We have a new president. Rather, a new old president.

Like Cleveland before him (the President, not the city from the Sublime song ‘April 26 1992’), Don John Trump will be the second president to serve two non-consecutive terms.

Also like the song ‘April 26 1992’, the creator economy has become a powder keg of raw feelings. And given this newsletter is written by someone who works daily with people who disagree with him politically*, I won’t contribute to that (unless you want to follow me on Instagram where I will be extremely vocal in my Stories).

*Side note: I did block people this week, but due to rudeness, not political differences.

Instead, I’m dedicating my hot takes to the impending U.S. TikTok ban, which is supposed to go into effect in January 2025.

Also in this edition:

• Elon’s Grok AI Goes Free

• MagicLinks Gets Into Creator Healthcare

• Short-form Music Money Hacks

• OnlyFans Creators Find Threads

• Job ops from Lacoste, Elevation Marketing, and Pocket FM.

• …and a dank creator economy meme by yours truly!

Let’s get into it.

NEWS:

Is TikTok Still Toast?

It’s rare for my most common DM after a president wins an election to be, “So do you think he’ll do what he promised?”

Usually, that’s a given, but here we are.

Lest we forget, Trump started the ‘ban TikTok’ movement during his first presidency via executive order, and Biden overturned it in 2021.

Now, Trump made ‘Save TikTok’ one of his core promises during an election in which he used social media stars as a core (and extremely effective) strategy to win.

Where does that leave us?

My hot take: I think the TikTok ban will disappear, but I’ll play both sides.

Why would Trump keep it?

• He promised he would.

• Trump has had a lot of creators in his ear lately, and they’re overwhelmingly advocates of keeping TikTok intact.

• A donor, Jeff Dass, that gave a Trump PAC nearly $100m is a 15% owner of ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company representing billions of dollars.

• Trump knows a TikTok ban would help Meta, and he’s recently called Facebook “the enemy of the people”

• Republicans are starting to win over young people and he doesn’t want to stop that momentum.

Why would Trump ban it?

• Kicking the can down the road would be easy. He can just push back the ban until after the next election to potentially hurt Democrats.

• Trump promised to impose 60% tariffs on Chinese goods, so Chinese tensions are about to get much worse.

• With Elon Musk in his ear daily, a TikTok ban could help X big time.

• He has never been one to obsess about keeping campaign promises and has played fast and loose with the truth (Mexico will pay for the wall, they have a better plan than Obamacare, starting the last administration lying about his inauguration crowd size, etc. etc. etc.)

Ultimately, I think Trump knows Republicans are winning the social media game and doesn’t want to threaten that.

But who knows? Maybe he’ll give up the White House the second he pardons himself from his felony conviction. Hard to tell in this crazy world!

ElonAI Tests ‘Free’

Twitter (X) may have gone ‘pay to play’, but Elon’s GrokAI is readying a free offering.

It’s already pretty inexpensive as it comes with an X Premium subscription at $8 per month, but users are starting to confirm that they’re getting access without that need.

At a time when Elon has teased raising $40b for xAI, this could be a transformative move.

My hot take: This is an attempt to get in on the AI bubble before it pops.

Everyone with access to TechCrunch and a calculator knows a lot of investors in AI tech are about to lose gobs of money.

It’s a race to get users at this point.

The vast majority of AI software is either free for a while or completely free with some limitations.

In fact, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, my favorite co-worker, offers a free service that allows you to do pretty much anything you need as an AI novice.

If Grok wants to be competitive, it needs user acquisition or a differentiated value proposition quickly.

And the ‘non-woke AI pitch’ isn’t going to cut it, especially since nobody has been able to tell me what this means besides “this one isn’t afraid to say racist stuff.”

MagicLinks Cares for Creators with CreatorCare

MagicLinks, a creator-focused affiliate technology with over $1 billion in transactions from over 21,000 creators, is getting into healthcare.

The CreatorCare program announcement provided a shocking stat: 40% of creators don’t have adequate healthcare.

So if creators make enough money using MagicLinks, they will provide a $300 monthly stipend for health insurance.

My hot take: These programs that help creators stabilize their lives are going to take off in 2025.

This year, the big pitch was ‘creators are finally becoming businesses’.

Cool. But how do they learn how to set up companies? Do taxes? Get credit cards? And, yes, find affordable healthcare?

We’ve finally hit a tipping point of public awareness for career creators that companies providing true infrastructure for creators will begin to thrive.

Also, check out essentL, providing health insurance for creators (I’m not a paid spokesman, but I’m sending a lot of creators to this signup list!)

FAME & FORTUNE:

Sound.me built the most reliable income source for short-form creators I’ve seen. Most TikTok creators know about ‘sound deals’, wherein you’re paid to make a video using a sound, generally well below your branded rate. Sound .me made this scalable by building it into a platform that provides multiple offers per day at decent rates.

Collabs have long been the best way for social media influencers to grow, but lately one format has provided the ultimate way to collab at scale: dating formats. After looking at the work Poppies Studios is doing using dating formats against a white cyc, then searching the growth of the ‘stars’ of each episode, it’s clear there is real growth potential to shining on these online gameshows.

Have a 🌶️ site (see: OnlyFans), then maybe you should try Threads. There’s a hack that’s been popping up in my feed often, likely because of my demographic (middle aged dude in California). I’ve been getting a lot of young women selfies talking about how lonely they are, begging for engagement bait, and asking for an Instagram follow. They are 100% OnlyFans pitches, and the amount of sockpuppet accounts doing this is massive. Which means it’s probably working!

TikTok Shop is making a hard push for a piece of the projected $240b in US holiday spend on ecommerce! They’ve launched a new TikTok Holiday Playbook for small and medium-sized businesses full of amazing information of tapping into this powerful technology. And if you’re a creator with 1,000 followers in a country that has TikTok Shop, now is a great time to enable the feature on your account!

INDUSTRY HIRING:

Lacoste needs a VP, Digital. If you’re scared of alligators, don’t apply.

Elevation Marketing is looking for a Sr. Director of Digital Marketing & Media (Marketing Agency). They do contractor marketing, so make sure you pad your estimated salary in case you knock down a support beam.

Pocket FM wants a Head of Creative. And if you’re under 35, no, FM doesn’t stand for ‘French Man’.

MEME ZONE:

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this edition, give it a share and if you get someone to sign up, I’ll send you my ‘10 Rep-Friendly Ways to Monetize Today!’ deck!

Until next time, protect yo rep.