James Hale

• Typical Gamer’s Fortnite studio has made $7 million so far. What’s next?
• Millions of creators make their significant others a big part of their content. So what happens when they break up?

  Nearly half of small businesses in the United States are family businesses--and, more often than not, founders' significant others play key roles in those companies. In the creator industry, it's no different: there are millions of content creators whose partners are involved in sharing the workload of their channels, either as onscreen co-stars or as offscreen camerapeople, producers, and managers. (Or, sometimes, as all of the above.)

  
• As X fumbles, Bluesky announces $15 million raise and plans for creator monetization

  Elon Musk's dumpster fire of a site has seen yet another mass exodus this month after introducing two much-hated changes: first, it's nuking the block feature by allowing users you've blocked to see your posts anyway, for some reason; and second, it changed its TOS so all material uploaded to X—videos, posts, photos, art, writing samples, anything—is now automatically licensed "for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type."

  
• Chatbot company Character.AI faces lawsuit over 14-year-old’s death

  Character.AI was founded in 2021 by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who left Google after it reportedly quashed their attempts to push developing a chatbot. They went on to turn Character.AI into a unicorn, raising $150 million at a $1 billion valuation—and Google was apparently interested in that, because this past August, it hired Shazeer and De Freitas back, plus brought on other members of the Character.AI team, to work in its AI unit Deepmind.

  
• YouTube is gamifying the creator-viewer connection
• Epic wants people to make more games. It’s creating–and owning–the marketplace.
• Netflix just closed its AAA game studio
• Music promoters are paying to put songs in TikTok videos. The FTC says creators might not have to disclose those deals.
• Top 5 Branded Videos of the Week: Copycats, kicks, and underground cities
• YouTube’s new program teaches teens how to recognize AI content
• Markiplier starred in a Prime Video exclusive. Why isn’t Amazon promoting it?
• Jake Paul is opening 25 sports bars