TOGETHER WITH

It’s National Quesadilla Day and Chipotle is partnering with three top TikTokers to keep fans coming back for seconds.

🗞️ Today’s News 🗞️

• Twitch brings merged chats to Stream Together

• Discord ups its ad game with new executive hires

• The Paul brothers battle it out in our weekly news roundup

• Sony launches a kid-friendly YouTube hub

• This week on the podcast…

KNOCK KNOCK

Twitch is finally bringing merged chats to multi-creator streams

The announcement: After almost five years of experimenting with multi-creator streams, Twitch is finally bringing merged chats to its collaborative Stream Together feature. CEO Dan Clancy made the announcement at TwitchCon, which ran from September 20-22 in San Diego.

The context: That change comes less than a year after the death of Squad Stream, a tool that allowed up to four streamers to join a single broadcast but kept their chats separate. The feature was discontinued in March 2023 (in large part because it had an adoption rate of fewer than 1% of Partner streams) and replaced with Stream Together. Twitch attributed much of Squad Stream’s low engagement to the difficulty of collaborating while responding to separate chats—but although Stream Together was a more polished multistream tool, it didn’t offer merged chats, either.

The rollout: As of late September, that’s no longer the case. Clancy said merged chats will roll out to all streamers sometime this week. Twitch also offered some key details about the addition to Stream Together, noting that creators will be able to “tell at a glance which messages came from their community” and that mods from all involved channels will be able to work together to moderate messages. Timeouts and bans can be issued like usual as well, and users banned from any one channel will be unable to send messages throughout the stream.

Creators who leave a Stream Together session will pull their chat back to their channel with them, and they can also choose to join a multi-creator stream without merging their chat into the group’s.

🔆 SPONSORED 🔆

If you’re an influencer marketer who hates free stuff, keep on scrolling, this platform isn’t for you

You spend hours every week hunting for the perfect set of creators for your campaign. It’s tedious, time consuming, and imperfect. We get it. 

Take a load off this week and let our team at Monroe do the work for you. We’ll send you a hand-crafted list of creators that perfectly align with your brand + past campaigns, for free. How? 

We’ve analyzed and tracked millions of videos from hundreds of thousands creators so you don’t have to. That means you’ll get a strong list of creators who align with your brand! 

You’re 4 quick questions away from getting a hand-crafted list of creators every week. 

Take 30 seconds to fill out Monroe’s form HERE to get your hand-crafted list of creators, for free →  

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• Discord wants to improve its ad game. (Tubefilter)
  ​

• Twitch plans to begin sharing offending chat excerpts with streamers whose accounts have been suspended. (Engadget)

• X has announced the upcoming launch of a TikTok-style “video tab” and an exclusive reality series from producer-slash-investor Alexis Ohanian. (The Verge)
  
  

• Tumblr has reportedly seen a nearly 350% growth in users in the days following Brazil’s ban on X. (TechCrunch)

HAVE YOU HEARD? 👂

Have you heard? One Paul brother says boxing is over, but the other is still fighting back

The column: Welcome to Have You Heard?, a new column that rounds up some of the hottest headlines. On this week’s agenda: creator food fights, the alleged death of influencer boxing, and more.

Creator commotion: Logan Paul, KSI, and MrBeast are beefing with creators over their new Lunchables competitor, Lunchly. YouTubers like DanTDM have questions about the health content of Lunchly’s products—which include Feastables chocolate and Prime beverages—but Paul says the brand’s detractors are ‘idiots.’

Tapping out: Logan isn’t the only Paul brother in this week’s news roundup (or even the only one making inflammatory comments). According to Jake Paul, influencer boxing is “dying out.” The creator-turned-athlete told the Daily Mail that “sloppy” matchmaking has doomed the trend—an opinion he decided to share only after taking his first L.

It’s getting hot in here: TikTok star Addison Rae broke into the Billboard Hot 100 last week with the debut of “Diet Pepsi”—and she isn’t the only social media sensation bringing the heat. Per Bloomberg, BuzzFeed is mulling over a deal that would allow Netflix to distribute live episodes of Sean Evans’ spicy YouTube interview series, Hot Ones.

Check out the full column here to learn about TikTok’s latest chaos-inducing trend and find out why X is earning a reputation as the ad world’s clingy ex.

KID STUFF

Sony knows kids are all about YouTube content—so it’s setting up its own hub

The phenomenon: Kids content is killing it on YouTube. Viewership among toddlers continues to surge year-over-year, and YouTube-based brands like CoComelon have evolved into multiplatform franchises. In our Tubefilter YouTube charts, family channels regularly rank as the most-watched channels with hundreds of millions of weekly views.

The launch: Sony is well aware of that upward trajectory—and it doesn’t plan on losing out on the momentum. The entertainment company has revealed a YouTube channel called Kidzuko, which will deliver videos related to properties like Octonauts, The Creature Cases, and Peter Rabbit. At launch, Kidzuko comes with a three-year back catalog of videos and a subscriber base of 377,000 fans.

The context: There are already indicators that Kidzuko will be a hit—and Sony’s previous success on YouTube is at the top of the list. Indian channels like Sony SAB and SET India have claimed more than a hundred billion lifetime views each and often wind up in our Top 50 charts. Now, the media company has a chance to combine its long-term experience in online video with the viral power of family-friendly Shorts.

LISTEN UP 🎙️

This week on the podcast…

Made on YouTube in review: This year’s Made on YouTube event included a flurry of upcoming feature announcements—and Creator Upload host Joshua Cohen was there to witness them all. Check out the latest episode of the podcast for details on everything from YouTube’s brand-new community-building tools to the introduction of Hype.

It’s all right here on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Introduce your brand to Tubefilter’s audience of creator economy pros.

Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here.​

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