YouTube still wants its users to keep things brief, but it’s reimagining the tools that cut videos down to size. A feature called Clips, which gave viewers the power to pull short-form segments from their favorite videos, is being discontinued. In its place, creators will be able to generate clips via YouTube Studio.

Thanks to the popularity of short-form feeds, clipping has become an important tactic for creators big and small. As a result, numerous third-party services have emerged to streamline and monetize clipping. The brands buying into that industry range from OpusClip to MrBeast.

YouTube hasn’t ignored the rise of clipping, and it even built a content shelf to hold short-form segments that originated on long-form streams. At the same time, the expansion of the clipping industry affected YouTube’s plans. According to a statement from the platform, there are “a number of third-party tools with advanced clipping features” that will seamlessly replace the bygone Clips feature.

Instead, YouTube is pivoting toward Shorts. Creators can already repurpose their content to fit the Shorts format, and that process is getting an upgrade. Video Clips on Shorts will arrive “later this year,” and when it does, creators will be able to make existing Shorts even shorter.

“We are focused on launching more clipping tools for creators in 2026. Video Clips is available in Studio today, allowing you to republish clips from longer videos and archived live streams,” reads a YouTube support page. “Later this year, we will be rolling out Video Clips to Shorts, and launching auto-suggestions to help you identify your most ‘clippable’ moments.”

The reshuffling of the clipping interface is part of a broader shift that will make timestamp-based tools the easiest way for viewers to spread shareable moments. The “Share at Timestamp” option is coming to mobile devices, letting on-the-go users send a clip over to their friends. Timestamps are useful for long-form creators, and they even have some value in the monetization department, so YouTube has a lot of reasons to increase its investment in that part of its interface.

The main losers from this change are the fans who turned clipping into a profitable side hustle. YouTube’s response, as previously mentioned, is to direct those enterprising fans toward any number of third-party solutions. Clipping is still a big deal on YouTube, but the methods used to take that action are about to look quite different.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Homepage Feature, News, YouTube by Sam Gutelle
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A leading creator in the sports category is turning his channels and offline ventures into a full-fledged business. Jesse Riedel, the 27-year-old basketball aficionado known online as Jesser, has announced the formation of a holding company called JesserCo.

The arms of JesserCo will include Jesser Media, which will encompass the titular creator’s content business, and Bucketsquad, his rapidly growing apparel brand. Riedel himself will serve as the Founder and CEO of the overarching JesserCo company. Zach Miller, a Spotify and NBCUniversal vet who has worked with the Jesser brand since 2023, has been tapped as the holdco’s President.

To find the executive who will oversee Bucketsquad’s commercial operations, Jesser looked to the world of sneakers. That’s where he found Eric Wise (pictured above), the former GM of Global Basketball at Adidas. As the new President of Bucketsquad, Wise will take the reins of a brand that already includes its own shoe line as well as several other hoops-focused product lines.

The corporatization of the Jesser brand is well-timed. While counting more than 10 billion views across all platforms, Riedel has secured partnerships with NBA greats and even earned a pro tryout for himself. Now he’s taking over NBA games, and his viewership numbers keep going up. According to our most recent Global Sub Top 50 chart, Jesser added 700,000 new subscribers on his primary YouTube channel during the second week of April.

“What stood out to me was the strength of the brand, the connection it already has with its audience, and the opportunity ahead,” Wise said in a statement. “Bucketsquad sits at a meaningful intersection within sport culture, and the opportunity to lead it as part of JesserCo’s broader vision made this an especially compelling move. Excited to help build what comes next.”

Like many aspects of Jesser’s career, his expansion plan draws inspiration from MrBeast. YouTube’s biggest star has also reorganized his business to put Beast Industries at the center of his content, commercial, and financial ventures.

Jesser might not be quite as big as MrBeast, but he has put in the work that will make JesserCo a valuable business in the future. Creators are more involved in pro sports than ever before, and Jesser just solidified his place at the epicenter of that boom.

Filed under: Articles, Business, Featured, Homepage Feature, News by Sam Gutelle
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There’s just no winning with Netflix shareholders. After it reported 2025’s Q4 earnings in January, stock prices plummeted to a 52-week record low because Netflix projected thinner profit margins due to investment in new content–including an expected closure on its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.

But, as you know, that deal ended up falling through thanks to Paramount swooping in with a hostile bid. (Hollywood is not happy about this.)

So that must mean things were looking up when the streamer reported Q1 2026 earnings, right?

Wrong.

Despite beating Wall Street analysts’ revenue projections by nearly 50 cents a share, Netflix saw its stock drop 10% in after-hours trading.

Why?

Two potential reasons. First, capital expenditure. The Warner Bros. deal failing to close is sure to make some shareholders happy, but even though Netflix is saving a boatload of money there, it’s already committed to spending nearly $20 billion this year on other new programming, focusing on areas like live sports and video podcasts.

That $20 bil will push Netflix’s content costs up 10% from where they were in 2025, and means less profit for shareholders in the short-term, obviously with the hope that more content will draw more subscribers and result in more money long-term.

The second reason is Reed Hastings. The Netflix co-founder, former longtime CEO, and current chairman used the Q1 call as a chance to announce he’s leaving the company.

Hastings, who’s 65 and a board member at AI company Anthropic, said he’ll exit Netflix’s board this summer to “focus on new things.”

“My real contribution at Netflix wasn’t a single decision; it was a focus on member joy, building a culture that others could inherit and improve, and building a company that could be both beloved by members and wildly successful for generations to come,” he said in a letter to shareholders.

Hastings leaving after so many years could be a shake for some shareholders, but he did step down as CEO in 2023, and co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters have led Netflix since.

Speaking of Sarandos, this was the time for him to give investors an inside look at what happened with the Warner Bros. Discovery deal.

“We’ve learned so much about deal execution, about early integration,” he said during a post-earnings video call. “We’re really proud of the teams that did all that work. We were proud to win the bid. We are confident in our ability to get to the finish line with regulators for the approvals that we needed. But mostly, we really built our M&A muscle. And the most important benefit of this entire exercise, though, was that we tested our investment discipline. And when the cost of this deal grew beyond the net value to our business and to our shareholders, we were willing to put emotion, and ego aside, and walk away.”

Netflix also defended its increase in content spending by pointing to the World Baseball Classic, which drew 31.4 million viewers in Japan and became Netflix’s #1 most-viewed title in the country so far. Netflix said the Classic also prompted its biggest single day of subscription signups in Japan, and that Japan beat every other country for contribution to subscription growth in Q1.

The streamer doesn’t announce exact subscriber numbers anymore, but said it came in above analyst projections thanks to “slightly higher-than-planned subscription revenue.”

We might see an uptick in subscriber money for Q2 as well, since Netflix just hiked prices again. But that triggers the age-old question: Will the people who accept and pay for yet another price hike outweigh losses from the ones who cancel their subscriptions?

Filed under: Homepage Feature, Netflix by James Hale
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As one AI-powered video generator bites the dust, another is being integrated into one of the world’s biggest social video platforms. Seedance 2.0, a powerful engine developed by Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance, is now included in the generative AI toolkit known as TikTok Symphony.

The Symphony suite, which TikTok first launched during the 2024 edition of its World conference, is filled with AI tools marketers can use to enhance their branded content on the app. Since then, TikTok has slowly but surely added new products to Symphony, and the latest addition is a big one: the Seedance integration will streamline video production for brands that want to reach audiences on the For You Page.

For years, ByteDance has experimented with AI-powered products by bringing them to its most famous subsidiary. For the users who have welcomed those features, Seedance 2.0 is a compelling engine. It turns text prompts into “polished videos with perfectly synchronized audio,” and ByteDance has taken care to make Seedance’s transitions and camera pans less robotic than those produced by earlier AI models. The tech firm is also promising advertisers that Seedance has undergone the rigorous testing it needs to comply with brand safety standards.

Those technical enhancements make Seedance a compelling product, even as rivals like OpenAI‘s Sora have faltered. Some AI analysts have argued that Seedance even performs better than Google’s latest Veo model.

Initially, ByteDance moved slowly as it looked to integrate AI video generation into TikTok. The tech company seems to understand the widespread sense of skepticism surrounding the artificial intelligence industry, but TikTok’s brand partners may find that Seedance 2.0 is too much of a time saver to ignore. With its combination of Chinese technology and international ad standards, TikTok is ready to haul in more ad dollars from the brands that are eagerly embracing AI.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Homepage Feature, News, TikTok by Sam Gutelle
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April is the Vylit hour in the world of social media. That’s the name of a new platform co-founded by former OnlyFans CEO Amrapali “Ami” Gan and her business partner Kailey Madger.

True to Gan’s work history, Vylit will be filled with adult content and will require all of its users to be at least 18 years old. Whereas OnlyFans embraces full-frontal nudity, however, Vylit takes a more subdued approach. Topless posts and “body-positive expression” are the forms of risqué content that are permitted on Gan and Madger’s new platform. By keeping things softcore and tasteful, Vylit hopes to operate, per a press release, as “the HBO of social media.”

Compared to OnlyFans, Vylit may be more choosy about adult content, but it is aiming to be more diverse in areas like discovery, monetization, and audience engagement. One of the platform’s hallmarks is a centralized feed that will connect users to creators they might be interested in. That feed is powered by a product called the Vylit Vybe Matching Engine, which analyzes “shared interests and aesthetics” to match viewers with like-minded creators.

Once creators do manage to turn some heads, Vylit will deploy AI tools that streamline fan connections. AI Image Generation and Vylit AI Chat will make those interactions as efficient as possible, allowing creators to accumulate as many paying subscribers as possible.

Vylit’s approach will answer some of the most common criticisms directed at Gan’s former employer. OnlyFans can be a seven-digit revenue stream for its most famous community members, but smaller creators struggle with limited income and emotional issues. By investing in discovery and engagement, Vylit aims to make it easier for its minnows to swim upstream.

“I spent years watching creators build audiences on one platform and monetize on another. That fragmentation doesn’t work. Vylit brings both together,” Gan said in a statement. “Creators are running real businesses – building strategies, fostering communities, connecting with their audiences. Vylit gives them the freedom to express themselves and monetize on their own terms, while fans can discover and connect with people who share their interests.”

Vylit is powered by a $2.7 million funding round led by Windmill Chain Fund. With that capital in hand and a new platform now available, Vylit is ready to see how sophisticated an 18+ social media experience can be.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Homepage Feature, News, Pornography by Sam Gutelle
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Nas Daily is jumping on the AI bandwagon.

He’s raised a $27 million Series A for Nas.com, a platform he says will let “solopreneurs” turn a single product image into an ecommerce business, complete with a brand name and logo, digital storefront, and generated ads to spam out on social media.

As Nas Daily–aka Nuseir Yassin–put it in an announcement video, “Think of it like AI Shopify, but with marketing.”

The $27 million round was led by a $10 million contribution from Vinod Khosla, with participation from iAngels, 500 Global, V Ventures, Factorial Capital, and a number of other individuals. You may recognize Khosla’s name: he became OpenAI‘s first institutional investor back in 2019, and has also invested in DoorDash, Affirm, Stripe, and Square.

Yassin, meanwhile, became a full-time YouTuber in 2016, building his audience of 14 million subscribers with short, loud #inspomaxxing videos. He’s since moved away from content, telling Business Insider that “[m]y next 10-year bet is completely different, and it’s about entrepreneurship on the internet.”

Perhaps that’s not a surprise, considering his social media presence has faced significant headwinds in the last couple years thanks to comments Yassin–who is Israeli-Palestinian–continues to make about Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

In that same timeframe, Yassin has focused on opening a hustlegrind hotel in Dubai and on building Nas.com.

Yassin’s business–like every other buzzy company these days–is built entirely around AI. He told BI the goal is to help a “mom in Wisconsin” who “would never start marketing” because things like Meta Business Suite are (apparently) too hard for her to navigate. He also said Nas.com will help entrepreneurs find customers even if they don’t have large digital followings.

To launch ecom brands, “You needed to be good at coding, you needed to be good at marketing, creating content, and you needed to be good at creating your product,” Yassin said. “And how many people in the world are good at everything? Very few.”

Nas.com primarily monetizes by charging entrepreneurs a subscription fee that starts at $6/month. It also takes a 5% cut of whatever they spend on marketing through its platform. Yassin said that so far, 3.5 million people have purchased products from businesses listed on Nas.com, and annual recurring revenue grew from $1 to $8 million in 2025.

According to Nas.com’s site, there are ~350,000 businesses currently using its platform.

Khosla told BI he decided to back Yassin’s company because he wants to “invest in companies that could not have existed five years ago and will be inevitable five years from now.”

He added, “Coding, customer service, marketing, and design are no longer blockers. This means millions of new entrepreneurs will be born. What I see is massive wealth creation opportunities.”

Who had AI dropshipping comeback on their bingo card for 2026? Ten points to you.

Filed under: Homepage Feature by James Hale
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YouTube already lets its users put a hard stop on their watch time each day, and an update to that feature is giving viewers even more control over their feeds. Anyone who’s sick of YouTube Shorts can now set their time limit for the format to zero, effectively removing it from their YouTube experience altogether.

Users can put a cap on their Shorts time by navigating over to the time management tab in the YouTube app. That toggle first became available last year, but it now boasts a wider range than it did at launch. At the high end, users can cut off their Shorts viewership after two hours of activity. For the real haters, however, that cap can now be set at zero.

As is often the case with this class of features, YouTube’s Shorts time limits don’t actually bar viewers from watching short-form content. Instead, when the cap is reached, the app reminds you that it might be a good time for a break.

Therefore, it’s not exactly correct to claim that this feature removes Shorts from YouTube, but users who set their time limit to zero won’t see the Shorts shelf on the YouTube homepage, and they will receive the “time’s up” prompt when they watch the first Shorts clip in each browsing session (unless they choose to override previously set limits).

The YouTube users who have complained about the deluge of AI slop on Shorts will surely relish the power to push away the TikTok-style format. YouTube has tried to stay ahead of slop channels, but it undermines that effort by continuously rolling out AI-powered creation features on Shorts. If cleaning up Shorts proves to be easier said than done, letting users closely control their Shorts activity might be the next best thing.

Here’s one burning question related to the Shorts time limit update: How will this change affect YouTube’s short-form viewership? The platform’s decision to become more lenient with its view-counting methods on Shorts has allowed its TikTok competitor to produce some eye-popping numbers. Now that some users will inevitably limit (or outright eliminate) their Shorts time, will we see a significant short-form downturn?

No matter the answer to that question, YouTube’s hands are tied. A recent court decision found Google and Meta liable for the social media addiction that plagues teens who spend too much time on platforms like YouTube. In response, YouTube is making it easier to break that cycle — even if the solution may require setting the Shorts timer to zero.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Homepage Feature, News, YouTube by Sam Gutelle
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Are major social media platforms safe for teens? The answer to that question could have massive ramifications.

A recent court decision overrode previous precedents by holding social platforms liable for the mental and emotional harms that are informed by addictive feeds. Meanwhile, in regions like the European Union, the mental health of teenagers is being used to justify wide-ranging restrictions on social media usage.

Amid all that commotion, the Pew Research Center is asking a related question: What do the teens themselves think?

Pew’s latest report focuses on TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. With those platforms in mind, Pew asked 1,458 teens (and their parents) about their social media usage habits. The 13-to-17-year-olds were asked to explain the reasons why they use certain platforms, detail the issues they encounter on their feeds, and evaluate their own relationships with social apps.

The good news, as far as Big Tech firms are concerned, is that teenagers still enjoy the time they spend on social media. Teens cited entertainment value as the most common reason why they use their favorite apps. A whopping 96% of TikTok users said that they are drawn to the For You Page “because it’s entertaining.”

Pew’s young respondents also largely felt that they are not overindulging in their shared entertainment source. For TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, the majority of teenage users claimed that the time they spend on those platforms is “about right.” And a similar majority claimed that those platforms don’t affect their self-esteem one way or the other.

At the same time, teens were more likely to say that they spend too much time on those apps rather than too little, and when their scrolling does affect their self-esteem, the effect is usually negative. Social media is certainly keeping teens up late, with 37% of TikTok users claiming that the app reduces the amount of sleep they get.

The parents surveyed by Pew were more likely to claim that social media negatively impacts their kids. 41% of the adults in the room, for example, said that TikTok hurts their child’s sleep schedule. Only 29% argued that the app neither helps nor hurt their child’s sleep.

The opinions held by parents seem to be driving legal and regulatory threats aimed at Big Tech firms, but the teens themselves don’t necessarily believe that social apps are harming their mental health. In fact, they were more likely to claim that their mental health improved as a result of their social media activity. And as far as interpersonal connections go, 44% of teenage Snapchat users said that their peer-to-peer activity on the app has improved their friendships.

So for the embattled consumer-facing companies in Silicon Valley, there is in fact a silver lining to be found. Embracing those positives, however, may require a shift in focus. Teens love the traditional community-building aspect of social media, but companies like YouTube and TikTok are avoiding the “social media” label as it becomes a more maligned descriptor. If those companies really want to embrace young users’ happiest feelings, they should admit that they are social media platforms, and that’s what causes their users to stick around.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Homepage Feature, News, Pew Research Center by Sam Gutelle
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Live sports broadcasts have become a hot investment for streaming platforms. Leagues like the NBA and NFL have fractured their distribution deals across multiple platforms, and NBCUniversal‘s February 2026 numbers explain why those rights packages are so desirable.

In the latest edition of Nielsen‘s The Gauge report, NBCUniversal enjoyed its best performance ever. Thanks in large part to coverage of Super Bowl LX and the 2026 Winter Olympics, streaming service Peacock drew 3% of all streaming traffic on TV screens in the U.S. That was good for a 64% increase over the previous Gauge report.

When you add NBCUniversal’s other properties into the mix, the February stats look even more impressive. Versant is a Comcast spinoff launched at the start of 2026 that brings cable and digital properties under one umbrella. Versant and Peacock combined for a 13.1% TV viewership share in the latest Gauge report. That was a higher figure than longtime Gauge leader YouTube, which earned a 12.7% share in February.

Before we question YouTube’s future Gauge performance, it’s important to remind everyone that the Google-owned hub still led all streaming services in the February report. NBCU’s 13.1% figure requires the addition of Versant and its cable lineup.

Upcoming editions of The Gauge, however, will probably favor NBCU. Nielsen’s February update was supposed to include changes to the report’s methodology, but the measurement company’s partners in the streaming industry have protested that change, arguing that it will unfairly tilt the scales toward traditional broadcasters. Nielsen responded by delaying The Gauge and promising to delay the new methodology until the fall, but that shift is coming.

No matter how you slice, the key takeaway from the February edition of The Gauge centers around live sports. Olympic viewership has always been a reliable asset for NBCU (and, in some cases, YouTube). That trend accelerated in 2026, and NBC’s Super Bowl broadcast gave it a powerful one-two punch this winter.

As a result, the cost of sports rights packages are soaring, and many streamers are passing the costs on to their subscribers. Entities like the NAB may want live sports to remain on traditional TV channels, but even at a premium, these deals are too good to pass up — so streaming services are going to continue bidding for them.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Homepage Feature, News, Sports by Sam Gutelle
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It’s been more than a year since RedNote had its big coming-out party in the U.S. The Chinese app, which is known as Xiaohongshu in its home country, became one of the biggest beneficiaries when the proposed U.S. TikTok ban seemed like a foregone conclusion.

Ever since then, RedNote has tried to figure out how to translate its temporary user gains into more permanent momentum. The uptick it enjoyed before the formation of TikTok USDS Joint Venture may have been a flash-in-the-pan, but that brief episode showed RedNote its potential in Western regions.

Flash forward to 2026, and RedNote is advancing its U.S. expansion across multiple fronts. At least ten job listings on LinkedIn, all posted in the past three weeks, mention offices in New York and Palo Alto. From those home bases, RedNote will set up shop in the U.S.

The positions based out of New York include community-oriented jobs that would oversee RedNote’s fledgling presence in the West. In the Bay Area, RedNote will hone some of its technical aspects, including its recommendation algorithm.

RedNote’s biggest breakthrough, however, could come on the product side. Rest of World has reported on the introduction of RedShop, an international ecommerce marketplace that sounds quite similar to TikTok Shop. At events in China, RedNote is connecting with its base of 300 million monthly active users and sharing best practices for its sellers.

Meanwhile, across American college campuses like Northwestern University and the University of California, San Diego, RedNote is recruiting new users and encouraging creators to share content through its app. That strategy sounds a lot like the approach TikTok used to promote Shop in the U.S. With its bicontinental pitch, RedNote wants to bridge the gap between Asian and American social media communities.

If RedNote is going to borrow TikTok’s strategy in the West, it will also have to contend with the consequences. Thanks to its Chinese ownership, RedNote could be subjected to the same regulatory threats that hampered TikTok’s U.S. operations. Even without those roadblocks, the social media market might be too crowded for another foreign app to break through.

Perhaps RedNote’s rumored IPO will help it amass the war chest it needs to compete with TikTok and other rivals. Even if “Chinese Instagram” flops in the West, its current moves are worthy of attention. For all the apps known as “TikTok refugee” havens, RedNote is drafting a playbook that could fuel further gains.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Homepage Feature, News by Sam Gutelle
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Update, April 16: Welp, it’s been cancelled.

Original story: On April 13, Twitch streamer Northernlion announced plans to hold a six-day “ultimate streamer cruise” that will give fans a chance to spend six days sailing with him on Royal Caribbean‘s Jewel of the Seas. With cabin prices starting at $1,800 (up to $2,159 for a premium “squad up” room), the cruise will take participants on a round trip from Tampa to Cozumel and Costa Maya.

But is it actually real? Skeptical fans abound on Northernlion’s Reddit community. Some believe it’s a bad idea. Some believe it’s not happening at all.

“Insane idea,” one commented. “Probably would be really fun if not for the part where you’re trapped on the open ocean with hundreds of twitch chatters.”

Northernlion (who has 993K followers on Twitch and 1.4 million subs on YouTube) later re-confirmed the trip is real, and we’re inclined to believe him based on Kotaku‘s digging. Its reporter Lewis Parker investigated the situation and pointed out that Northernlion’s close friend Dan Gheesling, a Big Brother winner and runner-up on The Traitors, made a guest appearance during the announcement stream.

Gheesling also said his mother, who’s “owned a travel agency for 50 years,” is one of the cruise’s organizers. Gheesling will apparently have a guest spot on the ship, along with streamers Squeex and Lovelymomo. Together with Northernlion, they’ll interact with fans throughout the cruise at a meet-and-greet cocktail party, Q&A sessions, and a “play with the pros” gaming moment for two fans.

We get the skepticism. It’s one thing to go from being behind the screen to meeting fans at a convention or pop-up. It’s another to go from being behind the screen and suddenly hosting a six-day cruise.

But Northernlion is far from the first creator to do this. TrovaTrip, which arranges group journeys, raised $15 million in 2022 to begin seriously courting creators during the post-COVID travel boom.

Its offer to them: “Get paid to travel with your community!” Creators who work with TrovaTrip can curate entire–often international–jaunts with small groups of attendees. Trips usually run in the $2,000-4,000 range for attendees; hosts end up making around $6,000 on average, TrovaTrip says. (That’s on top of getting comped their own travel costs and a plus one’s.) It’s arranged more than 1,800 trips so far.

Forget regular traveling, though. Northernlion isn’t even the first creator to host a fan meetup cruise.

In 2023, Dude Perfect ran a three-day “Cruise Perfect” from Miami to Nassau on Norwegian Cruise Line’s Norwegian Pearl. And Snake Discovery, a Minnesota reptile zoo with a sizable YouTube presence, began running fan cruises in 2025. Its first sail was a seven-day Caribbean trip, and it’s currently planning a second that will bring fans on the Carnival Mardi Gras for a week in early November 2026.

These trips are very high-lift ways for creators to meet their fans–but they’re also memorable, and bring in big chunks of cash from viewers. Do we see this becoming more of a thing? Maybe not with the economy and job market in their current states. But with more and more creators wanting to connect with fans IRL, we think they’ll look to make events more and more unique–and a cruise is certainly one way to do it.

Filed under: Homepage Feature by James Hale
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It’s been years since we last encountered a piece of Justin Bieber drama worth chewing over, but the singer’s performance at Coachella has given us something to talk about. By singing along with his old YouTube videos, Bieber ignited a controversy — and may have involuntarily provided an intriguing commentary on the relationship between social media and live music.

During the middle of his set, Bieber pulled up YouTube on his computer and started playing videos from the early days of his channel, back when he was still known online as kidrauhl. As baby Biebs strummed away on the screen, the adult version of the pop star sang along to his old Usher and Chris Brown covers.

The stunt — which ended up including other Bieber videos and random YouTube favorites like the “double rainbow” guy — drew polarized reactions online. Critics felt that the YouTube detour fell short of the spectacle Bieber’s fans had come to see. Others questioned whether such a low-rent portion of the show really deserved to come with a rumored $10 million performance fee.

Others, however, understood that Bieber was turning the spotlight back on his fans. He may be the pop star, but his fans made him the big shot he is today, in part because they consumed his early YouTube videos en masse. Watching kidrauhl clips with his fans let him relive a rise that would have looked very different in an age before the internet.

“There was something beautiful, even thrilling, about watching Bieber trawl YouTube,” reads GQ‘s review of the set. Music critic Anthony Fantano also praised the stunt, dubbing it a “postmodern piece of performance art” that could only come from a YouTube legend. “He’s displaying to the audience the way that he as an artist, and he as a person, grew up on the internet,” Fantano said.

There’s another wrinkle to this: Live music and social media are becoming inextricable from one another. Once upon a time, live music thrived on its immediacy and the fleeting connection between the performer and the audience. But in an age when thousands of concertgoers upload clips in real time (and platforms explicitly encourage that behavior), that ephemerality is blunted.

Or, to put it another way, if a thorough selection of clips from Bieber’s Coachella set can be found on YouTube, what are the live attendees really paying for? Has live music become just another piece of content, indistinguishable from the rest of your feed? “Bieber not only singing along to younger videos of himself, but also laughing at viral clips of himself running into glass doors, falling off stages, or creating memes that would go on to inspire today’s cultural lexicon, was beyond fitting for an artist shaped by the internet as much as he has been,” reads a Slate review.

Maybe Bieber just needed a little break in the middle of his set. No matter the reason why he pulled up YouTube, the decision resonated with many. Many musicians design their live shows to be marketable on short-form platforms, but Bieber went one step further. He brought the short-form world directly to his fans.

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