It’s Wednesday and Apple is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an auction. One of the historic gems up for grabs: Steve Jobs’ eighth-grade science fair project.

PLATFORM UPDATE

The update: YouTube is hoping inflated viewership numbers will help creators negotiate brand deals. Beginning August 24, the platform will count a “view” the instant someone clicks on a long-form video. It doesn’t matter if they misclicked or autoplayed; if the video loads, that’s a view.

YouTube already uses this measurement method for Shorts. Now, it’s extending zero-second measurement to long-form videos, too.

The creator details: That update might sound simple enough, but there are a few critical details creators should be aware of. For one, this change only affects public view counts—not the view counts creators see in YouTube Studio. The Analytics tab will show a different number called “Engaged views.”

Because of this, YouTube says the update won’t impact creators’ earnings; those “will continue to be based on ‘Engaged Shorts views’ and ‘Engaged Watch Hours.'”

The brand side: The update could, however, have a significant impact on advertising. YouTube said it hopes “that having metric parity across all formats” will make it easier for creators “to confidently express their true scale and value to brand partners and sponsors!”

But are views based on zero seconds of watch time a true measure of scale? Many sponsor ad reads don’t happen until a few minutes into a video, so if a “viewer” clicks away after the first frame, they’re certainly not sticking around for an ad spot.

You may remember that in 2019, Facebook paid $40 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its three-seconds-is-a-view policy. Agencies alleged that the measurement method inflated video view counts by up to 900% and gave them a false sense of how well their content was doing.

Will YouTube’s first-frame policy make advertisers feel similarly duped? We’ll be keeping an eye on how marketers respond to the announcement—and how a universal rise in public video view counts impacts the YouTube ecosystem at large.

POLL 📝

Once more for the readers in the back: if you haven’t filled out this poll yet, we’d love to hear from you. (And apologies if you’ve already seen it!)

WELCOME TO THE CLUB

The platform: After co-founding the virtual casino Stake.com in 2017, Australian entrepreneurs Bijan Tehrani and Ed Craven set their sights on live streaming with the launch of Kick. Now, the duo has announced the official launch of a new platform called Club.

Club is a home for superfan communities centered around individual creators, who can use the platform to launch spaces that unite multiple revenue streams. Subscriptions, tipping, paywalled content, and an in-app currency called Club Cash are all part of the monetization equation.

The idea is to consolidate all those resources so that creators can operate with nimble efficiency in close proximity to their biggest fans.

The launch: To acquire the Club.com domain, the platform’s founders paid $10 million, making the transaction one of the most costly domain sales of all time. In addition to that pricey publicity stunt, Tehrani and Craven teamed up with Henrik Pohlmann, who serves as the platform’s CEO.

So far, both moves seem to be paying off. Club entered its beta period earlier this year and has since accumulated a total of 100,000 members. According to a press release, one creator’s Club page already has more than 30,000 members.

Now, as Club emerges out of beta, its founders are launching a corresponding app and introducing a feature called Communities, which adds more social elements to the platform.

AI WAVE

The memorandum: AI Tom Cruise’s days may be numbered—at least on TikTok. The app’s parent company, ByteDance, has reached a “Memorandum of Understanding” with the Motion Picture Association after drawing its ire due to the widespread proliferation of AI deepfakes on TikTok.

ByteDance has agreed to “maintain strong guardrails” designed to protect the intellectual property associated with Hollywood’s biggest stars and franchises. Those protections build on advances that were incorporated into Seedream 5.0 Pro and Seedance 2.5, the newest editions of ByteDance’s generative AI models.

ByteDance will work alongside the MPA as it continues to integrate those models into apps like TikTok, CapCut, and the U.S.-based service known as TikTok USDS Joint Venture.

The context: Negotiations between ByteDance and the MPA stemmed from a cease-and-desist letter that the MPA—which represents most of Hollywood’s biggest studios—sent to TikTok in February. The notice was issued in response to a spate of Seedance-generated videos featuring deepfaked depictions of recognizable pop culture characters and actors like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

At the time, the MPA demanded that ByteDance stop using Hollywood IP to train its AI models. Now, by agreeing to the Memorandum of Understanding, the TikTok parent company is promising to work with major studios to adjust its technological innovations.

Though ByteDance is playing nice with Hollywood, don’t expect to see AI-generated content disappear on TikTok. The app is putting Seedance to work for brands and positioning the model’s creations as film festival fare—meaning ByteDance is still investing heavily in generative AI.

WATCH THIS 👀

The creator capsule: Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) has teamed up with YouTube to enshrine the work of ten culturally significant creators.

Among other notable stars, those creators include mathematician Eddie Woo, vlogger/singer Wengie (aka Wendy Ayche), former comedy YouTuber Natalie Tran, and GLITCH, the studio behind The Amazing Digital Circus.

Interviews with the inductees can be found on the official NFSA YouTube channel. Check out this video to find out how Wengie moves “between beauty, music and entertainment, the relationship between creator and persona, and the challenges of evolving in public.”

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