Despite TikTok’s terrible US launch (more on that later), short-form content is still dominating the video market.

I’ve seen stats thrown around that as much as 80% of all social media video traffic is from short-form content.

That’s a lot of You Have to Believe Me videos!

I’ll break down what info we know about these short-form initiatives and why I believe they’re doomed to fail.

Also in this edition:

🤔 When Should a Rep Take AdSense? (Thoughts Are My Own)

⚖️ Big Social Goes to Trial Over Youth Addiction

☕️ ‘Steal a Brainrot’ Goes Hollywood

😇 Dhar Mann is Making 40 Movies

🇺🇸 TikTok US’s Launch was Awful

💪🏼 Jobs from Cantina Labs, Fox Entertainment, and Linktree

🎭 …and a dank meme from yours truly!

Let’s get into it.

TLDR:

Paramount took a break from their hostile bid to buy Warner Brothers to leak some documents about their plans to launch a short-form feed.

As reported by Business Insider, Paramount’s Head of Product Dan Reich discussed getting one million ‘clips’ into the product so they can start with personalization.

And it sounded like they were pretty close to reaching that number.

Much like Disney+, it’s not entirely clear what these ‘clips’ will be, but I’m pretty confident they aren’t licensing much user-generated content.

Or, if they are, they haven’t reached out to my clients or me (is it me?)

The small hints in their respective links and releases suggest they want this feed to serve as marketing materials for their long-form content.

But is that so different from YouTube? The most powerful feature in YouTube Shorts is the ability to link shorts to longs.

So let’s take Netflix, who has been the most explicit. They’ve discussed featuring:

Hey! Did I just catch you yawning?!

Yeah, me too.

And that’s the problem.

Everything that’s been teased feels like DVD extras, but instead of diving deep into a singular fandom (I absolutely devoured all of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ extra featurettes) it will be more akin to watching trailers before a movie.

But there’s a bigger problem here.

This stuff is already on the social media short-form feeds.

I’m a fan of both stand-up comedy and podcasts, so guess what my TikTok feed looks like?

It’s a bunch of clips from podcasts and stand-up!

When the Stranger Things 5 trailer dropped, it was all over my Instagram Reels!

So you’re telling me that you’re going to get me to stop watching TikTok by giving me a feed that has everything TikTok has, but less, and with a lot more commercials?

Hard pass.

The streamers need to think about how they can be different, not the same. Lean into short-form on social for marketing, use deep links for conversion, and keep their apps' long-form, lean-back experience with amazing stories and strong production values.

I wrote a LinkedIn post this week about a 1m+ follower talent I spoke to, who said their representation was taking 40% of their AdSense revenue.

My DMs blew up.

To address the two biggest questions publicly:

- No, I won’t tell you who the company and talent are. It’s their story to tell if they choose.
- No, the reps weren’t offering services warranting that revenue split.

But considering my expertise taking the ride from arguably the beginning to the end of the MCN 1.0 era, I know exactly why this is happening.

It’s actually quite simple:

Creator representation is often presented as a get-rich-quick scheme, despite being a get-rich-slow scheme.

The margins are low, the competition is fierce, and it takes a ton of work to do it well.

The maths-math: I take 10% to 20% commissions from 500 creators, averaging $500,000 per year in commissionable revenue each, and that’s $50 million to $100 million dollars in your pocket.

Orgs pop that in a deck, raise a bunch of money, and aim for unicorn status.

But wait! Creators know their value. And creator economy experts know their value.

So scaling the right team to work with these talent can’t be done with a bunch of entry-level kids.

Big talent wants six-figure expertise.

Suddenly, you’re pulling out $100 million against $50 million in salaries, not to mention offices, legal expenses, accounting, sales teams (notoriously hard to build profitably), and a signing team in a more and more competitive environment.

But wait! I promised my investors this would be a get-rich-quick scheme! So what do I do?

You have to start taking AdSense, Twitch subscriptions, or whatever other revenue they can grab to show a growth story.

And that’s why the MCNs are doomed to keep repeating themselves. Because so many people are hunting for a big exit instead of truly remaining ‘creator first’.

Or, you know, you could try innovating. But that’s hard, so…

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

⚖️ Is this big social’s ‘tobacco moment’? Meta and Alphabet are in court in California, accused of making addictive products for kids. We won’t know the results for several weeks, but this is the biggest challenge to the broad protections of Section 230, which has given big tech companies a lot of cover in the past.

☕️ ‘Steal a Brainrot’, the extremely popular Roblox game, is going Hollywood along with Story Kitchen to develop the game into a movie. Reminder: this is all based on a bunch of viral AI characters, which means it is one of the first movie adaptations to originate from AI-slop.

😇 Dhar Mann Studios inked a deal with Fox’s Holywater to create 40 vertical shows (movies? experiences?) for the microtransaction-based long-form app. This is an incredible evolution in a market that, just a few years ago, wasn’t even touching the creator economy while banking billions of dollars.

🇺🇸 TikTok US is now officially a thing, and the transition was really, really bad. There was a full outage in uploading or viewing new videos, which the team blamed on a power outage at a US data center. View counts were not updating properly or at all. The analytics pages have been all over the place. All of this while there have been reports of extreme censorship of any liberal-leaning topics. Not a great start…

Head of Creator Program, Cantina Labs

Cantina Labs is the tech behind a ton of AI generated memes you’ve probably seen in your feed. And by taking a role heading their creator program, you can help pull together this new creator class making bursts of joy our of relevant moments. If you believe, as I do, that memes are the new news (sorry if that depresses you…) then this is the role for you.

Head of Creator Studio, Fox Entertainment

The big studios know they’re behind in the creator economy, as noted by teh aforementioned 40 picture slate with Fox and Dhar Mann. This is a very high level role focused on structuring all aspects of the creator world for Fox, which means you’ll have a lot of budget, IP, and talent to play with.

Director, Creator Growth and Support, Linktree

The link-in-bio space is a brutal battle. There are so many trying to own that part of a creator’s funnel, but Linktree not only raised more money faster, but they’ve often been viewed as the ‘default’ in the US. By managing Linktree’s creator support team, you’ll help guide how they interface with talent using its technology.