADHD) had begun sharing McCabe’s videos as educational resources.

How it’s going: These days, McCabe is a full-time creator with 1.6 million YouTube subscribers and a book deal with Penguin Random House. How to ADHD was released earlier this month and has already become a New York Times Bestseller—meaning McCabe is ready to set out on her next big adventure.

What’s next: The science communicator told Tubefilter that she and her team have a “secret project” in the works: a second channel called The Wandering Brain. After so many years of research, McCabe is ready to apply her findings to the outside world by trying out everything from glassblowing to waterfall repelling:

DATA • U.S. TOP 50 📊

This creator is bringing true love’s kiss to YouTube Shorts

Okay, so true love might be a bit of a stretch. The kisses featured on Maddie Joy’s YouTube channel tend to be more utilitarian than passionate—but that doesn’t mean viewers are any less charmed by all the lip-locking.

The strategy: Maddie Joy’s channel puts a provocative spin on Shorts’ uber-popular challenge genre by daring well-known YouTubers and TikTokers to lock lips on camera. Those videos are an example of fan service at its finest, especially when the influencers in question are dressed as pop culture icons like It, the Joker, and Wednesday Addams.

The stats: The success of Maddie Joy’s channel is definite proof that no one really grows out of the teenage truth-and-dare phase. This 2023 recap clip alone has earned over 15 million views since January 2—and that’s only the start of the creator’s meteoric rise to the top.

• Over the course of our last seven-day count, Maddie Joy’s channel scored 127.1 million weekly views.
  
  

• That whopping total added up to a week-over-week viewership increase of 63%.
  
  

• The result: in just seven short days, Maddie Joy’s Shorts hub rose from well outside the top 100 to #34 in our U.S. Top 50 chart.

WATCH THIS 📺

Frankie LaPenna shows off his chief asset in a new Shinesty campaign

Chief Asset Officer: Frankie LaPenna’s 8.5 million TikTok followers already know that he’s “built different.” Now, the “most caked-up man on the internet” is making sure his best assets (and everyone else’s) get the star treatment they deserve:

LaPenna has signed on as Chief Asset Officer for underwear brand Shinesty—and if you have any junk in the trunk, you won’t want to miss his first video on the job.

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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.