TOGETHER WITH

It's a Wonderful Wednesday and AI Jimmy Stewart is here to lull Calm subscribers to sleep with “a heartwarming new holiday tale.”

VIDCON RETURNS

VidCon 2024 is mere months away. Here’s everything we know so far:

VidCon 2024 is planning its return to sunny California. The convention will come back to Anaheim Convention Center on June 26 of next year, with festivities running until June 29. More details will emerge closer to those dates—but so far, it’s safe to say that VidCon 2024 is shaping up to be a star-studded event.

Here’s a current list of confirmed Featured Creators:

• ZHC

• Aimsey

• Aphmau Gaming

• CircletoonsHD

• KREW

• Eddy Burback

• Illymation

• KreekCraft

• Michelle Khare

• Molly Burke

• SeanDoesMagic

• Angry Reactions (Oneya)

• Tubbo

Tickets to VidCon 2024 are already on sale. As of yesterday, attendees can scoop up four-day tickets in three different tracks—Community ($110), Creator ($155), and Industry ($699)—or purchase single-day community tickets for June 28 and 29. Anyone unwilling to endure the California heat can also tune into Creator and Industry sessions virtually by purchasing a year-long “VidConDemand” subscription ($199).

🔆 SPONSORED 🔆

Year in Review: Viral Nation’s award-winning creators scored major brand deals and media spotlights in 2023

From spots in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 to deals with billion-dollar companies, Viral Nation creators made waves this year. 

Check out Viral Nation’s Biggest Creator Wins of 2023:

🎧 Connor Price: 100M Streams & A Sold-Out Pop-Up Tour 🎙️
Connor’s Spin The Globe ranked as Spotify's #7 Global Album Debut with 100M streams. He followed that success with a sold-out pop-up tour in Chicago and Toronto, a Streamy Award nomination, and deals with Ruffles and KFC.

🏆 Steven He: Deals with NFL Sunday Ticket, Meta, & McDonald’s 🍔 
Steven rounded out 2023 by…

• Launching a Streamy-nominated series (aka Ginormo)

• Appearing in ​Forbes’ 30 Under 30​

• Hitting the court with Simu Liu and Jeremy Lin

• Scoring media spotlights across Watch Mojo, Fox Studio, Inked Magazine and more

⭐ Yuri Lamasbella: VidCon Baltimore Featured Creator & Latin Billboard VIP Influencer 📸
From traveling with Disney to sealing deals with 30+ top brands (including Skims, Celsius, and De Beers), Yuri spent 2023 rising in star power—and appearing as a VIP guest at the Latin Billboard Awards—before settling in for an interview on Access Hollywood.

Viral Nation Talent​​ supports creators like Connor, Steven, and Yuri with 360° representation—including dedicated agents, an industry-leading PR team, marketing services, and more.

Find out how Viral Nation can support you → 

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• Former YouTube Head of Creator Product Marketing Jon Youshaei has teamed up with Thinkific to launch a growth program called the Insider Accelerator. (Tubefilter)
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• Meta and IBM have spearheaded the formation of the AI Alliance, a coalition of tech companies and universities designed to “advance safe, responsible AI rooted in open innovation.” (Gizmodo)
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• Discord has updated its mobile app to include a “Midnight” theme, new navigation tabs, and auto-clearing notifications. (Engadget)
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• X has now secured money transmitter licenses in 12 U.S. states, bringing it one step closer to becoming an “everything app” through which users can accept and send payments. (TechCrunch)

DATA • GLOBAL TOP 50 📈

This creator puts a short-form spin on the year’s biggest films

Bonku is a movie-loving beast. In just under four years, the YouTube Shorts channel has generated roughly three billion views and pulled in nearly five million subscribers—and it’s not slowing down anytime soon.

Bonku has a knack for attracting cinephiles and casual moviegoers alike.

The film hub’s success boils down to its ability to cut action-packed movies into bite-size snippets. Add in a sentence-long summary, and even the most complicated scenes are suddenly consumable.

That format effortlessly directs Bonku’s audience from Part 1 of a particular film to Part 2 and so on and so forth—until viewers are sucked into watching full movies through a series of 60-second videos. (Part 62 of this film, for instance, earned Bonku 9 million views all on its own.)

That’s just the tip of the iceberg: in total, Bonku’s top Short has claimed a whopping 244 million views since July.

• Over the last week alone, the channel contributed another 222.4 million views to its lifetime total.

• All those views added up to a 14% week-over-week increase.

• The result: Bonku claimed a place at #42 in our Global Top 50 chart.

DOWN THE TOILET

YouTube’s 2023 trend of the year is the stuff of nightmares

There’s no escaping Skibidi Toilet. YouTube selected the nightmarish meme—which has claimed billions of views since crash-landing onto Shorts earlier this year—as its top “Trending Topic” of 2023.

Skibidi Toilet headlined the platform’s most recent “Year on YouTube,” an annual blog post that offers readers a list of the videos, creators, trends, and songs that defined its culture during the previous 12 months.

Terrifying heads and porcelain thrones weren’t the only highlights of 2023.

Among other accolades, YouTube bequeathed the title of #1 Top Creator to MrBeast (aka Jimmy Donaldson) for the third year running. Another U.S. Top 50 regular—Pink Shirt Couple—won the #1 spot on YouTube’s list of Breakout Creators. (The originator of Skibidi Toilet (aka DaFuq!?Boom!) received its own shoutout as #4 on that list.)

YouTube’s annual recap also honored the musicians who made the biggest splash in the world of online video. Toosii’s viral bop, ‘Favorite Song,’ was deemed 2023’s Top Trending Song.

WATCH THIS 📺

Grand Theft Auto VI just broke one of MrBeast’s biggest YouTube records

Fans are pumped for the latest edition of Grand Theft Auto. Rockstar Games dropped the trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI on Monday and promptly blew past YouTube star MrBeast’s record for most views in 24 hours. (That record admittedly excludes music videos, but it’s still a pretty big deal).

The trailer’s 22-hour total: 85 million views. As of yesterday afternoon, that number had climbed past 92 million—meaning Rockstar has the potential to shatter another round of records as views continue pouring in.

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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.