TOGETHER WITH

It's Wednesday and we’re kicking off hump day with virtual feet. After many pleas (and many memes), it looks like Meta is finally testing out two-legged Quest Home avatars.

BACK TO SCHOOL

YouTubers can now erase their Community Guidelines warnings (if they’re willing to hit the books)

YouTube is giving creators a chance to clean up their permanent records. Since 2019, the platform has issued punishment-free warnings to creators who violate its Community Guidelines (instead of jumping straight to strikes, which was the previous policy). Those warnings aren’t quite as severe as strikes—which restrict livestreaming/uploading capabilities and can add up to full-on channel deletions—but they do last a lifetime.

Get more than one warning and you have an all-out strike on your hands.

YouTube’s newly-announced educational courses will make it a little easier to avoid that scenario. The platform has introduced 15-minute training courses that will help creators “learn how to better stay within our policy lines” while erasing any existing warnings on their channels. So long as a creator completes the course designed for their particular Community Guidelines offense—and doesn’t violate the same policy within 90 days—the warning will be removed from their channel.

Of course, that path to amnesty isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. Receiving a warning still means that any prohibited content will be taken down—and violating the same Community Guidelines policy within 90 days of passing a course will result in an immediate strike.

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HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

• 9-year-old YouTube sensation Like Nastya has landed her first movie role in a film adaptation of TV series Weird Waters. (Tubefilter)
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• X (aka Twitter) will allow political ads on its platform for the first time in four years. (Gizmodo)
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• Twitch is giving streamers a faster way to reach 350 paid subscriptions (as required for Partner Plus eligibility) by granting additional points for Tier 2 and Tier 3 subs. (TechCrunch)
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• Instagram head Adam Mosseri has announced a new test feature that will allow creators to “share comments from any public feed post or Reels to their stories.” (TechCrunch)

DATA • U.S. TOP 50 📈

This Shorts star’s recipe for success: popular sounds, colorful animations, and famous characters

Rocky Rakoon leaves no trend untested. The U.S.-based creator has ensnared 2.4 million subscribers by combining colorful animations with online sensations, from popular TikTok sounds to skibidi toilets. The channel’s animated crew is a big draw, too: a typical Rocky Rakoon video features a variety of dancing figures, including Helluva Boss and Five Nights at Freddy’s characters and well-known YouTubers like Dream.

That may seem like an odd combination, but Rocky Rakoon has a knack for bringing together disparate fanbases.

The animated hub has scored more than 1.3 billion lifetime views since launching in 2015—a testament to viewers’ intense love for fan memes and Grimace Shakes. A good chunk of that viewership comes from Shorts: while Rocky Rakoon’s top long-form video claims an impressive 15 million views, his most popular short-form clip blows that number out of the water. Overall, the Poppy Playtime-themed Short has scored 44 million views—and that’s only one video.

• During our last seven-day count, Rocky Rakoon collected a whopping 98.5 million weekly views.

• That total was good for a 57% week-over-week bump.

• The result: Rocky Rakoon now sits at #46 in the U.S. Top 50.

WATCH THIS 📺

Snapchat’s latest AI selfie feature lets users “try on new personas”

Dreams have finally arrived on Snapchat. The newly-announced “AI-powered feature” promises to help users “create fantastical images” and “try on new identities” with selfies that turn them into mermaids, pirates, and cowpeople. Your wildest dreams are at the tips of your fingers—as long as you only have eight. After that, Snap says, “you can make more with an in-app purchase.”

Check out the trailer for Dreams at the end of Snap’s latest Newsroom post.

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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.