Jim Louderback: Twitter vs. Substack, More Meta Missteps and Amazing New AI Tools to Auto-Convert Long-Form to TikTok, Shorts and Reels

BY JIM LOUDERBACK

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This Week: Exciting new AI tools to auto-cut, clip and reformat your videos. A new way to value your back catalog and make more money. Meta lays off much of its creator partnership team leaving creators without support. Meanwhile, Twitter and Substack are at war, and TikTok was fined $16M for exposing children. Plus, genAI ads are in the works from Meta, and Li Jin shares why most NFT projects fail. It’s the second week of April and here’s what you need to know.

Pooping Shorts: Auto cutting, clipping and reposting video is about to be democratized. Tubebuddy just released its “Suggested Shorts” tool, which combs through YouTube videos, evaluates viewership data and then suggests which sections would make great shorts. That’s a good first step, but what we really want is a tool that gobbles up long-form and poops out short-form. Enter Bigroom.tv and Opus Clip. Still in beta, but you can try ‘em today. 2 year-old Munch is another contender here, and Jellysmack will soon join the party with a product that presumably expands the auto resizing technology they acquired from Kamua. DM Paul Robert Cary if you want early access. It’s just the beginning of how GenAI will help you pinch every last penny from your videos. Related: the curious tale of short form clips with no long form parents from Garbage Day.

Valuing Your Back Catalog: Speaking of Jellysmack, they – along with Spotter – are aggressively renting back catalogs from YouTubers to create monetization scale. But how do you know you’re getting a good deal? Matt Gielen from Little Monster shares his home-grown process to value a YouTube back catalog to help you value your videos fairly. Remember, once you have your expected revenue over time you need to apply a “Net Present Value” to come up with today’s value (which you can do in Excel or Google Sheets).

Meta Lays off Creator Partnership Staff: Looks like the road to efficiency means less support for creators. By thinning the ranks of the creator partnership team, Meta yet again shows how little it cares for the creators that make it successful. Let me remind you once again – the platforms are not in business to support creators. They are beholden only to their shareholders. Oh, but apparently there is a way for creators to get timely support. Pay for it. Creators screwed yet again.

Twitter Declares War! That’s right, Twitter and Substack are now at war. If you have a Substack newsletter, you can no longer use Twitter to promote it. Why the vitriol? Substack created a similar service to Twitter, called Substack Notes, and that made Musk madder than a wampus cat in a rainstorm. Matt Taibbi – who actually WROTE the Twitter files – was just one of the ostracized authors. Ryan Broderick was too. Maybe it was just a “bug”? Whatever it was, there’s one thing for sure. Creators got screwed again.

QUIBIS:

• PewDiePie’s brilliant infinite money loop hack on Twitch.
• Twitch tries new ad formats. Streamers aren’t happy (again).
• The $22 reason why you should forget shorts and do a podcast.
• France likely to enact harsh law that could jail creators for non-disclosure and sketchy endorsements – this is actually a good thing.
• YouTube adds a “podcast” tab to channels worldwide.
• Google blocks Pinduoduo android apps because of malware (the Chinese company’s U.S. app is called Temu).
• YouTube and UMG fling a copyright strike at AI-generated parody of Eminem rapping about cats (h/t Creator Economy Law).
• We’re not a social media platform, says new YouTube Head Neal Mohan at Axios’ summit.
• Meta plans to create GenAi ads at scale, which eventually means they’ll be customized just for you.
• Flickr tries to stamp out copyleft trolls – and why I’ll never use Pixsy again.
• Patreon competitor Fanfix makes inroads.
• TikTok was fined $16M by the UK for not doing enough to keep underage children from signing up, and then abusing their data – which is about what they spent for lobbying in the U.S. since 2019.
• Global creators stand to lose big if the U.S. bans TikTok.
• So much for the pullback – U.S. advertising grew 11% on TikTok in March (FT $)
• ByteDance revenue up 30%, EBITDA up 79% to 25B in 2022.
• Using the China playbook to pump up Lemon8.
• Melvillian overtones as Whalar launches Moby Ventures to invest in creators, and co-founder Neil Waller releases his own Creator Economy manifesto.
• Piper Sandler releases spring edition of its semi-annual “Taking Stock With Teens” – although absent a methodology consider it directional not projectable.
• Statista explores “sinophobia” by mapping out where TikTok is banned. Whoops, forgot to include China in that map.
• Creator Economy startups bloom, funding withers.
• Think piece from Ben Evans on predicting the future of emerging tech. Made me think of “Twisted” by Joni Mitchell.
• Stream Elements adds YouTube creators to its Twitch-focused sponsorship platform.
• From the source: How creators can thrive on LinkedIn.
• Li Jin points to lack of “psychological ownership” as a reason why most NFT projects fail – and how to solve for it.

GENIES:

• I totally want this clock! Think I can get it to run on my smart bunny?
• Snap adds new safeguards and guardrails to its “My AI” chatbot.
• Bloomberg develops a finance-specific GPT – who will build the first creator economy one?
• New AI tool (in beta) promises to translate, dub, subtitle and voiceover videos in 60 languages.

Tip of the Week:  I made a few fun “Animai” videos of my dogs. Designed for people, it’s a neat way to get a wacky video of yourself for a profile picture or something else.

Thanks so much for reading and see you around the internet. Send me a note with your feedback, or post in the comments! Feel free to share this with anyone you think might be interested, and if someone forwarded this to you, you can sign up and subscribe on LinkedIn for free here!

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And don’t forget to listen to The Creator Feed – the weekly podcast Renee Teeley and I produce – get it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Stitcher!