Are You Fundable or Just Famous?

💡 TOP STORIES

WHAT INVESTORS WANT FROM CREATORS

It’s been a tough year for creators chasing VC money.  Most of the lemmings have bounced to AI, while the holdouts have raised the bar considerably.  But for creators looking for investment, and anyone backing creator businesses, Slow Ventures four-part series on how they evaluate creator-led startups is a must read.  Big thanks to @Megan Lightcap for putting it all together.  

Their framework centers on four pillars:

• The Creator: It’s not just about the content.  In classic VC form, they focus strongly on the founder.  Niche-obsessed, oozing charisma and focused on scaling.

• The Community:  Fans are table-stakes.  They look for strong shared values and purpose – along with a clear community identity. 

• The Category: Investability matters, but they lean into well-defined niches where enterprise value can readily be extracted.  Slow’s focus:  Where community + category = a compelling theme.

• Metrics That Matter: The baseline?  $500k annually from ad/brand revenue and over 100k followers.  But not on TikTok.  Strong off-platform revenue also counts heavily.  Ultimately, it’s “more about growth potential than current scale alone”.

Read all about it on Slow’s blog – and sub to their newsletter too.

HOW TO THRIVE IN THE AI AGE

Two ways to battle AI as a creator.  First, get into the business of creating tokens that will be highly valued by LLMs.  Second?  Build shared communities around your content.  Why is the latter so powerful?  Because AI turns the internet into a completely customized experience for every one of us.  But we crave shared content, and subscription-based content communities offer a path that AI will have trouble disrupting. (Stratechery)

AI INFUSES SHORTS

YouTube released new AI Playground for Shorts, along with a bevy of new tools.  Still not powered by Google’s most advanced Veo3 model, but that’s coming.  It’s another (big) step on the path to short-form video embracing AI.  My prediction:  80% of short-form vertical video will be mostly – or entirely – AI generated within the next 18 months. (YouTube)

THE CREATOR AOR

Not sure why it took so long, but brands finally seem to be uplifting their influencer marketing agencies into an “Agency of Record”.   It adds a level of permanence to a brand/agency partnership, while at the same time proving yet again that creators haven’t just arrived…  they’re a strategic partner for any brand. (Digiday)

HOW CAN I MISS YOU IF YOU WON’T GO AWAY?

Love that Vsauce released a new long last week.  But everyone saying “Welcome Back to YouTube” misses one important thing: he never left – he’s just been doing Shorts.

WELCOME BACK

A true welcome back to one of my favorite OG creators Kevin Nalty – aka Nalts.  He just launched a new channel called Prompteers Club, which looks like a place to learn about how to make video prompts.  Sign me up! 

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💡 PLATFORMS

YOUTUBE

• Batter Up: Should YouTube bid on Baseball? (Next In Media)

• Superfans and Drivebys:  YouTube analytics now breaks out viewers into three categories – new, casual and regular. (YouTube)

• New Rules of Podcasting: According to YouTube’s Rene Ritchie, Jon Youshaei and Steve McLendon – now in convenient podcast form.  (YouTube)

• WSJ Discovers YouTube on TV:  Guess it’s a real thing now.  (WSJ)

• Industry Reacts to “Inauthenticity”:  15 experts explore the ramifications of YouTube’s policy change (I’m one of ‘em!). (Net Influencer)

• GoogleTV: I still don’t think YouTube will get back in the content creation game.  But parent Google plans to create tech-positive TV.  I’ll bet the “TechTV” name is for sale somewhere inside Comcast.  (Stagerunner)

META

• The Keyboard Is Dead: Meta develops wristband tech that detects muscle signals, translates them into computer input (Meta)

• Expanding Teen Protections:  Meta expands DM and other protections for teen accounts – and also extending them to adult accounts that include kids (Meta)

TIKTOK

• Last Chance Texaco?  TikTok will go dark in the US in September if it doesn’t accept a sale deal (Variety)

• Bidder Drops Out: Blackstone was planning on a minority stake.  But no longer. (Reuters)

• 50 Days And Counting: My countdown clock counts down the seconds until TikTok’s sale/demise. (TikTok CountDown Clock)

LINKEDIN

• Trust is the new KPI:  LinkedIn’s latest research finds that B2B brands working with trusted creators – along with video – outperforms most other categories.  Why?  Because trust. (LinkedIn)

• Related: Embrace zero-click content to build trust over time. (SparkToro)

• Did They Or Didn’t They?  My LI feed has been awash in older posts, making it far less useful.  Apparently that algo change was rolled-back.  Or not.  (Social Media Today, MediaWeek)

• EGC Beats Company Pages:  Forget your company page, instead focus on your passionate employees building community on LinkedIn.  (Jillian Richards)

💡 QUIBIS

OTHER CREATOR ECONOMY

• Apples to Apples:  A helpful new tool helps companies, investors and creators make sense to all the B2B companies in the creator economy (Get Better Measurement)

• Vine Is Back:  Elon Musk says it’ll be an all-AI video platform.  Which means – by the time it launches  – it will be just like TikTok, Reels and Shorts (Social Media Today)

• It’s Official!  Wired discovers micro-dramas.  Gotta be a trend now.  (Wired)

• Clips R Us: More on Clipping from @Reid Duchscher (Night Light)

• Collapse:  VTuber agency VShojo collapses, CEO admits he mismanaged the hell out of it. (Dexerto)

• Fixing Influencer Marketing:  Nice profile on how @sophie Jamison is trying to reinvent the system. (Net Influencer).

• Rotten Fru.it:  Looks like one of my fav news sources, PassionFrui.it, has shut down.  Nothing published since June 30^th.   Sad to see it go.

• Meet Prajakta: Good interview with the only Indian creator to make Time’s 100 list.  (Social Nation).

• Communal Science Fair: Nice Open Sauce recap, from Friday’s Industry/Creator Day to why this is a truly special festival.  (Tubefilter)

• Age Check Verification Arrives:  UK requires platforms to verify age, to protect kids.  But it’s easily circumvented.  (Gizmodo)

• The Rise and Fall of Posting:  It’s headed to zero, according to this essay. (The New Yorker)

CREATOR TECH – AI, AR, VR, MORE

• 60% of Search is AI: Looks like we’ve reached a tipping point.  Interesting look at how publishers could bid for AI’s attention.  Also the end of the internet as we know it. (Tomasz Tunguz). 

• The Revenge of SEO: Looks like Google’s AI search results rely in part on traditional search, according to Google.  A new test shows ChatGPT does too. (SEO Roundtable, Aleyda Solis). 

• “We Are All Born Creators”: Ex head of Facebook Video product Fidji Simo, and incoming OpenAI Applications head, posts about the power of AI – notably calling out “Creative Expression”. (OpenAI)

• AI Could Do Better: What’s up with the thumbnails on OpenAI’s YouTube channel?  Even AI couldn’t fail this badly. (YouTube)

• Fighting Fire with Fire:  Roblox develops an LLM to filter outputs from its LLM-based NPC speech generation system. (Roblox)

📊 RESEARCH

Consumer Trend Report: The New Consumer’s mid-year trend report finds AI polarizing, podcasting accelerating and yes, pets are family.  But the bigger shift? Consumers are retreating into trusted, curated spaces, which favors smaller creators and simpler apps.  The data reinforces exactly what Slow laid out above: niche, trust and influence beat broad and shallow every time. (The New Consumer)

AI Search Results Don’t Convert: Pew confirms what we already sort of know:  If you’re getting AI-based Google search results, you’re much less likely to click on links.  And AI search results are more likely to lead to a session termination.  What else is dying?  Apparently, Google Search.  Lots more good stats inside. (Pew Research).

AI Likes News Sources:  Good news – AI trusts journalism more than paid media.  A new study finds that 95% of all cited links come from non-paid sources, and that 27% come from journalistic outlets.  That grows to 49% for more timely queries.  Axios, FT and Reuters are the big winners.  Want to improve the quality of results?  Enable citations.  Want to rank higher?  Keep publishing new stuff. (MuckRack)

100% written by me – no human or AI ghostwriters were involved in the production (except for the cover art!) and AI was very lightly used for editing.

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Let me know what you think – email me at [email protected]. Thanks for reading and see you around the internet.