I haven’t talked this much about Justin Bieber in a decade.

Was his Week 1 Coachella performance scrolling through his old YouTube vids lazy or brilliant?

My not-hot-take: it doesn’t matter.

He did something different, and people were talking about it. Mission accomplished.

But even more so than years past, Coachella was full of buzzy moments, controversies, random performers from music history, huge internet viewership numbers, influencers, and lots and lots and lots and lots of brands.

So what can we learn from the hype?

Also in this edition:

🧑🏽‍💼 Algorithm Optimization has Peaked (Thoughts Are My Own)

📼 Reed Hastings Leaves Netflix

💜 Vylit Launches as Adult and Premium

🧑🏽‍⚖️ Johnny Somali Sentenced to Prison

✂ Empyre Pays Creators to Have Clippers

💪🏼 Jobs from Franki, WhatNot, and Live Nation Entertainment

🎭 …and a dank meme from yours truly!

Let’s get into it.

TLDR:

YouTube now has multiple live streams on a single profile, and boy did Coachella use it this year with seven persistent live streams and three of them streamed in 4k.

The data supports the strategy's success. Coachella 2025 had 2 million social video tags. It’s going to top 3 million this year.

40,000 posts, 157 million engagements, and a bunch of hipster bands you’ve never heard of!

It topped $754 million in earned media value. That’s more than triple Super Bowl in-game brand placements.

If you got sick of watching Young Thug, you can flip right over to Tomora’s DJ set (and possibly get seizures from the light show).

And if you read that and said, “Wait, Young Thug was at Coachella?! How come I didn’t hear any press about that!?”

Despite having an absolutely incredible set and being a generational star, that’s just not enough to break out at Coachella anymore.

What did break out? What got all of the kids talking?

Justin Bieber scrolling through his past YouTube videos (65 million views in 12 hours).

Sabrina Carpenter and Madonna’s surprise trio of duets.

The Strokes’ performance as a history lesson of US imperialism.

In the early days of Coachella, it was enough to be a big star with an amazing set.

Now think of what the buzziest online stories from Coachella that I listed were really about:

These weren’t the best sets of Coachella.

None of them would make my top ten.

But they optimized like YouTube videos.

Outrage. Odd Juxtapositions. Clickable formats.

But most importantly: something to debate and analyze.

It’s almost as if internet culture, as a general vibe, has permeated every corner of Coachella, not just at the absolutely silly number of branded experiences and houses (and there were way too many).

P.S. Hey brands, I know tons of big creators who would have happily gone and promoted the heck out of you if your activations came with tickets. I mean…come on, guys…

So what does the success of these Coachella moments say about the current state of online attention?

We’re now in the fifth wave of winning the internet video game.

First Wave: Quality.

Second Wave: Fame.

Third Wave: Clickbait.

Fourth Wave: Optimization.

Fifth Wave: Buzz.

Mafiathon wasn’t optimized. It was a buzzy cultural moment.

Clipping is the top promotion strategy on the internet right now. It’s 100% buzz and distribution.

And Coachella’s quality is a given, but you can only break out if you can make yourself buzzworthy enough to have everyone talking about you.

You need to be famous for being famous. You need everyone to be creating content around your content, because your content is the trend.

And the smartest Coachella performers embraced internet-style buzz in a big way this year.

Serious question: is there anyone making really unique thumbnails on YouTube anymore?

I mean it. What popular people aren’t doing the MrBeast-style big reactions with minimal bold text and a huge action against a painfully saturated color scheme?

Or for that matter, what popular TikTokkers aren’t swinging around the camera in the first .5 seconds as a hook or saying a controversial declarative statement with text over screen that begs viewers to hold on.

A decade ago, I could see a title and thumbnail and know whether or not the video was going to do well.

Heck, I ran weekly meetings with the entire talent team at Studio71 where we dissected creator strategies based on metadata alone.

Now I’m seeing 100% optimized content on all social platforms with less than 100 views.

And this is just the beginning.

Just for fun, I asked HeyGen to make a fully optimized video based on another viral, then asked Claude to design all of the metadata strategy.

I didn’t launch it, but it took me about 5 minutes and both were fantastic.

Optimization in an AI world is a given. In the same way that a world where an ‘SEO specialist’ for a website in a single prompt destroys the entire concept of SEO.

Heck, it destroys the entire point of a search algorithm.

Optimization strategy was the key to success for a long time. It had a great run. But now, the only true key to success is distribution.

Optimization and content quality are a given. Both have to be perfect. But with the free tools at everyone’s disposal, with a 4k camera in your pocket at all times, there’s no barrier to entry for either of those things.

Now it’s about clipping, collabs, loud moments, and being part of the conversation.

What creators, brands, governments, and platforms are making waves this week in the name of fortune, fame, and fun?

📼 Reed Hastings announced his exit from Netflix’s board after a…let’s say…’interesting’ year when the WB acquisition was stolen out from under them by a government-friendly Paramount. Netflix shares dropped 9% in the aftermath, then everyone remembered there’s a K-Pop Demon Hunter sequel in 2027 and it leveled back out.

💜 Huge congrats to Ami Gan, ex-CEO of OnlyFans, for her launch of Vylit, the topless-friendly content platform heralded as the HBO of social. Don’t mistake this for another OnlyFans. In their announcement, it feels like discovery through Vybe Matching is their killer feature.

🧑🏽‍⚖️ Live Streamer Johnny Somali was sentenced to six months in a South Korean prison with labor for his deepfakes of other streamers. A good reminder that just because AI makes trolling easy, doesn’t mean it isn’t illegal.

✂ Every creator and brand worth their weight in views has a good clipping strategy these days, but what if you got paid to let clippers do it! Empyre, founded by Jake Cass of Aegis DRM fame, uses content claiming to revenue split clipping success with uncapped earnings between creators and their 15,000+ clippers. Need an intro, let me know!

Sr. Social Media Manager, Franki

Franki is like Open Table with rewards, so any social media manager for this role is going to have to love dining out for free at all of the best restaurants. But it will also be an interesting challenge: how can you exemplify the idea of restaurant reviews without sounding like a supplicant to their brands?

Social Media Manager, WhatNot

If you collect Pokemon cards, hard-to-find shoes, or retro video games (sheepishly raises hand), you know all about WhatNot. And creating content to promote a company about cultural social selling would be an incredible opportunity for your classic collector-types.

Day to Day Manager, Creators & Creatives, Live Nation Entertainment

Yes, they just got famously sued for a boatload of money for their aggressive ticket pricing, but there’s one thing Live Nation will always need: someone to manage their talent. Especially when you’re talking about celebrities, pop stars, and rock bands. This will likely be an absolutely brutal grind, but you’ll have the kind of stories that will make your grandkids blush someday.