TOGETHER WITH

It’s Wednesday and a 1999 Pokémon Charizard card just sold for a whopping $213,500. That sounds like a big pile of money to use, but hey—maybe the anonymous buyer is taking a page out of Logan Paul’s book.

Today’s News

THE BIZ

Yes Theory launched a fulfillment brand for merch. Eight years later, it’s time to sell.

The creator company: Yes Theory broke out during the tail end of the 2010s and quickly became a YouTube sensation. Within a few years, the adventure-focused channel teamed up with Boring Stuff co-founder Zack Honarvar and exec Ryan Westburg to launch Fan of a Fan: a company designed to facilitate the rollout and fulfillment of its merch brand, Seek Discomfort.

What happened next demonstrated the high demand for creator-oriented brand-building services. Fan of a Fan quickly built up a client roster that included the likes of Colin & Samir, Airrack, and Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan—and now, Yes Theory is cashing in on that success. Selery, a Texas-based ecommerce company that works with small businesses, has acquired the fulfillment assets from the Fan of a Fan brand.

The acquisition: A press release describes the transaction as a “multi-million dollar asset sale” that will allow Selery to scale up its operation on the West Coast. Fan of a Fan’s three warehouse facilities and its proprietary logistics stack will be used to build out a fulfillment center that is expected to open in Ontario, California later this month.

Beyond its fulfillment capabilities, Fan of a Fan encompasses a wide array of creator services. Post-sale, the brand will continue to operate as an agency that works with big-name videomakers to build brands from the ground up. Westberg will retain his CEO role, joining Selery’s C-suite.

🔆 SPONSORED 🔆

If you could analyze 50M YouTube videos in seconds, would it change the way you brainstormed content?

That question inspired Spotter Studio to develop Outliers, a new research feature that gives creators the ability to analyze trends and top-performing content across 50 million YouTube videos. Here’s how it works: 

• Explore real-time YouTube data: Analyze 50M videos based on intuitive filters like genre, upload date, subscriber count, or view count.
  
  

• Track outliers from top channels: Follow channels in Spotter Studio to track the performance of each upload and measure how new videos stack up to the channel’s average performance.
  
  

• Generate viral video concepts: After saving outlier videos, ask Spotter Studio to generate similar ideas that fit your personal niche, audience, and content history

Data-driven ideation gets results—just ask top creators like Guava Juice.

Since using Spotter Studio features like Outlier to generate content ideas, Guava Juice (16.8M subscribers) has seen a 15% revenue increase per video. And they’re not alone:

Outliers is just one way Spotter Studio helps creators get better video ideas. Hit the link below to find out what you can achieve with features like Thumbnail Generator, Brainstorm, and Title Generator:

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• Will synthwave soundtrack the AI revolution? One purveyor of dance beats and AI images—YouTube hub Masters of Prophecy—snagged the #1 spot in this week’s Global Top 50 subscriber chart. (Tubefilter)
  
  

• Substack has announced the upcoming launch of audio-only livestreams, along with plans for “a big party in Washington, D.C.” (Substack)
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• Reddit plans to institute new verification requirements in the wake of what it calls an “improper and highly unethical experiment” conducted by researchers who unleashed an army of AI bots on the site. (TechCrunch)
  
  

• Spotify has announced the launch of Plays, a new engagement metric that reflects “the number of times people have actively listened to or watched any episode” of an audio or video podcast. (Spotify)

PLATFORM HEADLINES

TikTok is expanding Pulse to keep brands connected to trends, events, and more

The expansion: TikTok is once again expanding Pulse Suite, an ad program that cordons off advertising space next to “the hottest, trending, and most-premium brand safe content” on the For You Page (per TikTok Newsroom).

The product has headlined TikTok’s NewFronts pitch in each of the past four years. It first debuted shortly before the 2022 pitchfest and expanded a year later with the launch of Pulse Premiere, which packages ad space next to “premium publisher content.” A year after that, TikTok introduced Custom Pulse Lineups and a fresh batch of publisher partners.

Now, TikTok is extending Pulse once again with a fresh batch of Premiere publishers—including Formula 1, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Red Bull Media—and the introduction of Pulse Core, a product that allows brands to focus campaigns on specific trends, seasonal events, or other categories. (A separate product named Content Sponsorship Packages will also put advertisers at the center of platform-wide tentpoles. Formula 1, for example, will build Sponsorship Packages around November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.)

The context: TikTok’s continued expansion of Pulse has unlocked a coveted audience that advertisers often struggle to reach through traditional marketing channels. Per the latest TikTok Newsroom post, 45% of the audience reached through Pulse campaigns hadn’t previously seen an equivalent ad on TV.

That being said, the concept of a digital ad program that targets a slice of top-performing content isn’t new; in fact, that type of offering is most closely associated with the Google's YouTube Select product. In recent months, other tech companies have rolled out their own takes on Select, with X and LinkedIn serving as two notable examples.

GOODBYE, BURNOUT

CreatorCare is here to help digital workers overcome mental health struggles

The resource: As the creator economy grows into a multi-billion dollar industry, mental health issues like burnout and poor work-life balance are becoming increasingly common. But as long-time What’s Trending host Shira Lazar points out, “the support systems haven’t kept up.”

That’s where CreatorCare comes in. The program—which connects digital workers in “high-burnout industries” to licensed mental health professionals—was born out of a partnership between Revive Health Therapy and Creators 4 Mental Health. The former organization is a Bay Area-based provider of in-person and telehealth counseling, while the latter is a self-descriptive initiative that emerged from Lazar and Jordana Reim‘s Peace Inside Live.

The details: CreatorCare offers on-demand access to therapists, and its sliding scale pricing model makes it tenable for creators big and small. That system is designed to provide mental health resources to the emerging creator class, which CreatorCare and Revive Health Therapy Co-Founder Amy Kelly noted will face greater risk unless relevant services evolve and grow. She added that more members of Gen Z are becoming influencers without equipping themselves with the tools they need to thrive. In her words, that trend is equivalent to “sending kids into coal mines without protective gear.”

CreatorCare will initially be available in California, with the aim of eventually expanding nationwide. Creators located in the Golden State can check out the program’s website to peruse available services.

WATCH THIS 📺

A social media-themed horror flick is getting a sequel

The follow-up: If you missed Influencer when it came out two years ago, now is the time to tune into the horror flick on Shudder. The genre-specific streaming service has helped Influencer collect a dedicated cult following since its 2023 release.

Soon, it will also play host to Influencers—a sequel that Deadline says “deepens a cinematic universe built around themes of deception, online identity, and the darker sides of curated personas, offering an expanded canvas compared to the original.”

Not sure if a creator-themed horror film is up your alley? Check out the YouTube trailer for the original Influencer film here before heading over to Shudder.

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