TOGETHER WITH

It's Tuesday and Google Register’s new .meme domain presents a golden opportunity for OG jokesters. (Sorry, feline lovers: "grumpycat.meme” and “nyancat.meme” are already taken.)

PLAYERS GONNA PLAY

YouTube Playables have arrived. Are you ready to get your game on?

YouTube is giving users yet another reason to pony up for Premium. Five months after the Wall Street Journal reported that YouTube was testing an in-platform gaming hub, Playables has at last been made available to Premium subscribers.

Here’s what to expect from that 37-game library:

At launch, Playables includes everything from puzzle and card games (including The Daily Crossword and Daily Solitaire) to mobile classics like Angry Birds Showdown. All 37 titles can be played directly in the YouTube app, with no additional downloads required—a perfect setup for casual gamers.

Those titles won’t stick around forever.

According to YouTube’s New tab, Playables can be found “by scrolling on Home or through a ‘Playables’ link in the Explore menu” and will be accessible to Premium subscribers until March 28, 2024.

Whether the gaming hub will survive past that point remains to be seen. If successful, Playables could give YouTube yet another way to compete with rivals like Netflix and TikTok (both of which have made their own forays into casual gaming). But with layoffs hitting gaming divisions at tech giants like Amazon and ByteDance, there’s no guarantee that YouTube’s in-platform hub will stand the test of time.

🔆 SPONSORED 🔆

Looking to expand your brand? Here are 3 reasons to syndicate your content with Viral Nation:

Only one talent agency in the world offers 360° creator representation—including a Creator Studio dedicated to content strategization and platform syndication. Viral Nation’s Creator Studio provides personalized support from the industry’s leading experts, so influencers can expand to additional platforms without putting in additional effort.

Here’s why Viral Nation experts recommend syndication:

1. Relying on one platform is risky 😰
Policy updates and algorithm changes can impact the visibility of your content. Syndicating to multiple platforms reduces that risk while encouraging consistent growth and audience building.

2. Syndication opens new revenue streams 📈
When you syndicate with Viral Nation, you’ll gain access to multiple monetization models—meaning more ways to earn revenue. Cross-posting allows creators to benefit from opportunities exclusive to individual platforms, including limited-time bonuses, new ad formats, and transactional revenue.

3. Posting to multiple platforms increases your views and your earnings 💸
Case in point: by posting a pre-existing YouTube video with approximately 426K views on Facebook, one Viral Nation creator earned $10,217 from stream ads and received 6.1M views—1,332% more than the original YouTube post.

Ready to unlock your multiplatform potential with the Creator Studio? Hit the button below to take your content to new heights.

Visit the website to learn more →

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• Warren James CEO Saurabh Shah says the merchandising firm is “looking at some retail plays” for Rhett & Link’s new MishMash cereal. (Tubefilter)
  ​

• True crime reigned supreme among Apple’s top 10 podcasts of 2023, with Crime Junkie and Dateline NBC coming in at #1 and #3 respectively. (Gizmodo)
  ​

• A complaint filed by an Austrian privacy group claims that Meta’s €9.99 monthly subscription cost would force European Facebook users to choose between financial stability and privacy. (Engadget)
  ​

• Pika has raised $55 million in funding to support the creation of an AI-driven platform dedicated to video editing and generation. (TechCrunch)

DATA • GLOBAL TOP 50 📈

Meet your friendly neighborhood Shorts creator

Spider Vambi might not be a real superhero, but that hasn’t stopped 15 million subscribers from tuning in to watch his bigger-than-life adventures. The Japanese Spider-Man has scored billions of views by collaborating with both top Shorts creators and a variety of masked cosplayers.

One of Spider Vambi’s most popular Shorts, for instance, features a face paint-wearing Pikachu, who accompanies the YouTuber as he recreates a series of trending internet hacks.

The resulting view count: 234 million.

That kind of virality is nothing new for Spider Vambi. The creator’s signature combination of short-form comedy, pop culture trends, and high-profile collaborations has earned him nearly 11 billion views since July of 2022—and he’s not slowing down anytime soon.

• Over the course of our last seven-day count, Spider Vambi scored a total of 243.9 million weekly views.

• That whopping figure represented a 34% week-over-week increase.

• All those views sent the creator’s channel skyrocketing to the top of the global charts. Spider Vambi’s final ranking: #41.

ON THE CASE

CASETiFY is facing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit from a major YouTuber

A multimillion-dollar copyright infringement suit is shaking up the world of device customization. Tech YouTuber JerryRigEverything has joined forces with Dbrand—aka the device skin company he’s partnered with since 2019—to sue Hong Kong-based CASETiFY for allegedly stealing their popular Teardown designs.

If you’re not familiar with Teardown, the production process is pretty intense.

Dbrand and JerryRigEverything (whose real name is Zack Nelson) create hyper-detailed scans of the internals of devices like iPhones, which they print onto skins and cases. An important part of Teardown (and one of the reasons the brand is so popular with fans) is that each image is slightly altered to contain easter eggs representing Nelson and/or Dbrand.

CASETiFY recently released its own high-def internals-themed collection—but the familiar style of the company’s “Inside Out” products isn’t what caught Nelson’s eye. According to the YouTuber, CASETiFY made a key error when producing its Inside Out collection: it released a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra skin that featured six little words printed on a blue tab.

The words in question: “Glass is glass and glass breaks.”

That phrase is not present in normal Galaxy S23 Ultra internals. But if you’ve tuned into Nelson’s channel—or purchased a Galazy S32 Ultra case from Teardown—then you’ll recognize “glass is glass and glass breaks” as one of his signature phrases. Easter eggs like that one are the backbone of Nelson and Dbrand’s multimillion-dollar lawsuit.

But despite the financial aspect of the case, Nelson says it “isn’t about the money.” Instead, the YouTuber plans to use any potential winnings to “give away wheelchairs for free as long as I can” through his wheelchair design and production company, Not A Wheelchair.

WATCH THIS 📺

This dad is dominating Fortnite with one simple strategy

Meet BushCampDad: the working father who’s making some serious waves in the Fortnite streaming community. According to fellow creator SypherPK, BushCampDad initially got into the gaming scene as a way to bond with his kids. He starting streaming “as a joke”—and things took off from there.

Find out more about BushCampDad’s rise to to”the highest rank in Fortnite” (and his ingeniously simple technique) here.

Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here.​

Today's newsletter is from: Emily Burton, Sam Gutelle, and Josh Cohen. Drew Baldwin helped edit, too. It's a team effort.