Each week, we handpick a selection of stories to give you a snapshot of trends, updates, business moves, and more from around the creator industry.

This week, Roblox is mired in a bitter feud related to child safety, Netflix’s hit film is a box office sensation, and AI slop is turning into a lucrative revenue stream.

Creator commotion

The Schlep situation just keeps getting messier. The sandbox platform says it banned one of its stars because his hunt for child predators took “the law into his own hands.” Schlep, however, isn’t buying it, and he scolded Roblox in an X tirade. It’s hard to see how Roblox will come out of this situation looking like the good guys, and meanwhile, Schlep’s audience is growing quickly.

Jake Paul’s boxing career is coming back to Netflix. After his clash with Mike Tyson set new platform records, the “Problem Child” is set to return to the ring on November 14 against Gervonta “Tank” Davis. Paul’s critics will be happy to hear that he has chosen an opponent who is close in age to him.

“Jakura” is so over. The pairing of streamers Jasontheween and Sakura helped turn Funny Mike’s Streamer Prom into a must-watch event. Unfortunately for the Jakura shippers, Jason recently announced that Sakura will no longer appear on his stream. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

The biz

KPop Demon Hunters successfully sealed the honmoon during its theatrical run. Netflix bet big on the animated hit by launching a sing-along event in movie theaters across the country. The numbers from that run are now in, and they confirm that KPop Demon Hunters is still as “golden” as its lead single: It earned between $18 million and $20 million over its big weekend, according to Bloomberg.

TikTok Live is big business for streamers. A report from The Ankler claims that the biggest draws on TikTok’s live-streaming hub can take home as much as $3 million per month. If you didn’t already know why ByteDance’s valuation is so high, now you do.

Jesser’s Bucketsquad brand makes it into Dick’s Sporting Goods. YouTube’s favorite basketball creator has turned his content operation in a multimedia enterprise. A placement in one of America’s largest sporting goods chains is just the latest feather in the cap of this 26-year-old baller.

The latest tech

AI slop is more than just meaningless spam. AI-generated videos featuring chaotic scenes have started popping up across short-form video platforms, and the returns have been significant. One slop creator claimed to make $9,000 in a single month from his videos. Maybe YouTube will be able to crack down on that category, but it feels like the weird cats, dogs, babies, and Jesuses are here to stay.

Perplexity’s AI technology is Theo Von’s new sideman. On episodes of his hit podcast This Past Weekend, Von will consult Perplexity’s bots to hit his guests with follow-up questions and fact-check their responses. If Von is the internet’s answer to the late-night talk show, then Perplexity is his Paul Shaffer — and something about that just makes sense.

Now you can use your brainwaves to play video games. Twitch streamer Perri Karyal developed a device that allows her to use her brain to play video games — no handheld controller necessary. I can only imagine the bizarre Twitch subgenres that could pop up if Karyal’s invention makes it to the masses.

The biz

Taskmaster‘s 20th season will feature day-and-date YouTube releases. We recently wrote about the novel distribution strategy that has turned the British game show Taskmaster into a YouTube hit. For the program’s 20th season, its producers are doubling down. For the first time, Taskmaster episodes will be available on YouTube in the U.S at the same time they premiere on British TV.

Is the video podcast YouTube’s path to Emmy consideration? In the wake of Taylor Swift‘s appearance on the New Heights podcast, a fresh piece in Variety argues that video podcasts could revitalize a talk show category that losing some of its longtime stalwarts. If YouTube can’t get its homegrown creators into the Emmys, maybe this is the next best thing.

Unwell’s next podcast will cover sorority life. Alex Cooper’s media company put out a call to find sorority sisters who are interested in updating the internet on the Greek life experience. With #BamaRush taking over feeds every August, this sort of project is a natural next step.

The internet is a strange place

The American Bible Society is using AI to reach Gen Z. As silly as that headline may sound, it’s true — and backed up by some prevailing trends. Weird AI-generated videos featuring God and Jesus rank among the most popular clips on YouTube Shorts, so I can understand why the American Bible Society would find today’s tech to be divinely inspired.

Not into the Bible? The Army is willing to reach you via Instagram, too. The U.S. Army’s influencer marketing partnerships could be the key that unlocks a new wave of recruits. “War propaganda is so back,” replied one commenter who encountered U.S. Army sponcon in the wild.

Or if God or the Army don’t do it for you, there’s always Democrats. Tech and culture reporter Taylor Lorenz took to Wired to unravel a dark money scheme that paid influencers up to $8,000 per month to push Democratic talking points. The right-wing has cultivated a powerful cadre of influencer voices on social media, and apparently, the opponents of the GOP want to bring their base online, too.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Homepage Feature, News by Sam Gutelle
Comments Off on Have you heard? Schlep hits back at Roblox, ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ is golden, and AI slop makes bank.

Was Raphaël Graven‘s death an unfortunate accident or an act of negligence on the part of Kick? The French government is contending that the three-year-old streaming platform could have done more to prevent the passing of the man known online as Jean Pormanove, and it plans to go to court to argue its case.

Graven, who used the Jean Pormanove moniker across major social media platforms, died on August 18 at the age of 46. At the time of his death, Graven was live on his Kick account, on which he had recently hosted marathon streams.

On Kick, Graven had cultivated a reputation as a human punching bag. During collabs with streamers Naruto and Safine — who have since been banned on the platform — Graven was subjected to physical abuse and sleep deprivation.

Those stunts helped Graven amass about 500,000 followers on Kick, according to Le Parisien. He also played to a sizable audience on his TikTok account.

Despite his success, Graven lamented the violent and humiliating streams that were hosted at his expense. Shortly before his death, he messaged his mom to say he was “being held hostage” and was “fed up” with the offensive streams.

Sadly, Graven’s complaints came too late to save his life. An autopsy revealed that his death was “not traumatic in origin,” but it had been caused by “medical and/or toxicological” means. Graven had been taking medicine for a heart condition.

Even if physical abuse did not directly lead to Graven’s demise, the sleep deprivation he endured was undoubtedly unhealthy. Extreme “no sleep” broadcasts hosted by streamers like Norme have drawn condemnation and led to bans for those involved, even as they have rolled up big viewership numbers.

The sad case of Jean Pormanove caught the attention of Clara Chappaz, France’s Minister of State for Digital Affairs. Chappaz has emerged as an outspoken critic of social media platforms and the harmful trends they foment. Previously, she went to war against the #SkinnyTok hashtag, arguing that it depicted negative, harmful, and unrealistic ideas about body image.

In this instance, France has opted to file a lawsuit against Kick. “Kick did not do everything possible to stop the broadcast of dangerous content,” Chappaz said. In an interview, she expressed her mission to “promptly end this digital Wild West.”

In Kick’s native Australia, the local eSafety Commissioner is also on the case. Kick has stated that it will cooperate with the ongoing investigations, but if eSafety concludes that the platform could have done more to ensure Graven’s safety, the resulting fines could rise as high as $49.5 million.

Though digital platforms have long been protected by safe harbor provisions that shield them from many forms of legal culpability, incidents that result in death have occasionally turned into complicated court cases. A 2024 decision broke from precedent, forcing TikTok to face a lawsuit that accused it of pushing a dangerous “blackout challenge” to a 10-year-old who ultimately died from asphyxiation.

Will the Pormanove case become the sad story that leads to permanent changes in the realm of digital safety? Chappaz is eager to take Kick to task, but she acknowledges that the situation is complicated. “As a minister,” she said, “you cannot decide to shut down a site.”

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Homepage Feature, News by Sam Gutelle
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Labor Day weekend marks the beginning of college football season, and a media company with a sizable presence across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitch has found a novel way to ring in the upcoming slate of games. Culture Media, which has evolved from a sneakerhead hub to an all-around sports channel for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, is touring some of the most storied college football venues in the U.S. as part of an initiative called the Culture College Tour.

Culture Media describes its college tour as a hybrid between a road trip and a creator house. Across a ten-week span, notable creators affiliated with Culture will visit big-time football schools, where they will hang with students, throw parties, and host tailgates before each week’s Saturday kickoffs.

The “creator house” aspect of the tour stems from its cast, setting, and format. At each stop on their itinerary, Culture College Tour participants will rent a house together, giving them a home base for their weekend of fun. Featured creators include TikTokers Elishiva and Frank Michael Smith, seven-footer Big Beau Brown, and O.G. Culture Media contributor Chase Young.

Cameras will be trained on the Culture College Tour crew at all times, turning each stop into an action-packed flurry of social media content. For the opening weekend of the college football season, the gang is in Clemson, South Carolina, where they’re already having a blast before the game has even started.

@culturemedia two seater🤣 @CultureCollegeTour @Brad.kraut #comedy #viral #clemson #foryoupage ♬ original sound – culture

“Everything is fair game at all times,” said Culture Media COO Sam Holland in a statement. “Everyone knows they’ll be on-camera 24/7. It’s all about how we can get 100 or so clips out each day.”

With its roving nature and its focus on football, the Culture College Tour has a lot in common with College Gameday, ESPN’s long-running, cross-country pregame show. As NIL dollars bring widespread interest to the world of college sports, Culture Media is betting that now’s the time to reinvent Saturday afternoon traditions for the short-form era.

But the growing interest in college-set content isn’t just about football — thanks to phenomena like Bama Rush, millions of TikTok viewers are living vicariously through the lives of today’s hard-partying teens and twentysomethings. That’s why the party aspect of the Culture College Tour — which includes pong tournaments, alumni trivia, and tailgate takeovers — is so important. College life is as trendy as it has always been in the world of entertainment, and for Culture Media, the promise of exciting football action is just the cherry on top.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Homepage Feature, News, Sports by Sam Gutelle
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Tayvis…Swiftce…Whatever you call it, the entertainment industrial complex power duo of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce has been all anyone’s talking about this week, thanks to their surprise engagement announcement.

But that announcement isn’t the only one they’ve made recently. On Aug. 13, Swift guest-starred in an episode of the Kelce brothers’ longtime podcast, New Heights, and used the spot to announce her next album, The Life of a Showgirl.

Swift is known for giving very few interviews, so the two-hour chat with her now-fiancé and soon-to-be brother-in-law Jason was a rare opportunity for fans. Her answers were PR-polished and delivered with her usual wide-eyed, all-American-girl expression, but they were a glimpse into topics she doesn’t frequently discuss, including the heated battle over the rights to her first six albums, how she comes up with the easter eggs she layers into tracks, and the grueling schedule she was on during her year-and-a-half-long Eras tour, which became the highest-grossing tour of all time and garnered a reputation (see what we did there?) for stimulating local economies.

We’ve written about New Heights‘ popularity before. It’s one of YouTube’s top-viewed podcasts, and in winter 2023-2024, during the leadup to Super Bowl LVIII (in which Jason played), it was regularly near the top of our Gospel Stats Weekly Brand Reports–meaning it was some of the most-watched sponsored content on YouTube week to week.

But Swift’s appearance sent the podcast to…well, you get it.

Guinness World Records confirmed the live premiere of Swift’s episode set a new record for number of concurrent podcast listeners: over 1.3 million people.

“The woman is a record-breaking machine,” Guinness said in a statement. She’s set numerous other Guinness records before–so many that it’s named her an official “Guinness World Records ICON.”

Guinness added, “Perhaps at this point we should just accept that this is Taylor’s world and we’re all just living in it.”

The past couple weeks have certainly felt that way. No matter what social platform you go to, it’s all TSwift all the time.

Data from Mondo Metrics confirms this omnipresence. Since Swift’s episode dropped, Mondo has been tracking not just the episode itself, but the various clips of it disseminated across platforms.

To date, the full episode + clips have gotten:

• 379 million views on Instagram
• 20.4 million views on YouTube
• 34.5 million views on TikTok
• 61.6 million views on X
• 51.4 million views on Facebook
• and 1.1 million views on Threads

As you probably know, Swift and the NFL, separately, are two of the most-watched entertainment entities on Earth. We already knew Swift’s attendance at Jason’s games pumped up the NFL’s viewership and brand engagement, and prompted record merch sales. Now we see what a calculated collab with her soon-to-be-husband can do for his digital media presence…and her Swifties CD hype machine.

Filed under: Homepage Feature by James Hale
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What would Sidemen be…without the Sidemen?

Now hang on, don’t worry too much: YouTube’s favorite seven-man supergroup isn’t going anywhere. What they are doing, however, is expanding their production horizons. For the very first time, they’re making shows that won’t feature the Sidemen themselves (that’s KSI, Miniminter, Zerkaa, TBJZL, Behzinga, Vikkstar123, and W2S), but instead their friends and fellow content creators.

The idea for these shows came from two things. First, longtime institution Sidemen Sunday, where a long-form YouTube video featuring all seven Sidemen is uploaded each week. These videos vary in topic, and over time a few fan-favorite themes emerged–along with fan-favorite guest stars.

And second, the popularity of the Sidemen’s reality competition Inside, which followed 10 influencer contestants competing for a £1 million prize. The premiere episode alone racked up 14 million views on YouTube, and the Sidemen sold the second season to Netflix, with member Vik Barn telling the BBC the Sidemen had hit “the ceiling with YouTube.”

Season 2 went on to become the #3 most-watched production on Netflix globally, and while its ratings did drop off after that, Victor Bengtsson, Managing Director of Sidemen Entertainment, told Deadline the Sidemen still felt like they’d “completely broken the mainstream.”

So, they decided to take that momentum and turn it into two full-fledged, non-Sidemen-starring series on their streaming service Side+.

Viewers can now pay £6.99/month to tune in to Forfeit Footgolf, starring ArthurTV, Bach, Pieface, Weller, George, AB, and Chip, and Blind Dating, starring Samham, Pieface, Marlon, Jakey, Chazza, and Heinz.

“[L]ast year when we created Inside it became clear that with the creative minds of the Sidemen applied to formats we could make really enjoyable content with others outside the core group,” Bengtsson tells Tubefilter. “As we reinvested in Side+ and thought about things we could try, it became a natural thing to look at classic Sidemen Sundays but with some of the boys’ best friends and creators. We wanted the Side+ members to have something new and fresh to look forward to in the second half of the year, so it became a really cool place to test out what something like this could look like.”

Bengtsson says the Sidemen hope these shows can “give creators a chance to meet other creators and see what happens when they come together in a new format–and as a unified group (a bit like the Sidemen setup).”

“As it continues to develop, it can hopefully become a place where any UK creator can come and potentially realize a video idea they had for a long time but didn’t have the chance to make,” he adds.

For now, the Sidemen are focused on producing Forfeit Footgolf and Blind Dating, and want to see what their Side+ viewers think before committing to more shows.

“We’ll listen to the audience and take their feedback on this one and make decisions based on that,” Bengtsson explains. “But of course, we’re hoping to make this into a starting point for more external productions if there’s a want for it. I think entertainment needs some challengers who ask what viewers seek, and we’re absolutely at the forefront of that.”

The Sidemen are far from the first creators to use their success and platform to boost the careers of other makers, but with their digital video omnipresence and increasing reach, they could have a significant impact on the careers of up-and-coming creators in the UK.

Filed under: Creator, Homepage Feature by James Hale
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Cozy Earth is running a campaign that puts the spotlight on sleeping beauties. The Utah-based bedroom brand is drawing millions of views on “Bed Rot” content that turns the trendy “sleep stream” genre into an ingenious piece of TikTok-based marketing.

The Bed Rot campaign is a contest, and the rules are simple: Competitors must stay in their respective beds for as long as possible, and the last person to rise and shine will walk away with a $25,000 prize. Cozy Earth has broadcast the action via TikTok LIVE, and some on-demand Bed Rot clips have cleared 10 million views on the ByteDance-owned platform.

@cozyearth We’re OFFICIALLY live #bedrotting #officegames #cozy #competition #winner ♬ original sound – Cozy Earth

Beneath its simple, MrBeast-style gimmick, the campaign references a streaming category that has become big business for some practitioners over the past five years. Sleep streams first blew up during the COVID-19 pandemic and have evolved since then. Some streamers let their fans watch them catch some z’s; others subject themselves to crowdsourced wake-up calls.

No matter the format, sleep streaming is often lucrative. In 2023, Twitch star Amouranth claimed that she earns up to $15,000 every time she lets viewers watch her snooze.

To bring that concept into the brand world, Cozy Earth put out a public call to find the world’s best sleepers. The Bed Rot stream is running 24/7, and is (of course) linked to product listings on the brand’s website.

It’s all rather clever, but the Bed Rot concept has downsides as well. Some streamers, like the Australian risk-taker Norme, have pushed the sleep stream to its limit, leading to health concerns and temporary bans. There are widespread calls for sleep streaming to be outlawed entirely, lest it promote dangerous habits among practitioners and their fans.

Valid as those criticisms may be, the Bed Rot campaign explains why sleep streaming persists. As odd as this phenomenon will be, people can’t get enough of it, and it might just get them to buy a new mattress, too.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Homepage Feature, News by Sam Gutelle
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ByteDance‘s latest stock buyback program is offering a rare look into the Chinese corporation’s financials. According to Reuters, the parent company of TikTok is claiming a $330 billion valuation as it makes a tempting offer to its current employees.

Through the buyback program, which is expected to begin in the fall, ByteDance will offer its workers $200.41 per share. The massive valuation attached to that offer places ByteDance among the most lucrative tech companies in the world. Reported first-quarter earnings of $43 billion put TikTok’s parent just ahead of Meta, which raked in $42.3 billion of revenue over the same period.

Though Americans may associate ByteDance with TikTok’s innovations in the social video industry, its 12-figure valuation is largely powered by ecommerce. Shopping on TikTok and its sister app Douyin — particularly in regions like Southeast Asia — helped ByteDance turn a $25 billion profit in 2023. A year later, ByteDance Co-Founder Zhang Yiming became the richest billionaire in China (though that title is more complex than it may seem at first glance).

ByteDance’s eye-popping numbers explain the company’s emphasis on TikTok Shop, which has become a global ecommerce juggernaut through a mix of price cuts, small business credits, vendor buy-ins, and other incentives. TikTok Shop has leveled up so quickly that a potential U.S. TikTok ban would likely hurt business owners more than ByteDance. U.S.-based sellers would lose access to a potent revenue stream, whereas ByteDance would be able to refocus ecommerce efforts in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia.

It’s also reasonable to suggest that the value of ByteDance’s ecommerce empire is inflated; the company’s critics could point to multiple rounds of layoffs that have recently affected global TikTok Shop teams. The details of the stock buyback program, however, suggest that ByteDance is still growing even as it encounters widespread regulatory hurdles. Compared to the figure attached to a buyback program that launched six months ago, ByteDance’s stated valuation is now $15 billion higher. And revenue is up too, going from $43 billion in Q1 to about $48 billion in Q2.

Therefore, any rumors of ByteDance’s decline would seem to be unfounded. And on our side of the Pacific, Donald Trump may be overstating his ability to shape a TikTok deal. China holds all the cards and a large chunk of tech wealth, so don’t expect ByteDance to be strongarmed into a one-sided agreement.

Filed under: Articles, Bytedance, Featured, Homepage Feature, News by Sam Gutelle
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Since the dawn of digital content, piracy has been a problem for creators of all kinds. But those who make short-form content are particularly vulnerable, because industry-standard digital rights management tools like YouTube‘s Content ID “weren’t built for clips that were shorter than 30 seconds,” James McFadden tells us.

In 2012, at the height of the Vine era, McFadden and his brothers Tyler and Will co-founded Collab, a digital content studio and video creator development company. They were creators themselves, and only joined YouTube because people were taking their content from their own website and uploading it to Google’s platform without their permission. Sure, having their stuff on YouTube exposed them to more viewers, but like many thousands of other pirated creators, they were losing out on crucial revenue that was rightfully theirs.

So, recognizing the magnitude of piracy as a whole and the specific issue Vine creators faced because their videos were too short for the major DRM systems, the McFaddens (along with COO Soung Kang) launched Collab.

Collab offers a lot of things to its hundreds of creator partners, including talent development, marketing, production support, and proprietary tech tools. But a big part of its business is ensuring creators’ content isn’t reuploaded without their permission–and, if content has been reuploaded, Collab works on reclaiming the revenue pirates stole.

Vine might have perished (RIP), but these days, thanks to the rise of TikTok, short-form content is everywhere. Collab works with creators who publish videos on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and more. And some things never change: short-form content is still harder to protect than long-form videos.

“We had to develop a team of people doing manual reviews, human reviews, watching a bunch of videos, identifying our content and creators, and placing manual claims for our creators,” James says. “We were very successful at that for many years, transitioning over from Vine to YouTube and Instagram and eventually TikTok. Nowadays, a lot of them are coming from TikTok, but we’re still helping protect the rights of their content primarily on YouTube.”

Collab has a team of 20 people working on DRM, but the magnitude of what they’re up against grows every day. Collab wanted to figure out how to support its human team members so they could process more claims, without having to sit through videos that might be 30 minutes or an hour long, searching for a second or two of creators’ stolen content.

That’s where CollabScan comes in.

Collab started working on the scan-and-recognize system five years ago. In its earliest iteration, CollabScan could recognize text, so it primarily read the auto-watermarks TikTok places on videos.

“It would know, ‘Okay, @soandso is one of our creators,’ and that would send a notification to our team that it found some of our creators in videos that were being scanned,” James explains. “From that, we were able to do a couple things: Create a database of where our creators’ content was appearing, and for creators we didn’t work with, it was finding opportunities for us to help them protect the rights to their content.”

That system helped Collab’s manual reviewers, but Collab says it’s nothing compared to what CollabScan 2.0 can do.

To build 2.0, Collab brought in recent developments in data analysis and large language models.

“We’re using modern AI technology, which obviously has come a long way and has improved tremendously over the last couple years,” James says. “Nowadays, CollabScan doesn’t just read handles, it can identify exactly what is happening within each individual clip and match it back to creators and clips we have in our library.”

The system is “especially good at identifying content that is under 10 seconds long, five seconds long,” he adds.

The new version of CollabScan “really helps increase the productivity and output with a small team of manual claimers,” James says, but notes that Collab still relies on humans to double-check CollabScan’s results to “make sure we’re placing accurate claims.”

Collab currently files around 40,000 DRM claims per month on behalf of creators.

Another benefit of CollabScan 2.0 is that it’s quick, Tyler says.

“It’s important, when you are providing DRM management for a rightsholder or creator, that you identify the claims opportunity as quickly as possible to maximize potential earnings,” he says. “You don’t want a video to be posted and then not be able to detect that claim for a few weeks or months after it was posted. You want to be on it immediately.”

CollabScan, the brothers says, “detects piracy as soon as it happens.”

And a final, crucial element of Collab’s approach to DRM is that in many cases, it leaves pirated videos uploaded, but claims the revenue on them–so creators benefit from the exposure to potential new viewers, but are also able to redirect revenue from the pirate uploader back to their own bank accounts.

“We’ve found that taking them down is somewhat of a game of whack-a-mole,” James says. “It’s almost an endless struggle. But monetizing it, if you can leave it up, helps the creator grow their business without them having to put in any direct effort.”

That’s not the only source of passive income Collab provides to creators. A separate branch of its DRM management arm involves licensing. Collab represents a library of around 230,000 viral clips, and licenses them out to third parties–including other creators, like reaction channel hosts.

If a channel wants to license clips from Collab, Collab looks to see “if they’ve done a good job with building an audience, if they’re using the content in a way the partner might not object to,” Tyler says. “Some meme edits, for example, might be controversial, or in bad taste. But if they’re redistributing in a way the content partner might not object to, they might be eligible for an agreement.”

To date, across all its offerings, Collab has paid out over $300 million to creators, it says.

Right now, it wants creators to know about the benefits of CollabScan 2.0, and how being proactive about protecting their content will also help protect their rightful earnings. When the system looks for creator content, there are cases where it’s finding content from creators who don’t yet work with Collab. Collab wants to put together audits for these creators, to show them how CollabScan 2.0 could help them.

“We can say, ‘Hey, we found your content in 100 compilations, here’s what we can do,'” Tyler says. “Pirates know which creators to prey on, in terms of who has a service like this and who doesn’t. We want to help.”

You can check Collab out here.

Collab is a Tubefilter partner.

Filed under: Collab, Homepage Feature by Tubefilter Staff
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One of the biggest spectacles in streaming is coming back for its third chapter, and this installment looks like it could be even bigger than the two record-breaking events that preceded it. Kai Cenat has shared the trailer for Mafiathon 3, which will conclude a series he has dubbed a “trilogy” of Twitch-set subathons.

Cenat’s first subathon, which took place in February 2023, gave the 23-year-old Bronx native the Twitch record for the most active subscriptions. Not to be outdone, Cenat went even bigger for Mafiathon 2: Kim Kardashian‘s internet-breaking appearance in the subathon’s trailer set the tone for a star-studded spectacle that rewrote the Twitch record books once again.

The guest star in the Mafiathon 3 trailer doesn’t have as many social media followers as Kim K, but he’s an A-lister in his own right. Fresh off his starring role in the horror blockbuster Sinners, Michael B. Jordan picked up another acting credit in Cenat’s Scarface-inspired Mafiathon preview.

“This time, we gotta go bigger than ever,” Cenat tells Jordan in the trailer. “How do you go bigger than Mafiathon 2,” Jordan asked in response. “I mean, you did 30 days 24/7. That’s insane.”

Cenat has a clear goal in mind. “This time, we’re going for one million subscribers,” he told Jordan. “No one’s ever done it.”

It would take a Herculean effort to reach that seven-digit Twitch subscriber goal, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Cenat. The streaming star is ready to pull out all the stops to make his final Mafiathon the grandest one of all. His third subathon is set to begin on September 1 and continue throughout the ninth month of the year.

Even if Cenat fails to achieve his lofty mission, he is a virtual lock to finish 2025 in the same place where he began the year: On top of the Twitch leaderboard. And once 2026 rolls around, the fun won’t stop. An easter egg in the Mafiathon 3 trailer alluded to the return of Streamer University, which rolled up 27 million hours of watch time during its first “semester.” Cenat may be retiring Mafiathon, but his streaming career isn’t going anywhere.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Homepage Feature, News by Sam Gutelle
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In our world, attention is currency–and views unlock that currency. Getting big views means earning not just the attention of the viewers actively tuned in, but the attention of brands, managers, creator services companies, the media, platforms themselves, and more. People like MrBeast and Kai Cenat are always on the digital front page because they’re some of the top-viewed creators in the world.

So it’s not entirely unexpected that content creators who want more of the attention currency might try to game the system which grants it.

That’s where viewbotting comes in. Viewbots are fake viewers that fluff up engagement numbers. How? By ‘watching’ a creator’s video or sitting in their livestream, making it look like more people are tuning in. Padding the viewer count with just one more might not seem like a problem, but creators who employ viewbots usually don’t stop at just one. Services offering viewbots send out fleets of them, guaranteeing thousands upon thousands of views.

Viewbotting has worsened in recent years, and Twitch has faced particular scrutiny. Creators like Trainwreck (who has an ownership stake in Kick, so perhaps take a pinch of salt here) have insisted top Twitch streamers are “botting massively and making a lot of money from it.”

This past spring, a round of viewbot accusations hit the ‘net, with xQc in April accusing Kai Cenat’s friends Reggie and Rakai of paying for views. Around the same time, Jynxzi also faced accusations due to his rapid climb to success and many thousands of concurrent viewers, but xQc defended him. Cenat, meanwhile, responded to xQc’s allegations against his friends by saying, “I don’t give a fuck. They’re all viewbotters–I don’t care.”

A month earlier, another streamer, QueenGloriaRp, was caught viewbotting when she accidentally broadcasted the program she used. Twitch banned her for breaking TOS, but that incident prompted questions about how Twitch plans to catch people who don’t out themselves.

Sites like Streams Charts, which plug in to Twitch’s API and look at data about streamers, have also been raising the alarm. Earlier this month, Streams Charts Product Manager Nazar Babenko said his company found over 41,000 Twitch channels with “at least one suspicious stream” during Q2 2025, and more than 10% “showed clear, persistent signs of viewbotting.”

It wasn’t just Twitch, though. “On Kick, the trend is just as alarming—starting in 2025, we began to consistently record over 1,000 blatant viewbotters each month, and in Q2 2025 that number tripled to nearly 3,000,” Babenko said. “This means that about one in six Kick streamers averaging 50+ viewers are now confirmed viewbotters (there were 18k+ streamers with 50+ average viewers on Kick in Q2), a record high and a sign of rapidly growing fraudulent activity on the platform.”

Kick is supposedly handling viewbotters, and as for Twitch…Its plans for botters are now here, and having a significant impact on viewership–so significant that it might already have rolled changes back.

A quick update on viewcounts. We have teams and tech dedicated to ensuring that the views that show up on channels reflect actual viewership, and aren’t artificially inflated in any way. Ultimately, metrics on Twitch should represent the real and growing communities that show up… pic.twitter.com/Pr6XaoSCfP

— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) July 28, 2025

At the end of July, Twitch announced it would introduce viewbot sniping that “meaningfully [improve] our ability to identify viewbots, inauthentic viewership, and other potentially fake engagement.”

“We have teams and tech dedicated to ensuring that the views that show up on channels reflect actual viewership, and aren’t artificially inflated in any way,” it tweeted. “Ultimately, metrics on Twitch should represent the real and growing communities that show up and participate on channels, so we regularly update detection tools and methods.”

It didn’t say what changes it planned to make, but warned streamers that if their channels were viewbotted (either by them or by a third party without their consent, which does happen occasionally), they should expect to see “an impact on your channel’s viewcount.”

Twitch appeared to hit the switch earlier this week–and almost instantly, saw a sitewide decline in viewership as high as 22%, analyst Zach Bussey reported. The decline fluctuated with time of day, he said, but remained between 5% and 22%. He added that after the viewbot snipe went live, many of Twitch’s top ~5,000 streamers had their lowest-performing streams of the year.

Twitch hit back against Bussey’s assertion, saying “viewership is by no means in decline or in free fall,” and that third-party sites were spreading “misinformation” due to incorrect data.

Streamers responding to Bussey also theorized Twitch’s snipe might have overreached, banning some lurkers (aka real human viewers who have a pattern of watching streams, but not engaging with chat) as well as genuine viewbots.

Not long after his original tweet, Bussey returned, saying he thought Twitch might have already undone its change, because most streamers were back to their pre-snipe viewcounts:

It’s a bit too early to be sure, but it looks like Twitch undid this change today.

Almost every example I looked at on Saturday that showed streamers having their lowest performing streams of the year between Thursday-Saturday, are back at their 30-day average today.

(That or… https://t.co/TschSLII4S

— Zach Bussey 🇨🇦 (@zachbussey) August 26, 2025

Twitch does have a history of reverting policy changes, but we’re not sure why it would undo this one. Brands don’t like it when their marketing dollars are impacted by fake engagement, so Twitch’s mass ban and the viewership dip it would inevitably cause might look rough in the short-term, but would be a long-term boon.

Perhaps, if Twitch did undo the snipe, that was to fine-tune it and make sure lurkers weren’t being affected.

Either way, though, API data can be finicky, so it’ll be hard to tell–at least for a while–which streamers’ channels had high percentages of viewbots…and whether their viewership will recover now that they have to appeal to actual humans.

Update, Aug. 28:

Twitch asked us to include this statement:

“We haven’t rolled back any of our viewbot tools or removal efforts. We are very committed to combating viewbotting on Twitch. We think our work here is important, not only for our service, but for the wider livestreaming industry.

Viewership fluctuates throughout the day, so you may notice some changes over time. Plus, viewbotter services work hard to evade detection and figure out new detection systems. Combatting viewbots is an ongoing process, and we continue to develop new and better methods to detect viewbots. This will always be the case.

We are fully committed to combatting inauthentic viewership on Twitch, continue to invest in our detection tools, and will continue to make updates to improve our viewbot system.”

Filed under: Homepage Feature, Twitch by James Hale
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The United Arab Emirates’ 1 Billion Followers Summit returns for its fourth year Jan. 9-11, 2026, and expects to welcome thousands of content creators, entrepreneurs, and industry experts to the Emirates Towers, Museum of the Future, and International Financial Centre in Dubai.

Last year’s summit brought over 30,000 attendees, including 15,000 creators and 420 speakers. Along with offering dozens of panels and workshops, it handed out a $1 million prize to British creator Simon Squibb, founder of free entrepreneur resource guide/networking pool HelpBnk, and divvied up $13.6 million among participants in a Shark Tank-esque competition called “1 Billion Pitches,” where startups went before a panel of investors and talked up their ideas in STEM, tech, and more. Winners there included “trainable pathology” program Halo AI and South Korean media company Eugenius.

The UAE Government Media Office, which organizes 1 Billion Followers Summit in an effort to advertise its region as “a global hub for positive content creation and growth in the digital economy,” wants to make the 2026 event even bigger.

Repeating 2025’s theme of “Content for Good,” the upcoming 1BFS has partnered with digital platforms including Google/YouTube, TikTok, Meta/Instagram, X, and Snapchat. It hasn’t yet announced speakers for 2026, but last year’s headlining speakers included Tucker Carlson, Zach King, Jay Shetty, Airrack, Supercar Blondie, and Elon Musk‘s mother Maye Musk.

It’s also brought in five ambassadors to help guide the summit’s direction (descriptions provided by 1BFS):

• Simon Squibb is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and one of the most-followed business creators online. Having founded and invested in over 100 companies, Simon now dedicates his time to helping people start businesses for free. Through his content, he shares advice, mentorship, and opportunities to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs. He is also the founder of HelpBnk, a platform built to support aspiring founders and democratize access to entrepreneurship.
• Alexandra Mary Hirschi, the Australian content creator known as “Supercar Blondie” – the nickname of the Australia-born media personality based in the UAE where she began her journey and built a global presence of over 100 million followers across platforms. Her story embodies the UAE’s ability to serve as a launchpad for digital talents reaching the world. It is a story of transformation from a simple journalist into a content empire managing a global team
• Khalid Al Ameri is a content creator, writer, and speaker from the UAE, known for his heartfelt videos on culture, relationships, and social issues in the Arab world. Through his relatable storytelling and cross-cultural content, he has built a strong online presence and inspired millions globally.
• Omar Farooq, Bahraini content creator, widely recognized across the Arab world for his video series “Omar Tries”, which explores cultural and humanitarian experiences. His YouTube channel has garnered over 1.2 billion views and more than 6.7 million subscribers.
• Ammar Kandil, the co-founder of Yes Theory, a movement and media company built around seeking discomfort and living life outside of one’s comfort zone. Through powerful storytelling, global adventures, and community-building, Ammar and his team have inspired millions to embrace curiosity, courage, and meaningful human connection. He continues to push boundaries by leading creative projects that unite diverse communities around the world.

This year’s $1 million prize will go out to the winner of a contest for the best short film made using generative AI. The contest, a collaboration with Google Gemini, “aims to support and encourage the production of purposeful films using diverse AI tools, raise awareness of the humanitarian messages such films should convey, and enhance creative capabilities, aesthetic vision, and advanced skills in integrating AI into film production,” organizers said.

More details about the contest will be released in September, but for now, organizers said the top 10 films (judged on “storytelling, creativity, integration of AI, execution, and alignment with the theme in delivering a humanitarian message”) will be showcased at 1BFS, and the winning film will walk away with $1 million.

More details about the rest of 1BFS 2026–programming and speakers, creator business development offerings, and other interactive opportunities–will be released in coming months as well.

Tickets to the summit are currently on Super Early Bird sale, with three-day general passes starting at $40.50 USD per person. Three-day creator tickets (with access to workshops, networking sessions, and the Creators Lounge) start at $121.50. And finally, three-day VIP tickets (access to more workshops, masterclasses, exclusive off-site experiences, concierge service, pre-delivered badges, and valet parking) are $1,215.

You can buy tickets here.

1 Billion Followers Summit is a Tubefilter partner.

Filed under: 1 Billion Followers Summit, Homepage Feature by Tubefilter Staff
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Earlier this year, Instagram launched Edits, an app that greatly expands the available toolset for creators who are looking to craft polished, cinematic content on Reels. In other words, Edits serves as Insta’s take on CapCut, the editing app that is closely aligned with TikTok.

From the jump, Instagram has been looking to attract professional creators to Edits. When the app was first announced, Instagram Head Adam Mosseri positioned it as something intended more “for creators than casual video makers.” To help cultivate that community of short-form pros, Instagram has launched a new web series that trains viewers to make the most out of Edits.

The series, hosted by creator Adrian Per, goes over topics like camera placement, teleprompters, and key frames. According to Social Media Today, five installments are now live, with 15 more slated to arrive before the end of the year.

 

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A post shared by Instagram’s @Creators (@creators)

Eight months after Edits was announced, public perception of the app has shifted. Its initial reveal felt like a (somewhat cynical) attempt to capitalize on CapCut outages associated with TikTok’s regulatory troubles in the U.S. What happened instead is that TikTok’s operating status became much less tenuous while the launch of Edits was pushed back.

Despite those delays, Edits still made a big splash when it officially debuted in April. Meta’s platforms have placed a bigger emphasis on original content in recent years, and Edits — which encourages short-form creators to originate their uploads as Reels — feels like a big part of that push.

As for the tutorial web series, while it’s just limited to Edits for now, it could be an interesting candidate for a broader focus. The videos are reminiscent of YouTube’s Creator Insider hub, which has become an important source of clear communication from YouTube higher-ups to creators. Instagram has had its own issues when it comes to creator communication, so maybe it should consider more tutorial team-ups moving forward.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Homepage Feature, Instagram, News by Sam Gutelle
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