This week US courts delivered two verdicts that should scare every social platform. In Los Angeles, a jury found Meta and YouTube liable, for the first time, in a civil trial over social media addiction. The jury found that platforms acted with malice or fraud and awarded $3M in compensatory damages and another $3M in punitive damages.

TikTok and Snap had already settled before the trial began… make of that what you will. 

A day earlier in New Mexico, a separate jury found Meta violated state consumer protection laws by enabling child sexual predators on Instagram and Facebook, ordering $375M in damages. That case isn’t over: a second phase in May will decide whether additional penalties are due and how the apps should change.

Of course, both companies will appeal, and issued the standard blah, blah, not our fault corporate-speak.  And the penalties are annoying but hardly significant.  But that’s not the point. I’ve been covering this story since 2023 with a focus on addictive design, internal documents proving they knew about the harm, the coverups, and efforts to ensnare users as young as 2. 

In these cases, at least, juries evaluated the facts and agreed on the harm.  And with 1,600-plus plaintiffs still in the pipeline, “these cases” will get a lot bigger.

The big question now?  What are we going to do about it?

Last week we explored how movies grew a participatory identity… or in other words, how Rocky Horror Picture Show ate the industry. This week, @Abby Ho makes the same case for sports. 

It’s no longer just a broadcast you watch or a game you attend. It’s a maze of entry points, including FanDuel, Jomboy, Bleacher Report, highlight edits and athlete vlogs. Any one of them can be where fandom starts, ends, or where a fan goes deep for a season or a lifetime. 

The old model was built around three massive gravity wells: the live event, the team and the league. Fantasy sports started chipping away at that, letting fans interact instead of just watch and root. 

The new model is less a set of tidy solar systems and more a messy asteroid field, with as many gravitational objects as there are fans. Creators are the new planetoids, each with their own gravity well and orbiting fantellites.  Highlights, video games, Fanduel and memes suck in their own fantellites too.

If you’re building in this space, hopefully you’re designing for the mess rather than pretending one ring still rules them all.  (Fellow Kids, Lab Thoughts)

Sora 2 introduced something creepy to the creator economy…  and I mean that as both warning and compliment.  Like most early signals, it foreshadowed a future where anyone can star in their own show and casually experiment with personas as the flavor of the week.  In short, the democratization of creation.

So what killed it? It wasn’t just a tool.  OpenAI imagined it as a social network, an AI version of Vine, but it never broke through. A profitable company might have refined the social mechanics and invested in growth.  Remember TikTok spent billions juicing installs before it became today’s juggernaut.

But Sora 2 was brutally expensive to operate, lacked a clear revenue model, and the copyright liability probably drove OpenAI’s legal team into paroxysms of existential dread.  And since OpenAI now needs to prove it can be a profitable public company rather than a venture-funded loss leader, this expensive experiment got the axe.

But that doesn’t foreshadow the death of the democratization of creation. Three signals worth watching now that Sora 2 has been sent to the knackers:

Buckle up, it’s going to get turbulent. (Benedict Evans, Sharp Tech)

Related: Adobe launches Photoshop as a ChatGPT app.  (ChatGPT)

I’m really looking forward to Scalable Summit on May 6^th in LA.  @Kaya Yurieff and @Jasmine Enberg know how to curate conversations, and this promises to be a fun and insightful day of discussions.  Plus you get to roam around the Lighthouse in Venice, a wonderful space built by The Whalar Group that offers a clubhouse and studio to creative professionals.  Hopefully I will see you there.  Note the early-bird ticket pricing (which is a massive bargain), expires tomorrow.  (Scalable Summit)

Making Money From Creator TV Shows:

(note my first version of this misrepresented the Spotter percentage of what they are calling "Creator TV").

Spotter’s business is licensing creator content and selling ads against it.  When the fluff is stripped away, their new “Creator TV” report is essentially an analysis of their own inventory, projected across a small sub-set of creators. That’s not a negative though, as the CreatorTV category they define in the report generates an estimated 136 billion US views annually.

Spotter’s own campaign data shows that ads running on CreatorTV deliver a 70% completion rate vs. 57% on shorter videos.  And brands buying integrated campaigns across Spotter Shows see a significant increase in both site visits and branded search volume.

Can you project that to the broader creator economy? No.

Here’s what actually matters for creators. If you’re already producing 22+ minute episodes on a consistent schedule, and your CTV viewership share is above 40%, you’re sitting on an undervalued asset which was just exposed to buyers via Comscore’s new measurement product. Build a media campaign around it.

And for brands, it's a great opportunity to pick up valuable ad inventory with a real audience connection. See the flipside of this in the Evan Shapiro "woobies" link below.

For everyone else, TV-screen distribution is an aspirational destination, not a strategy for today. Build the audience and the back catalog first.  Download the research at (Spotter).

LinkedIn Video Views Decline 36%: Fascinating takeaway from a new study by Social Insider.  They evaluated 1.3 million posts from business-only profiles, and found that video views are declining while text post engagement is up 12%.  Sounds like LinkedIn has identified video-first viewers and is flooding their zone while leaving everyone else alone.  Ties into what @Sam Carao Clanon told me on stage at @1 Billion Followers Summit: Either do all video or none at all.   The report also found that PDF/Documents on LinkedIn were the best performing of all formats.  But remember, this is applicable for business only pages.  Individual creators will find the data interesting, but not actionable.  (SocialInsider) – HT: Geekout

Every year I build a big presentation on the weird, creepy, and genuinely wonderful future of the creator economy. I took this year’s to SXSW – focused on how AI will change the creator economy and what human creators and the industry should do.   Each week (until I run out), I’ll be exploring one of the key themes here in this newsletter, anchored by a current event. Today we’re exploring synthetic podcasts.

Grab the full deck free here! (drop me a tip if you want):

Last week we talked about how Grammarly used the names and writing-style equivalent of Image and Likeness in their product without notifying or compensating the writers that were tagged and included.  In conversation with CEO @shishir Mehrotra, @nilay Patel explores the why and whether this was right or wrong.  Mehrotra’s defense boils down to “the idea of copyright is very different from a name and likeness claim.”  He kept deflecting the argument with an “attribution” defense, rather than agreeing he should have offered payment.

Legally, Grammarly may not have done anything wrong. You can copyright a piece of content. You cannot copyright your likeness, your voice, or your writing style. As Patel put it plainly: “I should be able to copyright my face.”

At SXSW I argued that every serious creator is becoming an IP holding company.  Your voice, face, and way of writing are asset classes that will be bought, licensed, cloned, and monetized. That only works if you can legally own them. Denmark has right-of-personality protections already. The US has the proposed NO FAKES Act. The law is coming, but slowly. The gap between what exists today and what creators need is exactly where Grammarly walked in.

Until that gap is closed, every platform with the ability to monetize who you are gets to decide whether to ask first.  Most, like Grammarly, won’t. Until they have to.

The question isn’t whether Mehrotra owes Nilay Patel money. It’s whether you know which platform is selling you right now without pay or attribution. And how to protect yourself until the laws get changed. (Verge, The Guardian)

This was one of 44 different themes I presented at SXSW a week ago.  Look for a new theme each week as we explore the creepy, weird and ultimately hopeful future of creators in our new AI economy.  

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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.