TOGETHER WITH

It's Sunday and here’s a handpicked selection of stories to give you a snapshot of trends, updates, business moves, and more from around the creator industry.

But first, Ore-Ida turned a TikTok trend into a new product. The food brand describes Croutots as “like croutons, but tater tots.”

CREATOR COMMOTION

Skyrim Grandma moves on and Hawk Tuah Girl hits Twitch

The gaming grandmother: The 89-year-old “Skyrim Grandma” is moving on to new horizons. Shirley Curry has been one of YouTube’s oldest Skyrim players for more than a decade, but she’s grown bored of Bethesda’s hit RPG. In a video called “My Goodbye to Skyrim,” Curry closed the book on her gaming exploits, though she didn’t rule out the occasional vlog in the future.

The food critic: Keith Lee has signed with UTA. The TikTok food critic is so influential that the so-called “Keith Lee effect” drives restaurant sales and trends. He now boasts a new talent agency deal that will provide him with representation in all areas.

The streamers: Forget the Talk Tuah podcast—Hailey Welch is Just Chatting. The “Hawk Tuah” girl has taken up Twitch streaming so that she can have more manageable interactions with her audience. The resulting show, Talk Tuah Live, will include some contributions from chat.

Welch isn’t the only entertainment sensation trying her hand at streaming; Ice Spice is launching her own Twitch account, too. During Paris Fashion Week, the rapper kicked off her streaming career with a star-studded broadcast. We hope fellow Bronx native and notable Ice Spice fan Kai Cenat is paying attention.

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Advertising Week New York kicks off tomorrow. What will your agenda look like?

From October 6-9, the leading festival for all things marketing and media will return to Manhattan with 1,200+ speakers, 500+ sessions and 28 content tracks.

With so many programming options to choose from, planning your Advertising Week New York schedule can be a challenge. So, what would Tubefilter do?

Here are four sessions we think should be on your AWNY agenda:

Purpose, Produced: Where Cause Meets Creative (Monday • 4:10 PM)
Actor Kevin Bacon and social impact leader Stacy Huston explore the intersection of creativity and cause.

The Business of Funny: Smosh’s 20-Year Evolution in Digital Media (Tuesday • 12:10 PM)
Smosh CEO Alessandra Catanese outlines 20 years of brand growth and what marketers can learn from a fan-first content strategy.

Hot Ones: Advertising Week Edition w/ Sean Evans (Tuesday • 4:55 PM)
Sean Evans and a group of 3 brave industry luminaries take on the hot sauce gauntlet.

Lights, Camera, Pitch! The Big Creator Challenge (Thursday • 2:20 PM)
Creators have just 7 days to take an Adobe brief and pitch their ideas live for a chance to win a $25,000 brand deal with Adobe.

Visit the AWNY website to register now and start planning your agenda:

THE INDUSTRY

This week in platform headlines…

The Spotify CEOs: Daniel Ek has a pair of replacements in Spotify’s C-suite. The platform’s founding CEO is transitioning to the executive boardroom. In his place, Spotify is taking a page out of Netflix’s book by appointing Co-CEOs. Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström have oodles of experience (and three umlauts) between them.

The TikTok head: It looks like Adam Presser will take over the new U.S. version of TikTok. After succeeding V Pappas on TikTok’s leadership team, Presser led a reshuffling of the app’s operations. Now, he is being predicted as the head of the platform that will arise as a result of the U.S. TikTok deal. Let’s make sure the transaction closes first.

The Threads feature: Threads wants to cater to your interests with Reddit-style communities. With its latest move, the Meta-owned social hub is incorporating current tech trends. Reddit-style content is surging in the era of AI, and Bluesky is pushing the industry toward community-based browsing, so Threads is doing what it can to keep up.

The Tubi content: Evan Shapiro is bringing a creator-led Skit to Tubi. Shapiro’s EShap production company teamed with distribution company Filmhub to land a 30-day exclusive window at Fox’s FAST platform. Skit is a comedy film led by a cast of content creators, including Nataly Aukar, Alise Morales, and Lukas Arnold.

TECH TALK

AI is big on YouTube—but it’s causing headaches in Bollywood

The AI recs: AI bots are more likely to send referrals to YouTube than to any other platform. So claims a study published by BrightEdge. Google’s presence in the AI game via Gemini is certainly a factor here, though even ChatGPT is pulling more from YouTube than from any other source.

The Bollywood suit: AI-generated Bollywood videos went bye-bye after a report called them out. Reuters located videos that resembled the uploads that sit at the center of a lawsuit filed by Bollywood stars Abhishek Bachchan and his wife Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. After the report came out, many of the offending videos were promptly taken down. Funny how that works out! 

The customization technique: If you’re tired of all the AI slop dominating social media, one developer may have a solution for you: just turn your YouTube playlist into a TV channel. The instructions are here, though we can’t promise this method offers any utility that’s not available on the main YouTube app. It is cool, though.

WATCH THIS 📺

A streamer beat Elden Ring by using a saxophone as a controller

The musical prodigy: When you go by the name Dr. Toot, what choice do you have other than using a woodwind as a gaming device? Toot is moving on to other games, but we’d like to see him try other instruments. The accordion controller speedrun is right there for the taking.

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