November 28, 2023

Posted November 28, 2023

Jaron Lanier: We Need AI Regulation and Data Provenance (ASAP)

Adrian Pennington

data big data AI artificial intelligence

TL;DR

Tech guru and Microsoft scientist Jaron Lanier adds his voice to those calling for regulation of AI.
He says all data should have its provenance tracked to ensure integrity, reward where reward is due, and to curb deepfakes.
Lanier thinks more executives in Big Tech companies (like him) should speak more freely and be prepared to criticize in order to build a better business and a better society.

Tech guru Jaron Lanier has added his voice to those calling for regulation in AI, arguing that it is in the best interest of society — and that of Big Tech.

As part of that regulation, Lanier, who now works at Microsoft, also argues for all data used by AI models to have its origin and ownership declared, to counter the threat from misinformation and deepfakes.

“All of us, Microsoft, Open AI, everybody in AI of any scale is and saying, we do want to be regulated. [AI] is a place where regulation makes sense,” Lanier told Bloomberg’s AI IRL videocast. “We want to be regulated because everybody can see [that AI] could be like the troubles of social media, times a thousand. We want to be regulated. We don’t want to mess up society. We depend on society for our business. You know, markets are fast and creative. And you don’t get that without a stable layer created by regulation.”

Speaking to the idea of “data dignity,” Lanier explained that this is the notion that creators should be compensated, especially if their data is being used to train algorithms.

Provenance

“In order to do it, we have to calculate and present the provenance of which human sources were the most important to give an AI output. We don’t currently do that. We can though. We can do it efficiently and effectively,” Lanier says. “It’s just that we’re not yet. And it has to be a societal decision to shift to doing that.”

He admits to being “scared” of the potential for misinformation caused by unregulated AI use interfering with politics but feels the answer to deep fakes is provenance. “If you know where data came from, you no longer worry about deep fakes. The provenance system has to be robust.”

Lanier’s Role

Lanier’s bizarre title at Microsoft is “Prime Unifying Scientist,” something he admitted was a humorous attempt to encompass everything he does, like an octopus.

“I have come to resemble one, or so my students tell me, and I’m also very interested in their neurology. They have amazing nervous systems. So we thought it would be an appropriate title.”

However, this gives him something of a free-roaming role both inside and outside the company. He was at pains to point out that he was not speaking here in an official Microsoft capacity.

In fact, Lanier has become a fierce critic of the industry he helped build, but he wants to challenge it to do better from within.

“To be an optimist, you have to have the courage to be a fearsome critic. It’s the critic who believes things can be better. The critic is the true optimist, even if they don’t like to admit it. The critic is the one who says this can be better.”

Open Source Concerns

For example, he doesn’t think the open source model for AI or Web3 makes any sense. He poured scorn on the idea that open source would democratize and decentralize the internet and its reward system.

“I think the open source idea comes from a really good place and that people who believe in it, believe that it makes things more open and democratic, and honest and safe. The problem with it is this idea that opening things leads to decentralization is just mathematically false. Instead of decentralization, you end up with hyper-centralization and monopoly. And then that hub is incentivized to keep certain things very secret and proprietary, like its algorithms.”

Instead, he advocates for a market economy, in which people and businesses pay to use technology, like AI. He hints that doing so would fund data provenance and retain data integrity.

Lanier says he doesn’t agree with the founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman, on everything, including his notion of a universal cryptocurrency: “I think that some criminal organization will take that over, no matter how robust he tries to make it.”

The Benefits of Speaking Up

He says being able to criticize from within Big Tech is actually beneficial for Microsoft’s own business.

“I’ve tried to create a proof of that, where I can say things that are not official Microsoft. Look, I spend all day working on making Microsoft stuff better. And I really am proud that people want to buy our stuff and want to buy our stock. I like our customers. I like working with them. I like the idea of making something that somebody likes enough to pay you money for it. That to me is the market economy.”

Lanier wants to persuade colleagues at Meta and Google to speak their minds more, too.

“If the other tech companies had a little bit of [free] speech in it might actually be healthy for them. I think it would actually improve the business performance of companies like Google and Meta. You know, they’re notoriously closed off. They don’t have people who speak, and I think they suffer for that, [even if] you might not think so because they are they’re big successful companies. I really think they could do more.”

He says there are four or five other execs at Microsoft with public careers outside the company who speak their mind.

“I think it’s been a successful model. Do I agree with absolutely everything that happens in Microsoft? Of course not. I mean, listen, it’s as big as a country, you know.”

November 25, 2023

Posted November 25, 2023

How Influencer-Generated Content Has Become Core to Brand Strategies

creator economy influencer social media influencer creator creator economy

TL;DR

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, the creator economy has emerged as a powerful force, reshaping the way brands connect with consumers.
An overwhelming majority of brands are using creator-generated content for channels beyond social media, highlighting its versatility and reach, a new survey finds.
The terms “creator” and “influencer” tend to be used interchangeably, but marketers are applying different metrics to judge the performance of each.

What Comes Next for the Creator Economy? (Um, Apart from That $480 Billion)

social media influencer creator creator economy

TL;DR

A national poll identified 27 million people, or 14% of 16 to 54-year-olds, working as “influencers” in the US economy.
The creator economy could be a $480 billion industry by 2027 as it continues to grow a sizable business ecosystem around social media stars.
Yet traffic and wealth tends to be concentrated among a very few creators with less than 10% of full-timers earning a decent wage and the vast majority making less than $2,000 a year.
The latest innovation driving the creator economy forward is artificial intelligence.

While there is near universal agreement about the growing size and importance of the creator economy, estimates vary widely. For example: Citi estimates there are more than 120 million content creators generating $60 billion of revenue, a figure which it estimates is growing at about 10% per year.

Goldman Sachs research has a very different estimate, saying the total addressable market of the creator economy could roughly double in size over the next five years to $480 billion by 2027 from $250 billion today.

Meanwhile, it estimates there are presently 50 million global creators, growing at 10-20% per year — far less than Citi.

AI Comes To the Creator Economy

The latest innovation driving the creator economy forward is artificial intelligence.

This year, YouTube unveiled new AI tools and features aimed at simplifying content creation. According to Business Insider, the industry is betting on AI not to replace creators, but to increase productivity and bring more opportunities for people to make content.

Rising AI startups in the creator economy like Crate, an AI platform helping creators streamline the creative process, and Midjourney, an AI model that can generate images, are winning over investors.

WATCH MORE: The creator economy is changing, but can it thrive? (Financial Times)

November 26, 2023

Posted November 20, 2023

Gavin Guidry: How to Get Great Content From/With/By Creators

TL;DR

Gavin Guidry, creative director at Spotify, maintains there’s a “massive disconnect” between the mindset of a marketer and that of a creator and outlines what can be done to address this. Watch his full presentation above.
By putting creators in the driver’s seat, brands can create content that is unique and relevant and that cuts through to audiences.
The secret ingredient to all of this is community “because relevance comes through creating consistent impact.”

Brands can no longer just post content and hope that audiences on social media platforms will actually see it. They either need a massive spend, or they need to cross collaborate or pay to collaborate with a creator to actually get their content seen.

“Really what we’re seeing is a brand’s ability to impact audiences going down, while creators’ ability to impact audiences is steadily moving upwards,” says Gavin Guidry, creative director at Spotify. “That means the road to relevance must go through real people.”

In a video published on Vimeo titled “The Road to Relevant Video Content,” held as part of Vimeo’s Outside the Frame event, Guidry talks marketers through the ins and outs of a successful influencer collaboration. Guidry heads up Spotify’s podcasts, working with creators and brands to create content.

He claims there’s a “massive disconnect” between the mindset of a marketer and that of a creator.

From Gavin Guidry’s presentation “The Road to Relevant Video Content”
From Gavin Guidry’s presentation “The Road to Relevant Video Content”

What Creators Want to Make

A marketer cares about KPIs, ROI and brand perception, he says, but creators care about authenticity and connection to their community above all else. They don’t always know what marketers want, and marketers don’t always know what creators want.

“But when creators have a say in making content, you get content that’s authentic and connected to their community, and it can help you check your marketing boxes as well. Working with creators helps your brand actually build credibility.

“The good thing about working with creators from a fan perspective is that monetizing doesn’t feel like buying — it feels like supporting a creator that they love.”

Some 49% of consumers says they rely on influencer recommendations for their purchasing decisions.

“People trust people more than they do brands, and algorithms are responding to that. Hiring an influencer to create your video content is a winning strategy, but the collaboration can be fraught.”

From Gavin Gudry’s presentation “The Road to Relevant Video Content” — From Gavin Guidry’s presentation “The Road to Relevant Video Content”

Creating Impact

The secret to success is community “because relevance comes through creating consistent impact.”

Guidry insists, “It’s not about chasing cultural relevance; it’s about earning community relevance.”

He outlines three steps to create impact through community: get vulnerable; collaborate with influencers; use video.

Vulnerability is not a marketing metric, or a business tactic. It’s more of a soft skill, he explains. It’s about showing that your brand is human.

“When a brand doesn’t open themselves up, they don’t ask the community what they want, they just give them content without really asking. And that can end up exploiting a community. The goal is to ramp up your vulnerability by asking your audience, what they want.”

Guidry urges brands “to embrace risk” because getting vulnerable requires exposure to meaningful risks.

This will lead to better creator collaboration. It means going deeper than demographics to truly understand the creator’s audience.

“The term creator is really broad — they could be comedians, writers, hosts, musicians, even activists — but the thing that binds them all together is that they make content that nourishes audiences. So it’s important to know that creators have their own audience, their own style and their own motivation.”

For creators, their audience is “what they spend their blood, sweat and tears curating with their content. You don’t want to ask them to do anything that their audience will find unauthentic.”

Instead, seek to understand their audience and what you can offer them through this partnership.

Creator, Collaborator, Partner

Think about style — the way a creator talks or the way that they create for their audience. Don’t present a campaign that fits outside their style, but do seek their input on how their content comes to life through their unique lens.

Consider a creator’s motivation. Guidry says there’s a bit of a misconception with creators that it’s all about the money.

“That couldn’t be further from the truth. Creators are probably more excited than you are to work with big brands. It’s like a feather in their cap. They’re able to say, ‘Hey look audience, I’m now able to work with these brands.'”

But don’t just seek a transactional deal with creators, Guidry advises. “Seek to build a long term relationship that creators can talk about with their audiences over time. Offer a mutually beneficial partnership that results in creators raising their profile through your partnership.”

Of course, you want to make sure you find a creator with the right niche and an engaged audience. You want to make sure that creator is an authentic user of your brand or product and that they have a strong style and POV.

“You also want to make sure that they’re professional, and that they have craft that can elevate your brand.

“Lastly, use video. Over 200 million people consider themselves as creators, and this means that your audience is just a resource of creativity waiting to be unlocked. You can use video and creative partnerships to do just that. It’s the best way to engage audiences with CTAs and educate in relevant ways.

“You get video that’s raw and real and shows your brand is human. And you get to sit back and let your videos woo a built-in audience.”

He sums up: “So if you didn’t hear anything else I said today, when you prioritize community and build authentic creator relationships, you can create relevant video content.”

Visit our dedicated resource for the creator economy here.

November 12, 2023

Posted November 12, 2023

Evan Shapiro: “What’s Next” for Media in the User-Centric Era — Part 2

Watch media universe cartographer Evan Shapiro’s keynote address, “What’s Next” at the 2023 NAB Show New York.

TL;DR

Evan Shapiro’s keynote address at NAB Show New York continues to dissect the user-centric era of media, focusing on the digital ad revolution and the essential “Rules of Gravity” for the M&E industry to successfully navigate the new landscape.
The streaming boom has led to a saturated market, and Shapiro highlights the challenges of subscription churn and the need for innovative business models to retain viewer engagement and ad revenue.
Shapiro’s analysis of industry data reveals a seismic shift in ad revenue, with digital and CTV ad spending projected to reach nearly $58 billion in 2023, challenging traditional TV’s market dominance.
The advertising paradigm is changing, with a significant portion of ad spend concentrated among a few tech giants and a move towards performance-based digital marketing, emphasizing the importance of ROMI and ROAS in media buying.
Shapiro concludes with his “7 Rules of Gravity,” advocating for integration, a symbiotic relationship between subscriptions and advertising, and the strategic importance of daily engagement, commerce, and diversity in leadership to thrive in the user-centric era.

Streaming Ascendant: Growth and Challenges

The streaming sector is experiencing an unprecedented boom, reshaping the M&E landscape with its rapid growth and the challenges that accompany it. As streaming services proliferate, they face the dual challenge of saturating the market while striving to maintain and grow their subscriber bases.

The pandemic, Shapiro notes, served as a catalyst for an unprecedented surge in connected television (CTV) sales and subscriptions, leading to a scenario where “more people have more intelligent televisions than they’ve ever had in more rooms.” This proliferation of smart TVs has not only changed how consumers engage with content but has also raised the stakes for content providers to develop a comprehensive CTV strategy.

Contrary to the belief that younger audiences are averse to paying for content, Shapiro argues that they are discerning but willing to invest in premium experiences. The decision to pay hinges on content relevancy, the presence of exclusive originals, refresh rates, and the breadth of the content library. These factors are pivotal in attracting and retaining the younger demographic, who place a higher value on content quality and exclusivity than on cost.

Shapiro emphasizes the consumer’s newfound power in the user-centric era, with the ability to fluidly navigate between various content offerings, including ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) and subscription-based video on demand (ASVOD), as well as video game platforms. This shift in consumption patterns demands a cohesive content delivery approach from providers.

One of the most pressing issues for streaming services is subscription churn. Shapiro sheds light on the industry’s churn rate, which has seen a significant increase. He explains that every four months, a quarter of all premium ASVOD subscriptions are canceled, a trend that reflects the consumers’ growing propensity for “serial churning” — a cycle of subscribing, binge-watching, and canceling.

Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP

“If people are churning out on this massive a basis on a regular month-to-month continuum, keeping the ad dollars in ecosystem is going to be difficult in and of itself. It’s not just a subscription problem; it is also an advertising problem.”

The solution, says Shapiro, is to change how streaming companies charge users for content. “They need to figure out ways that are different than just cancel or not cancel,” he counsels. “It doesn’t have to be a binary choice. What if, I don’t know, Pluto and Paramount+ were the same app? And that when you were done with Paramount, you stop paying but you’re still living inside the Paramount ecosystem, and they can still remarket to you? And instead of having to re-onboard the whole time over again, you just click back on for the paid [content]. What if you only pay when you watch, so you always are subscribed, but you’re only paying based on usage?”

Disregarding the need to change their business models will lead to failure, Shapiro admonishes. “Even Netflix is going to have a hard time over the next five years making their business work if they can’t grow their ad business,” he says. “And if they fall into this trap, their ad business will never work.”

Adapt or Perish: The New Metrics of Media Advertising

The advertising landscape within the media industry is undergoing a pivotal transformation, with digital platforms and Connected TV (CTV) rapidly ascending as the new titans of ad revenue. Shapiro’s analysis of the latest industry data highlights a critical juncture for media entities: evolve swiftly with new advertising trends or face decline.

“If you’re in the ad business It’s going to be an interesting time,” he says, explaining how the US just exited an 11-month decline in advertising but ad sales, while rising, still haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Digital video and connected TV (CTV) platforms commanded an already impressive $41.1 billion in 2021, soaring to nearly $58 billion in 2023. This steep upward trend in digital ad revenue is reshaping the traditional advertising paradigm, Shapiro says. In 2021, traditional TV held a dominant 62% share of the advertising market, but has now contracted to just 51%. In contrast, the market share for digital video and CTV has ballooned from 38% in 2021 to an impressive 49%, signaling a near equalization with traditional TV’s market presence.

Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP

Ad spend is indeed on the rise, says Shapiro, pointing to a recent Google earnings call that reported a 12.5% increase in revenue for YouTube, “but it is not being distributed proportionally across the ecosystem the way it was pre-lockdown,” he cautions, “and it never will be again. It’s going to the big platforms. And it’s going to the places where the ad buyers know that their dollars work.”

Media buyers, he says, are moving out of more traditional upfront deals “into much more performance-based digital marketing” like CTV and digital. Emphasizing that “the money is going to go where the money works,” he points out that a staggering 60% of all ad spend in the United States is funneled to just three companies.

Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP

One crucial point, Shapiro adds, is that consumers see creator-led social video as a quality equivalent to professionally-produced content. “More importantly, for your business, advertisers now see it the same way,” he says, easily moving ad budgets back and forth between these two ecosystems on a regular basis based on pricing performance and need case.

“As a provider of ad impressions [you] need to be able to demonstrate that their money isn’t being wasted when they spend it with you,” Shapiro advises, noting that more than half of advertisers, brands and agencies surveyed said return on media investment is the number one metric for determining media buys.

The key to thriving in this new advertising economy, Shapiro says, is understanding and leveraging the metrics that matter. Return on media investment (ROMI) and return on ad spend (ROAS) are becoming the primary metrics for media buying, he asserts. “This number is going to rise [at] every upfront forever, it’s never going to turn back around.”

Shapiro’s “7 Rules of Gravity for the User-Centric Era”

Shapiro concludes his keynote with the “7 Rules of Gravity” for the user-centric era, guiding principles for media entities navigating the new landscape where consumers dictate the orbit.

Rule 1: Integration Over Isolation — Shapiro champions a unified media experience, where users control the convergence of video, audio, social, and games. “The user is the center of all of it,” he insists, advocating for a seamless integration of media services.

Rule 2: Subscription and Advertising Symbiosis — The second rule dismantles the notion that subscriptions and advertising are at odds. Shapiro argues for a complementary relationship where both models can coexist and bolster the other, providing a stable revenue mix.

Rule 3: Global Audience, Local Content — Shapiro highlights the importance of content that resonates locally while reaching globally, especially for the under-40 demographic that constitutes a majority worldwide.

Rule 4: Compete and Cooperate with Tech Giants — Media companies must navigate the delicate balance of both working with and competing against the tech behemoths. Shapiro advises learning from diversified companies like Amazon and Google, which offer bundled services for consumers and advertisers alike.

Rule 5: Daily Engagement is Must-Have — To be indispensable, Shapiro says, media must engage users daily. “Just because they use you today doesn’t mean you’re a must-have,” he cautions, pushing for consistent and compelling daily engagement.

Rule 6: Commerce Pumps the Heart of Media — Shapiro reminds us that commerce is the lifeblood of media, and integrating commerce into media strategies is not just an option but a necessity. “Commerce pumps the heart of media, it always has,” he states.

Rule 7: Representation at the Helm — Shapiro calls for diversity in media leadership, ensuring content reflects and resonates with a broad audience. “The media has too few people at the top from the communities it’s supposed to serve most,” he points out, stressing that a diverse array of voices in leadership positions is not just a moral imperative but a strategic one.

Shapiro’s parting message is one of urgency and action. He implores media companies to align with these principles swiftly, not only to survive but to lead in the user-centric era. The future favors those who place the user at the core of their strategy, who innovate in content, engagement, and commerce, and who act decisively. The era of user-centric media is not on the horizon — it’s here, and the time to adapt is now.

November 12, 2023

Posted November 12, 2023

Evan Shapiro: “What’s Next” for Media in the User-Centric Era — Part 1

Watch media universe cartographer Evan Shapiro’s keynote address, “What’s Next” at the 2023 NAB Show New York.

TL;DR

Media universe cartographer Evan Shapiro’s keynote address at NAB Show New York centered on the pivotal shift to a new user-centric era of media, unveiling new consumer research and urging industry adaptation.
Demonstrating the volatility of the media ecosystem, a Publishers Clearing House survey of 27,000 people in the US found that only 7% of users planned to stick with their current suite of subscriptions over the next year.
Shapiro discusses the “Hierarchy of Feeds” as a crucial adaptation strategy for media companies to meet the diverse and daily needs of consumers.
Highlighting the unexpected rise of local news, Shapiro underscores its significant role and potential for growth in the media landscape.
Shapiro spotlights the rapid growth of Free Ad-Supported Television (FAST), which is projected to reach a global market value of $20 billion by 2028.

Media universe cartographer Evan Shapiro commanded the Main Stage at NAB Show New York in October with a keynote address that urged industry professionals to embrace the inevitable: a new era where user choice dictates the flow of content and technology giants carve the path forward. With his customary wit, Shapiro unveiled fresh consumer research and a set of strategic imperatives designed to navigate the shifting currents of media consumption.

Going beyond analysis, Shapiro’s presentation is a call to action, depicting a future that’s unfolding in real time. From the “Hierarchy of Feeds” to the new “Rules of Gravity” in a media world centered around the consumer, he provides a practical guide for industry adaptation.

Explore key highlights in NAB Amplify’s two-part report, and gain full access to Shapiro’s insights by watching the keynote address in the video at the top of the page.

The User-Centric Era of Media Is Already Here

The Media & Entertainment landscape is undergoing a profound transformation with consumers now at the helm, while tech giants diversify to deliver a “Hierarchy of Feeds” including “must-haves.” Shapiro, in his keynote, delineates this transition with strategic imperatives for navigating these changes as he urges industry professionals to acknowledge and adapt to the present realities of media consumption.

“I think there’s this misperception that we’re coming to what’s next, that what’s next is around the corner… maybe a few years off, and that’s absolutely untrue,” he says at head of his talk. “What’s next is already here.”

Evan Shapiro’s map of the 2023 Global Media Ecosystem. Click here to view/download a full-size version. — Evan Shapiro’s map of the 2023 Global Media Ecosystem. **Click here to view/download a full-size version.**

Evan Shapiro’s map of the 2023 Global Media Ecosystem scaled by revenue and community size. Click here to view/download a full-size version. — Evan Shapiro’s map of the 2023 Global Media Ecosystem scaled by revenue and community size. **Click here to view/download a full-size version.**

The gravitational pull of what Shapiro calls “big tech Death Stars” is reshaping the media universe. His two most recent media maps, sized by market share and communities, illustrate this point vividly. Companies must now operate in a domain where the rules are written by the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google — entities that command a significant share of global mobile users and advertising spend. At the same time, these big tech companies have ceded enormous power to users, who program personalized media bundles on a daily basis using just their thumbs.

Addressing changing media consumption habits, Shapiro revealed a Publishers Clearing House survey of 27,000 people in the US, which found that only 7% of users planned to stick with their current suite of subscriptions. “Now, math is not my best topic,” he acknowledges. “But what I understand is that means that 97% of consumers are rethinking some or parts or all of their subscriptions that they have in their home on a month to month basis. Ready to switch out, ready to cancel.”

Shapiro emphasizes “Hierarchy of Feeds” as critical for adaptation to the user-centric era of media. “This is the set of itches [consumers are] looking to scratch when they wake up every morning and pick up that first piece of glass.” Media companies, he says, must ask themselves, “Do I touch all these needs? If not, there are plenty of companies who do, and if not, consumers are going to be spending time with other forms of media while they’re not paying attention to you.”

The New York Times serves as a prime example of a legacy media company that successfully transitioned its business model from a print-centric approach to becoming a multimedia conglomerate. They achieved this by diversifying into “lifestyle bundles” that cater to a variety of consumer “must-haves,” ranging from games and sports to news, entertainment, food, video and television.

Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP

Samsung has also adapted to cater to users. The company isn’t “just a manufacturer of televisions,” Shapiro notes, but also an operating system and channel business. “Google isn’t just a platform with video and audio, but also the maker of the fastest growing connected television operating system on the face of the earth. Amazon isn’t just Prime and free shipping and Twitch, but also the manufacturer of Fire,” he continues.

“You have to think about being everywhere your consumers are because you need to build your business around them, not make them fit into your business.”

Local News Isn’t Just Surviving, It’s Thriving

In an era where the digital transformation of media is often headlined by global platforms and streaming giants, Shapiro spotlights a surprising, yet pivotal player: local news. His analysis reveals a sector that’s not just surviving but thriving amid the media revolution, commanding a significant portion of screen time and audience attention.

As the number one use case for broadcast, “local is not just a segment, it’s a quarter of all TV time,” he points out. “Local urgent programming information that I can use in my daily life is going to be one of if not the most important part of the video economy in the United States and around the rest of the world for the next 10 years.”

Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP

The rise of local news isn’t just about numbers; it’s about relevance and the ability to meet the immediate needs of the community. Shapiro notes the fragmented but significant ways people access local content, from FAST news channels to station apps, and the urgent need among younger demographics for local information. “[For] two-thirds of consumers under the age of 45… local news is really important,” he says. “We all need our weather, our local school boards; these things matter more and more on a regular basis.”

Shapiro’s call to action for local media is clear: adapt and innovate. “If you work in local television, think about ‘what’s my website strategy? What’s my app strategy? What’s my FAST strategy, what’s my podcast strategy?’” he advises.

The shift in advertising dollars follows the audience, and local news is no exception. “The money is going to go where the money works,” he says, suggesting that local news can capitalize on this trend by understanding and leveraging the new metrics of media investment, such as cost per activation and video completion.

The Future of FAST

Free Ad-Supported Television (FAST) is staking its claim in the media landscape, with a growth trajectory that commands attention. Shapiro underscores its significance, noting, “FAST is the fastest-growing segment of the video economy.” This trend transcends borders, with the UK, Austria, Brazil, and Germany among the countries riding the FAST wave.

Platforms such as Samsung TV Plus, Roku, and Pluto TV have seen their monthly active users skyrocket, yet Shapiro urges industry professionals to view this data within the broader market perspective. He projects that by 2028 the FAST industry could be worth between $14 to $20 billion dollars worldwide. But while these are impressive numbers, they still pale in comparison to behemoths like YouTube, which is on track to earn a whopping $34 billion this year.

Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP
Cr: Evan Shapiro/ESHAP

The data reveals a volatile subscription landscape, with premium ASVODs gaining and losing subscribers at a comparable pace. Shapiro interprets this as a potential pivot point for revenue strategies. Even Netflix is branching into advertising, he says, signaling an industry-wide shift towards a hybrid revenue model that combines subscriptions with ads.

While FAST is a crucial piece of the puzzle, Shapiro says, it’s not the sole answer to a media company’s business model challenges. “Yes, FAST is great,” he says. “Yes, FAST is important. Yes, you should be looking at FAST as part of the continuum you’re making out there. But if you’re resting all of your future laurels on this one format, and thinking it’s going to save your business in and of itself and replace all the revenue you’re losing from all these other traditional platforms, not so much.”

Head on over to Evan Shapiro Reveals “What’s Next” for Media in the User-Centric Era — Part 2 for more highlights from Shapiro’s keynote address at NAB Show New York, including his “7 Rules of Gravity” with clear, actionable steps for building a sustainable media business and thriving in the new era.

November 6, 2023

Posted November 5, 2023

When It Comes to M&E Technology, Let’s Separate “Hot” and “Hype”

TL;DR

There’s a wave of pragmatism and caution underlying investment in technology across the industry as buyers reign in their equipment spend.
A report compiled by Caretta Research finds buyers increasingly selective about new developments, focusing instead on creating efficiencies within their technology stack.
Generative AI is identified as the most transformative technology by buyers, but most are still not yet clear on how they will use it.
Disappointingly, sustainability is not yet having a significant impact on buying decisions, the report finds, although it is becoming a consideration for certain parts of the supply chain.
Buyers still maintain the strategic importance of large global trade shows such as NAB Show and IBC for meeting with vendors.

Cr: Caretta Research/Bubble Agency. View a larger version of this graphic here.

The Economy of SaaS

Here, SaaS-based platforms are considered to be a “transformative trend” allowing buyers to have flexibility in their architecture, but also ongoing support and incremental improvements to service.

There is a concern, however, over the lack of support given by some vendors to their customers. “Like with traditional licensing models, a one-off sales approach is no longer sufficient. Buyers have an expectation that support will be continuous and that products will continue to roll out new features over time.”

There is also a perception that the industry has stopped innovating. Particularly with the shift towards SaaS, buyers are able to change suppliers more easily than ever before. Per the report, this means that there’s a lower tolerance for lack of innovation on the buyer side, and less certainty around buying cycles on the vendor side.

“This is a dangerous place for industry vendors to be,” judges Caretta.

Broadly speaking, difficult economic conditions have impacted both buyers and vendors leaving most prioritizing existing revenue and streamlining their operations to do more with less.

Per the survey, 75% of vendors and buyers are seeing the need to tighten belts and 30% have had a hiring freeze, which compounds the widespread feeling of being under-resourced.

Caretta’s conclusion: “Buyers are seeking efficiency when deploying new technology in their stacks and are taking a pragmatic approach to new services, only investing in those which deliver value to audiences.”

Generative AI Interest

Generative AI is identified as the most transformative technology by both the survey and buyer focus group, but most are still not yet clear on how they will use it.

There are some early use cases in news editing and metadata for example, however the true potential of generative AI is still under consideration.

“There is a healthy amount of skepticism towards GenAI, but most see it as an opportunity despite reservations,” Caretta concludes.

Disappointingly it seems that sustainability is not yet having a significant impact on buying decisions, the report finds, although it is becoming a consideration for parts of the supply chain where vendor products and services are similar in terms of feature and price.

Trade Show Value

Of particular interest to trade show organizations like IBC and NAB is that in-person meetings are still considered valuable, with the trade show itself among the very best places to do business.

“Buyers consider industry events as one of their most important sources of information, and vendors consider it their most important channel for promoting their products to buyers.”

Yet half of buyers and vendors in the survey group have scaled back on investment in events since the pandemic and only 5% of vendors have increased their investment.

“Manufacturers may be left with a conundrum of how to get in front of new customers if investment in events by buyers continues to decline. Fewer buyer attendees will make it harder to get sales people in front of prospective customers.”

October 29, 2023

Yes, It’s Time to Think/Talk About Technology in 2024

TL;DR

Gartner dives into 10 predictions for the future that represent opportunities or threats.
Digital charisma filters are going to make us all individually better, according to analysts.
By 2027 a quarter of Fortune 500 companies will actively recruit neurodiverse talent across conditions like autism, ADHD, dyslexia to improve business performance.
Generative AI will be a new machine-to human-interface and a new and increasingly important machine-to-machine interface.

“In 20 years, when we look back, we are going to think that this is the year that everything changed,” says Gartner analyst Leigh McMullen. “I don’t know if any of us feel like that future’s too futuristic anymore. I don’t think it feels like science fiction.”

Generative AI is going to make us all individually better, according to a new future trends report by Gartner. The report was unveiled by McMullen at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in a session entitled “Strategic Predictions for 2024 & Beyond: The Year Everything Changed,” that you can watch in full above.

“With generative AI we have the ability to let individuals profit from innovations and technology, free up time, become better at what they do, maybe even spend a little bit more time with their families,” McMullen said. “Generative AI has the ability to help us write better it has the ability to help us engage with our customers more intimately. It has the ability to make us more charismatic.”

The latter might seem odd but Gartner is actually predicting that by 2026 30% of workers will leverage digital “charisma filters” to achieve previously unattainable advances in their careers.

Which begs the question: What’s a charisma filter?

McMullen explains, “We’re talking about the ability to increase your presence in the spoken word, increase your presence in the written word, increase your presence in your organization, virtually.”

We’re already seeing technology from organizations like NVIDIA that will adjust your eyelines so you’re always looking right down the barrel of the camera and that will skinny you up or make you look a little bit prettier.

“Digital charisma filters are going to help us in our organizations achieve new sorts of personal heights that will help us achieve new levels of personal performance.”

It’s also going to become an indicator of national performance.

Gartner expects these 10 trends, which each fall into one or more categories, to factor into many business and technology decisions over the next 36 months. Cr: Gartner View a larger version here.

The analyst thinks that the productivity value of AI will be recognized as a primary indicator of national power. It’s not farfetched given that we already use indicators of productivity GDP and organizational productivity as a source of power by making it a national benchmark.

“By making it something that we report on as nations this will cause greater investment it will speed this transformation into a world where we all prosper.”

Next, Watch This:

October 30, 2023

Posted October 29, 2023

Peter Csathy: It’s Time to “Generate” Your AI Game Plan

AI machine learning artificial intelligence

TL;DR

AI is a mainstream topic in Hollywood, but it’s the Big Tech companies that will make the most money and have the most control and power.
Futurist Peter Csathy says the WGA has been smart to agree to a time limit of three years in its new pact with the studios. This will allow the guild to survey the changing landscape and determine if contracts need to be updated.
Csathy thinks there are “compelling opportunities” for all players in the Media & Entertainment industry to leverage the power of AI, provided you do your homework and “Get a game plan.”

When it comes to AI, for futurist Peter Csathy, you have to get real: “I understand the fear, but we can’t put our heads in the sand. We need to look at things stoically.”

Csathy is considered a leading expert in Media & Entertainment and in particular where M&E meets future tech. In a new presentation, that you can watch below, he shares his thoughts on the current state of play of generative AI in the overall creative economy, highlights “compelling opportunities” to leverage its power for all players in the entertainment industry, and assesses the sobering risks it poses to artists within the entertainment ecosystem.

“I’m certainly no engineer, but I understand [tech] pretty deeply and I’m not afraid of it,” he says. “But with AI and with all new technologies, we need to be stoic about it, understand not only the possibilities, but also the risks and the impacts on life as we know it today and on the industry that we love so much.”

AI may be a mainstream topic in Hollywood, he says, but it is the Big Tech companies that will make the most money and have most control and power.

“Let’s look at the realities of economics. Big Tech has multitrillion-dollar valuations. Whereas the biggest media company out there, a traditional media company, which is Disney, has $150 billion market valuation. Ultimately, Big Tech is the big winner here. And I would say that Big Tech is the big winner on the backs of creators, artists, musicians.”

Certainly, creators, artists and musicians can learn to leverage AI for their benefit, but ultimately, “the scale of it all really inures to the benefit of Big Tech.”

That said, not even the CEOs of Microsoft, Google or Amazon know precisely how the sausage is made. “They don’t know precisely how a work is created [by generative AI]. They know generally how it’s created but they don’t know precisely how the ultimate output is achieved, when it comes to the black box of generative AI and the inputs that we put into it. Even the smartest minds developing the technology don’t know exactly how it does what it does, or where it’s going to be going.”

While that spreads inevitable confusion, uncertainty and fear, Csathy cautions that Media & Entertainment companies historically tend to “put their heads in the sand.” Ignoring AI is not a sound business strategy.

Cr: Peter Csathy
Cr: Peter Csathy
Cr: Peter Csathy
Cr: Peter Csathy

He advises CEOs to think about what Pixar did to traditional animation. “Before Pixar, Disney artists would be hand-framed, drawing each picture. Now, there’s a beautiful art to that. But imagine the length of time it takes to realize the vision of the film, while Pixar came in with computer generated animation and really disrupted and transformed the industry. Now, for some, it was not welcome because it disrupted their job as traditional animators but, on the flip side, it created an entirely new industry with new jobs,” he explains.

“I don’t want to minimize the human pain of that,” he adds. “It’s akin to what happened with factories on automation.”

Csathy suggests that governments are not equipped to create guardrails or regulation on AI, due to a lack of understanding and “demographic imbalances” in Congress. However, the biggest guardrail for Media & Entertainment companies using generative AI is existing copyright legislation, which in the US prohibits AI-generated works from receiving protection.

“While it’s daunting, just because it creates entirely new creative words doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s cannibalistic. I certainly believe that humans love engaging with cool content and experiences. There may be some cannibalizing because we have limited time in a day, but nonetheless, if I liked this AI generated work, I still may like the song I was listening to that is not AI generated. They’re not mutually exclusive.”

He imagines likeness and voice licensing opportunities for actors like Tom Cruise (“So you can imagine a case where Tom Cruise Mission Impossible 20 is in production, and Tom Cruise is on a beach sipping his margaritas,” while, the script, the actors, etc., are auto-generated) but this doesn’t address the fears of the 99% of talent without Cruise’s star power.

Of course, SAG has yet to agree terms with the studios, with AI royalties being a sticking point. Csathy says the WGA has been smart to agree to a time limit of three years in its new pact with the studios. This will allow the guild to survey the changing landscape and determine if contracts need to be updated.

“You have to learn to understand the language of AI, all of you no matter what role you play in the ecosystem of creativity, M&E, or technology. So you get it yourself. So you can speak the vernacular. So you have credibility. So you can work with other people and collaborate with them. It’s very important and follow developments closely,” he concludes.

“You got to create your game plan. Like I said, you can’t fear AI. This is the reality. This is where we are. Stoicism is key.”

October 30, 2023

Posted October 17, 2023

Evan Shapiro: We “Need a Holistic CTV Strategy”

Join Evan Shapiro at NAB Show New York for the session “The Televisioning of FAST,” held Wednesday, October 25 at 11:45 a.m.

Shapiro dives into TV’s hottest topic, FAST, through a conversation with Justin Evans, Global Head of Analytics & Insights for Samsung Ads. Together they will delve into insights on what FAST needs to do to mature and grow into its full potential.

graphic courtesy of Evan Shapiro

FAST is now both incredibly popular and immensely disjointed, even “more fragmented than cable TV used to be,” writes Evan Shapiro.

He nods to an nScreenMedia reports that two-thirds of American viewers now report watching FAST channels, with the caveat that the average FAST channel garnered approximately two minutes of viewing time monthly (according to data from 2021). That’s perhaps less surprising when you consider that there are more than 1,000 FAST channels in the US alone.

And they continue to proliferate in numbers and in share of viewing time. Per Nielsen, Roku, Tubi and Pluto totaled 3.4% of all TV viewing in July and 3.3% of TV viewing in August.

graphic courtesy of Evan Shapiro

FAST revenue is also projected to explode; Omdia forecasts it reaching $11 billion by 2028 (again, in the US alone), a 208% increase over a five-year period. The researcher sees these US numbers as on the low end, with Mexico’s revenue growing by about 400% over the same period and topping off in Australia at 565%; Canada and the UK are expected to have increases more similar to the US, at 300% and 250%, respectively.

Shapiro cautions against misinterpreting the reason behind this growth (and looking at it without context). After all, it wasn’t long ago that SVOD was king and media watchers believed a hatred for ads was the raison d’être for Netflix.

“What consumers actually hated was the over-priced, inflexible cable bundle oligarchy, not linear TV, nor even the ads,” Shapiro writes. “Viewers (even younger audiences) want choice. They want a steady flow of stuff to watch. Their first (second, third, and fourth) priority is the relevancy and depth of the content they get, not the format, nor the ad load.”

graphic courtesy of Evan Shapiro

In terms of the numbers, remember that, Shapiro writes, “in Ampere Analysis’ projection for worldwide Media revenues, [FAST and AVOD’s] 2027 total comes to approximately 25% of ‘normal’ TV advertising, less than 40% of online display ads, and a tiny fraction of social and search advertising.”

While at first blush, this may seem counterintuitive, Shapiro points out that “FAST publishers must split all their revenues with the FAST platforms, and inversely, the platforms must split their ad sales with the channel providers.”

To get around the slicing and dicing, “many of the bigger FAST platforms are cutting back on voluminous channel offerings, and moving their marbles to channels they own and operate themselves” — AKA what Pluto pioneered.

In terms of content, that means “Gone are the days of launching dozens of channels full of repurposed YouTube videos every quarter. Today, the name of the game is quality over quality, and Distinction over ubiquity,” Shapiro writes.

He predicts that 2024 FAST will feature “professional, recurring, utility programming that emulates the best parts of traditional cable TV.”

That especially makes sense given consumers’ viewpoint:They “see FAST, AVOD, SVOD, vMVPDs, and YouTube not as separate things, but as one, big smorgasbord of video content on their CTVs that they control with the touch of a button or the swipe of a thumb.”

graphic courtesy of Evan Shapiro

In addition to programming changes, Shapiro thinks “FAST platforms must find more ways to make money than just ads. Hence Roku jumping into commerce. CTV tech allows for way, WAY more user-friendly commerce than we’re doing.”

Shapiro also advocates for “unified CTV strategy that treats their YouTube and FAST channels as two parallel lanes on the same TV highway, much as we used to see DirecTV and Comcast,” unless, of course, you’re getting paid for exclusivity rights. After all, YouTube is FAST’s biggest direct competitor.

To be adequately nimble, Shapiro says, “programmers need a holistic CTV strategy” because “consumers see media as a continuum, not a set of binary choices.”

October 10, 2023

Will AI Kill Our Creativity? It Could — If We Don’t Start to Value and Protect the Traits That Make Us Human

Vincent van Gogh’s painting ”Wheat Field with Poppies and Lark,” 1887, courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

There’s no doubt generative AI’s ability to rapidly produce new texts, images and audio is shaking up creative jobs.

In the long-running and now-resolved Writers Guild of America strike, a central sticking point was the guild’s demand that AI be used only as a research tool and not a replacement for its members. For many creative types, it seems harder to earn a living with AI around.

At the same time, however, AI tools are often seen as a springboard to next-level human creativity. Technologies such as Anthropic’s chatbot Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Dall-E 3 offer a seductive creative experience.

Will these tools help us survive and thrive as a creative species? Or are they the death knell of creativity as we know it?

What is Creativity?

In her book The Creative Mind, cognitive science expert Margaret Boden distinguishes between two types of human creativity.

Psychological or personal (p-type) creativity happens when an individual thinks something for the first time — even if others have thought it separately before. One example is a child realizing water can take any shape.

Essentially, p-type creativity is learning something useful and, in the process, synchronizing our thoughts with others.

Historical creativity (h-type), on the other hand, happens when an individual thinks something that has never been thought before. One example would be Archimedes’s “eureka” moment in the bath, which supposedly led to him discovering the law of buoyancy.

The more someone’s creativity subsequently affects other people’s thinking, the more momentous and enduring we consider their legacy.

This is why Wandjina rock art in the Kimberley, Homer’s Iliad, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house and Albert Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis papers are all considered exceptional works left behind by exceptional humans. They are important because they continue to shape our thinking.

Generative AI Doesn’t Belong in Either Category

AI obviously has the potential to promote both p-type and h-type creativity. It can lead us to insights about biology, history and mathematics, and help us create texts and images that may be useful or thought-provoking.

But there is one key difference between human creativity and AI-driven creativity: the latter doesn’t stem from the evolutionary clash of mind and world.

AI models don’t contain reality. They rely on the complex statistical abstraction of digital data. This limits their real-world creative significance and their capacity to produce “eureka” moments.

To differentiate AI-driven creativity from old-fashioned creativity, I have proposed a new term: generic, or g-type, creativity. It formalizes the fact that while AI models are capable of provoking new thought, they are limited by the underlying data they have been trained on.

The Big Risk: A Generic Spiral

We can expect an explosion in g-type creativity in our future. The danger here is that our increasing use of AI could make us think too much alike, leading to a decrease in cognitive diversity and an increase in cultural tightness.

In this scenario, societies would become more rigid in the norms they enforce, and less tolerant of deviations from the status quo. At a population level this would be a creativity killer.

The threat isn’t just AI-generated movies, TV, books and art. In the future, the homes we live in, the cars we drive (or won’t have to drive) and our shared public spaces will all be shaped by AI. We may see our thinking become homogenized under the pressure of increasingly similar environments and experiences.

This sameness further put us at risk of a generic spiral. AI models are trained on content we create. So the more we use AI for g-type creativity, the more generic our content will become — and since this will be used to further train AI, the more generic AI outputs will become.

While this might be useful for certain specialist tasks — such as consistently interpreting law — it’s worrying to contemplate the kind of Orwellian political economy a generic spiral might give rise to.

Can We Enjoy AI and Also Preserve Creativity?

Balancing and reconciling human creativity with AI isn’t as simple as going for regular walks in nature — although that will probably help.

Generative AI may well be a transformative technology to rival the printing press or steam engine. Such juggernauts are difficult to resist; we collectively get swept up in the change, uncertainty and alienation they foment.

Some of the best minds of our generation are already abandoning other pursuits to try their luck at building and using advanced AI models.

Our best chance to remain truly creative is to protect and privilege the human over the artificial. Intellectual property law is key. Any further moves towards legal personhood for AI — such as allowing AI a “fair use” right to train itself on copyrighted material, or have copyright applied to AI outputs — will erode our creative system and risk a generic spiral in human creativity.

Cameron Shackell, Sessional Academic and Visitor, School of Information Systems, Queensland University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Artificial Intelligence: Understanding the Potential for Media & Entertainment

creativity generative ai artificial intelligence

Interested in how artificial intelligence will impact technology, business, and creativity? (How can you not be?) Ride the wave into the future of Media & Entertainment, where curiosity meets innovation meets storytelling, with NAB Amplify’s dedicated resource exploring the transformative force of AI. Dive into explainers that demystify complex concepts, discover real-world applications in Hollywood, and glimpse the road ahead. Aimed at industry professionals working at all stages of the content lifecycle, these resources are your gateway to understanding how AI is reshaping the entertainment landscape. Join us, and let’s Amplify the conversation!

October 30, 2023

Posted October 10, 2023

Here’s Your Virtual Anchor for the Nightly News

TL;DR

Marc Scarpa, the founder and CEO of DeFiance Media, shares his company’s approach to creating custom virtual news anchor Raxana.
Scarpa will share the benefits of leveraging AI to accurately produce news stories in a fireside chat, “AI Virtual Humans in Broadcast News,” at NAB Show New York.
Reducing production times and costs, virtual news anchors allow for the delivery of around-the-clock video programming in up to 30 languages.
He says the technology is not suitable in every case and not yet advanced enough to move from pre-recorded packages into live — but that’s definitely on the horizon.

Virtual humans are an emerging phenomenon likely to be increasingly used by filmmakers on-screen and widespread in hospitality and retail scenarios but perhaps alarmingly beginning to creep into broadcast news and journalism.

The first such virtual humanoid news anchor in the US, Raxana, was unveiled earlier this year as a lead host of DeFiance Daily, a program on streaming channel DeFiance.tv.

Marc Scarpa, founder and CEO of parent company DeFiance Media, is headed to NAB Show New York to share his experiences in creating Raxana and why he is optimistic for the future of broadcast news created and presented using AI tools.

Scarpa will provide his insights in a fireside chat with StoryTech’s Lori H. Schwartz entitled “AI Virtual Humans in Broadcast News.” During the session, Scarpa “will share the benefits of leveraging AI, along with human expertise.” Also, learn how DeFiance Media built a bespoke virtual studio for around-the-clock broadcast news.

“We are not here to destroy journalism; we are here to empower it,” he tells NAB Amplify. “At the end of the day, news producers will still need a workflow that involves humans. Virtual humans are just a device to communicate what those broadcast journalist stories may be.”

Scarpa predicts that virtual humans will become pervasive across all sorts of storytelling genres. “You are seeing it in social media. You will see it in healthcare and education, in other areas of entertainment, and broadcast journalism will not be immune,” he says.

Part of his argument for AI is simple cost efficiency: Local news in the US, as in other parts of the world such as the UK, has been challenged for some time in terms of operating costs. While local news remains an FCC mandate, its continued existence is in contention because of changing business models.

Scarpa says he is a big believer in the value of local news broadcast as a staple of information and culture, but the economics have to change.

“Broadcasters have to find new ways to monetize local news. They’ve not veered from the same business model for the last half century. They have attempted to reduce costs in terms of basic infrastructure in studios and control rooms and now there’s shift in terms of talent from an on-camera presence to virtual humans.”

Marc Scarpa, founder & CEO of DeFiance Media and StoryTech’s Lori H. Schwartz. — Marc Scarpa, founder & CEO of DeFiance Media (left) and StoryTech’s Lori H. Schwartz (right)

This could be to the benefit of already stretched on-air talent, suggests Scarpa, since their likeness can be cloned into a digital representation of them.

“This would allow for the ability for known personalities to deliver more news packages without having to physically be there to shoot them and therefore generate more revenue for themselves. It would be a residual (royalty) module that runs on a blockchain.”

Scarpa is putting his theory into practice at DeFiance.tv, a television and digital network reporting on the alternative economy — meaning Web3, AI, VR, and digital asset developments.

Creating and Casting Raxana

During his fireside chat at NAB Show New York, Scarpa will share lessons learned in the course of creating Raxana. DeFiance originally worked with an out-of-the-box solution from Israeli developer Hour One but decided to customize one for their purpose.

“Hour One have fantastic technology, in particular for business-to-business applications, such as virtual humans for customer service, but it was not quite the storytelling device we needed for news. We realized that we needed a virtual human who is representative of our brand and who could communicate well with our audience.”

Instead, DeFiance used Hour One’s templates to create a bespoke virtual human based on an existing news anchor already employed by the network.

“What is most important is you can go and start with a stock character which is something that we did, but ultimately, we chose to create our own. That was a huge shift. Our engagement increased. The resonance with our brand really changed,” he said.

“There is old saying, ‘you have a face for radio,’ which means something intangible about your ability to connect with listeners,” Scarpa says. “I believe there is something similar about people who have an on-camera presence. I am not sure of the science behind it, but some people are able to communicate better than others in front of a camera. That art can be replicated, starting by recording motion capture of the person and delivering their virtual likeness on screen.

“We cast Raxana — based on a real person — to represent this Eurasian human, which studies predict that most humans will have this similar genetic mix in future. In essence, Raxana is the most intelligent journalist that can read a teleprompter in the world, but she is not going to be doing Barbara Walters interviews anytime soon.”

He continues, “How we use virtual humans is very rudimentary and basic at this stage. We are not using it to substitute for investigative journalism or a talk show format. The tech is not there yet, but it will [be]. I have seen AI virtual companion software that is outstanding.”

However, DeFinance is using AI across the news production workflow, not just in presentation.

“We use AI for fact checking and scripting and research and generation of video. We’re utilizing a variety of AI tech in our workflow to deliver factual accurate news packages,” Scarpa says.

Other AI Anchors

While the technology is cutting-edge, Scarpa is not the first to implement it.

In 2018, Chinese News agency Xinhua News unveiled an AI news anchor. A year later, it launched a female AI news anchor, “Xin Xiaomeng,” also developed by Chinese tech firm Sogu, whose voice and image were clones of a reporter named Qu Meng, a news anchor at Xinhua’s New Media Center.

In April this year, Kuwait News introduced “Fedha,” an AI news anchor on Twitter, as a test of its potential to offer new content.

The New Face of News?

Would an artificial news anchor weaken and destroy any faith we have left in broadcast news as a source of trusted information?

Scarpa replies by arguing that Walter Cronkie was the most trusted face of news in history — but that there was still an organization of broadcast journalists behind the camera.

“There are different types of broadcasters. Some are investigative, some report sports or the weather. All the rest of the hosts on our platform are humans who present traditional TV news shows, doing their own independent research and giving their opinions,” he says.

“Raxana’s function is very specific. She is not able to do much, but she is able to do enough for what we want her deliver and to able to package that news up at scale.

“For example, we can create and broadcast a news bulletin every two hours and take that package and auto-translate it into 30 languages. That’s an economy of scale that only AI can achieve. At the same time, we’re getting across information about the new economy out to as many people as possible. That is our focus and that is why Raxana works for us.”

However, live broadcasts are not yet possible. Scarpa says, “If I have a live camera covering the Senate hearings, then I would not feel comfortable having that fed into an AI for real-time commentary as human anchors and journalists do with authority today, but anything pre-taped can work in that manner.”

That said, Scarpa imagines weather presentation to evolve to virtual humans “fairly soon” with some forms of sports commentary to follow — although, again, not where there’s any live interaction between a virtual sports presenter and an athlete, human news anchor or pundit.

“We are not there yet with live. I’ve seen it working and seen you can do it, but it’s not ready for primetime.”

WHERE IT’S AT: NAB SHOW NEW YORK INSIGHT THEATER

Get in on key trends and powerful intel at NAB Show New York’s Insight Theater! This is where you can catch up and connect the dots. Between process and products. Between the ways we now create and consume content. This is an intimate space to glean coveted insight and interact with the people and products transforming the industry.

From a keynote session on What’s Next for M&E with Media’s official Unofficial Cartographer Evan Shapiro to a conversation presented by the American Cinema Editors with the edito from Only Murders in the Building, the Insight Theater sets the stage for the trends and technologies you need to know. Gain insights into Video for Social Impact, Data-Driven Trends in Content Creation, the Virtual Production Revolution, and more.

September 26, 2023

“Empire State of Mind” Celebrates Creativity at NAB Show New York

TL;DR

Discover the intersection of technology, visual art, and personal branding at “Empire State of Mind: A Photo Competition Review” at NAB Show New York, led by Bamboo founder and CEO Nick Urbom.
The winner of the “Empire State of Mind” photo competition will be unveiled during the session, receiving a cash prize of $4,000. Contestants can enter via the official contest website.
The session will reveal new storytelling techniques blending photos, videos and narratives, and provide insights into leveraging social media tools and content monetization strategies.
Urbom underscores the vital role of personal branding in today’s Media & Entertainment industry, describing the Bamboo platform as a unique space for creators to evolve their online presence and personal brands.

In a world where digital innovation shapes our daily lives, the fusion of technology and visual creativity has never been more apparent. As artists and creators harness the power of modern technology to craft compelling narratives, they also embrace a sense of personal branding, reflecting the values and complexities of our time.

Experience this exciting convergence at NAB Show New York, where Bamboo founder and CEO Nick Urbom will announce the winner and present a fascinating case study featuring the participants of the “Empire State of Mind” competition.

“Empire State of Mind presented by Bamboo” is seeking the next great photographer and their creative collaborators to shoot an exclusive creator merch drop. The twist is, the creator will be taking to the streets of NYC for an epic fan-meets-creator photoshoot. On Bamboo, creators will build a collaborative feed with their team to showcase their artistic style. They can include their chosen collaborators to present their creative, photographic approach to fashion on the streets of New York. The winner will get to lead the merch shoot for the renowned creator, Avori Henderson, and be tagged in the final post by Avori. The exciting journey will be documented and shared on the Bamboo platform and social media. The winner of the competition will receive a cash prize of $4,000 to help fund their creative journey.

The “Empire State of Mind: A Photo Competition Review” session at NAB Show New York will demonstrate new storytelling techniques, allowing attendees to discover innovative ways to blend visual mediums. The session will also cover social media tools, providing concrete practices for leveraging photos and videos for social media channels, as well as strategies for content monetization and winning methods for crowd-sourcing photo/video projects.

Urbom, the visionary behind Bamboo, has developed and produced a number of cutting-edge experiences for creators to advance their careers, including tech platforms, professional conferences and awards shows. He was the Co-Founder, CEO and Chairman of Infinity Festival Hollywood, and has co-founded three world-renowned trade organizations: the International 3D Society, the Advanced Imaging Society, and the VR Society.

He views the Bamboo platform as a space where creators can evolve with their presence online. “One of the major benefits of our platform is that you can create collaborative feeds on any topic,” he explains.

Bamboo founder & CEO Nick Urbom.

“So if you’re currently a drummer, and then you join a band, and then you later start a business in your career, like I did, you might have a feed on your personal music, and then you might also add a feed on the band. Then you might add a feed on what you’re doing with business, and you might add another feed on what you’re doing with the record industry now that you know some professionals in the music business — whatever it might be — so you can actually evolve over time as a personal brand.”

This evolution of personal branding, as Urbom describes it, is emblematic of a broader shift in the Creator Economy and the wider Media & Entertainment industry at large. In an era where individuality and authenticity are highly valued, the development of a personal brand has become a vital aspect of a creator’s journey. It’s not just about showcasing skills or talents; it’s about weaving a cohesive narrative that resonates with an audience, reflects one’s unique perspective, and adapts to the ever-changing landscape of creativity and innovation.

Bamboo’s unique approach to collaborative posting and monetization is a game-changer for creators. “What we noticed, what was missing in essence, was that there’s no way to collaborate on shared topics, and curate who can post into that space and who can see it,” Urbom recounts of the platform’s inception.

“Maybe you want to put a paywall in front of it, and maybe you want to put a product in there that you want to sell,” he continues. “And so we just started listening to all these ideas and testing features out with our platform. We got feedback from users on what they were looking to have available to them as tools, and that is what has now resulted in Bamboo, the social platform for collaboration and monetization. The “Empire State of Mind” competition, with its focus on creative collaboration and innovative storytelling techniques, is an opportunity to continue learning directly from creators about their evolving needs.”

Urbom will be sharing even more insights during NAB Show New York with “How To Leverage Collaborative Social Posting To Successfully Monetize Your Professional Life.” This meet-up session will explore various strategies for creators to monetize their content and leverage the latest social media platforms for collaborations and career-building.

Don’t miss this exciting opportunity to be part of the creative revolution and turbocharge your personal brand. Join Urbom and register today for NAB Show New York to discover new storytelling techniques and opportunities for monetization, and learn how to maximize your content and brand.

New at NAB Show New York: Photo+Video Lab

So what is the Photo+Video Lab? It’s a space where the worlds of photo and video converge, where image-based, still photography fuses with motion capture, where you find the inspiration to try something new.

It’s a space to connect — not only with the end-to-end workflow for your craft, but with your community. Content creators. Photographers. Videographers. And so many others… through photo walks, meetups, Q&A sessions, demos, exhibits, workshops and more. View the full schedule of events here.

Dive into a full-on immersion into the photo and video world with an integrated workflow experience that will allow you to sample the latest tech and gear side-by-side from iconic brands and innovative newcomers.

September 17, 2023

Strange New Worlds: Evan Shapiro Expands His Search for the Media Universe

From “Star Trek,” courtesy of Paramount Television

TL;DR

Evan Shapiro has debuted a new kind of media map: the Global Media Ecosystem, which illustrates where both audiences and economies are gravitating, rather than only focusing on the market cap of individual companies.
Spoiler alert: mobile video and gaming have really come into their own, and media companies need to start integrating this type of content into their portfolio to most effectively leverage their IP.
Shapiro offers seven suggestions for thriving in the year 2023. All require an understanding of the current landscape and changing tastes of younger demographics and emerging markets. Still, his way forward sounds remarkably common sense.

Evan Shapiro's map of the 2023 Global Media Ecosystem is scaled according to the size of communities. — Evan Shapiro’s map of the 2023 Global Media Ecosystem is scaled according to the size of communities. **Click here to view/download a large version.**

Evan Shapiro’s latest map of the media universe has a new look. (And if you think that the resemblance to old-school video games is coincidental, you’re fooling yourself.)

Shapiro’s map of the 2023 Global Media Ecosystem is scaled according to the size of communities. This newly retooled version reflects a different way of thinking.

Per Shapiro, this version “refocuses our view around the audiences and economics at the foundation of our Global Media Ecosystem.”

In Amsterdam, Shapiro told an IBC audience, “This map is meant to be specifically a graphical representation of how most media consumers across the planet look at our media ecosystem right now.”

What’s New and Notable?

What can we learn from Shapiro’s latest map (crafted from Ampere Analytics data)?

Vive le mobile révolution! About half of all mobile usage (cellular data, not time) consists of video, and half of all video content watched on mobile is YouTube, reports Michael Burns for IBC365.

Additionally, the gaming sector is not just fun and games. Brands are now raking in $94 billion worth of in-game revenue annually. Burns notes that this is more than AVOD and FAST advertising represents. (Also, this is probably why the new map looks the way it does. Only Evan can confirm or deny.)

So who’s playing their cards right? Shapiro says Sony, the New York Times, and Amazon are all making smart bets and diversifying their portfolio in ways that anticipated where the market’s headed.

He told Burns, “Sony plays across that ecosystem incredibly well,”
he said. “They’re in gaming. They’re in TV. They have a huge audio business. They have one of the best niche subscriber products in the world in Crunchyroll and Funimation. They’re in hardware that touches all of these things. It’s a multifaceted company.”

Some may be surprised he counts NYT as a winner, but Shapiro points out that this legacy media company “has a strategy for this entire map. It does gaming, social, audio, news, cooking and sports and all these different things. It’s a model for transformation for
traditional media in this new age.” Shapiro thinks its “digital content bundle” even comes close to rivaling Amazon!

Speaking of which. He notes, Amazon’s Prime Video will host “a live shopping event at the halftime of the Jets-Dolphins game on Black Friday in the United States.”

He told IBC attendees, “Both (the New York Times and Amazon] are right now multifaceted, personalized lifestyle bundles that power a constant state of evolution around the needs of their customers. Two very different companies; one that inspired the new era that we’ve already begun, and the other that had to reinvent itself to compete ably inside this era.”

On the big tech side, Shapiro shouts out Apple and Google: “

Apple helped drive us to this moment and to this user centric era. And they are beyond well armed to battle for their place atop it with an arsenal of media services that goes along with their best in breed tech. Google starts this new era in pole positions across every segment of the media economy, video, social, audio and gaming. These and other tech giants are readying themselves to use their enormous resources to battle for control of the hearts and the minds and the money represented on this map. But they cannot and they will not run this ecosystem by themselves.”

Oh, and about YouTube? Shapiro says Google’s video platform relies on traditional media to survive. He tells Burns, “Without the Public Service Broadcasters and the local content creators, YouTube would be a wasteland, no one would ever go there. Yes, it has to have MrBeast, but it also has to have local creators and news. Increasingly that’s where people are going. YouTube is the biggest channel on television, in the UK, in Italy, and Germany. Why? Because you can get stuff from all around the world but also you can get news from around the corner.”

How can companies wrap their head around all this change? Shapiro suggests, “The fastest way to get there is [diversifying] age and class and race and gender. But you can find old white dudes like Mark Thompson (ex-BBC DG, ex-New York Times CEO, and now CEO of CNN) who think differently, you just have to know where to look for them.”

Your Favorite Map Is Here ⬇️

If you’re attached to the old look (and focus), never fear: Shapiro also made the 55th (!) update to his original media map (below).

Click here to view/download a large version.

Just keep in mind that Shapiro would likely chide you, sharply, if you don’t take a closer look at the Global Media Ecosystem (September 2023) graphic, too.

That’s because he knows that people tend to view these maps as predictive, but they’re actually made in real time. As he told his Substack subscribers, “This map is not a warning. It’s a weather report.”

“Everything that’s happened in the media ecosystem [since 2020] has only proved the thesis that much more,” Shapiro told attendees at his IBC2023 keynote.

Surviving the Media Apocalypse

Shapiro insists that he’s an optimist (repeatedly) and even offers a survival kit for media companies that want to thrive in this era of change.

There are seven ingredients Shapiro thinks we need to succeed in 2023 and beyond:

Understand that IP is the hub of the wheel, which means that video, audio, social, and gaming are all spokes and not separate categories any more.
You don’t have to choose between subscription-based or ad-based models anymore.
Look outside of North America if you want to grow your footprint. Africa in particular has a lot of potential for investment.
You need Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley needs your content.
Create and maintain relationships with your audience, and don’t let another company be the gatekeeper.
Consumers are buying content, which makes it a product. Invest in something worth paying for.
New ideas require new kinds of people, and you need to understand the users you hope to gain and retain. That means sourcing leaders who don’t think and look and act like you.

Watch This Next:

Evan Shapiro to Predict “What’s Next” for M&E at NAB Show New York Keynote Address

Media cartographer and industry observer Evan Shapiro is set to deliver the keynote address at NAB Show New York. Known as media’s official Unofficial Cartographer for his visual charting of the industry’s continual evolution, Shapiro’s speech will center on “What’s Next” for Media & Entertainment. He’ll use this keynote to lay out what to expect in the next era of media, whether we’re ready for it or not.

Attendees can look forward to new research and insights, as well as Shapiro’s honest assessment of how the M&E industry can grapple with its next era. Preceded by remarks from NAB President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt, this keynote session is scheduled for Wednesday, October 25, at 10:30 a.m. on the Insight Theater stage.

September 5, 2023

AI Scores in the Top Percentile of Creative Thinking (No, Seriously)

BY ERIK GUZIK, UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA

art AI machine learning artificial intelligence — From “The Birth of Venus” by Sandro Botticelli, 1483 – 1485

Of all the forms of human intellect that one might expect artificial intelligence to emulate, few people would likely place creativity at the top of their list. Creativity is wonderfully mysterious — and frustratingly fleeting. It defines us as human beings — and seemingly defies the cold logic that lies behind the silicon curtain of machines.

Yet, the use of AI for creative endeavors is now growing.

New AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney are increasingly part of creative production, and some have started to win awards for their creative output. The growing impact is both social and economic — as just one example, the potential of AI to generate new, creative content is a defining flashpoint behind the Hollywood writers strike.

And if our recent study into the striking originality of AI is any indication, the emergence of AI-based creativity — along with examples of both its promise and peril — is likely just beginning.

A Blend of Novelty and Utiliy

When people are at their most creative, they’re responding to a need, goal or problem by generating something new — a product or solution that didn’t previously exist.

In this sense, creativity is an act of combining existing resources — ideas, materials, knowledge — in a novel way that’s useful or gratifying. Quite often, the result of creative thinking is also surprising, leading to something that the creator did not — and perhaps could not — foresee.

It might involve an invention, an unexpected punchline to a joke or a groundbreaking theory in physics. It might be a unique arrangement of notes, tempo, sounds and lyrics that results in a new song.

So, as a researcher of creative thinking, I immediately noticed something interesting about the content generated by the latest versions of AI, including GPT-4.

When prompted with tasks requiring creative thinking, the novelty and usefulness of GPT-4’s output reminded me of the creative types of ideas submitted by students and colleagues I had worked with as a teacher and entrepreneur.

The ideas were different and surprising, yet relevant and useful. And, when required, quite imaginative.

Consider the following prompt offered to GPT-4: “Suppose all children became giants for one day out of the week. What would happen?” The ideas generated by GPT-4 touched on culture, economics, psychology, politics, interpersonal communication, transportation, recreation and much more — many surprising and unique in terms of the novel connections generated.

This combination of novelty and utility is difficult to pull off, as most scientists, artists, writers, musicians, poets, chefs, founders, engineers and academics can attest.

Yet AI seemed to be doing it — and doing it well.

Putting AI to the Test

With researchers in creativity and entrepreneurship Christian Byrge and Christian Gilde, I decided to put AI’s creative abilities to the test by having it take the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, or TTCT.

The TTCT prompts the test-taker to engage in the kinds of creativity required for real-life tasks: asking questions, how to be more resourceful or efficient, guessing cause and effect or improving a product. It might ask a test-taker to suggest ways to improve a children’s toy or imagine the consequences of a hypothetical situation, as the above example demonstrates.

The tests are not designed to measure historical creativity, which is what some researchers use to describe the transformative brilliance of figures like Mozart and Einstein. Rather, it assesses the general creative abilities of individuals, often referred to as psychological or personal creativity.

In addition to running the TTCT through GPT-4 eight times, we also administered the test to 24 of our undergraduate students.

All of the results were evaluated by trained reviewers at Scholastic Testing Service, a private testing company that provides scoring for the TTCT. They didn’t know in advance that some of the tests they’d be scoring had been completed by AI.

Since Scholastic Testing Service is a private company, it does not share its prompts with the public. This ensured that GPT-4 would not have been able to scrape the internet for past prompts and their responses. In addition, the company has a database of thousands of tests completed by college students and adults, providing a large, additional control group with which to compare AI scores.

Our results?

GPT-4 scored in the top 1% of test-takers for the originality of its ideas. From our research, we believe this marks one of the first examples of AI meeting or exceeding the human ability for original thinking.

In short, we believe that AI models like GPT-4 are capable of producing ideas that people see as unexpected, novel and unique. Other researchers are arriving at similar conclusions in their research of AI and creativity.

Yes, Creativity Can Be Evaluated

The emerging creative ability of AI is surprising for a number of reasons.

For one, many outside of the research community continue to believe that creativity cannot be defined, let alone scored. Yet products of human novelty and ingenuity have been prized — and bought and sold — for thousands of years. And creative work has been defined and scored in fields like psychology since at least the 1950s.

The person, product, process, press model of creativity, which researcher Mel Rhodes introduced in 1961, was an attempt to categorize the myriad ways in which creativity had been understood and evaluated until that point. Since then, the understanding of creativity has only grown.

Still others are surprised that the term “creativity” might be applied to nonhuman entities like computers. On this point, we tend to agree with cognitive scientist Margaret Boden, who has argued that the question of whether the term creativity should be applied to AI is a philosophical rather than scientific question.

AI’s Founders Foresaw its Creative Abilities

It’s worth noting that we studied only the output of AI in our research. We didn’t study its creative process, which is likely very different from human thinking processes, or the environment in which the ideas were generated. And had we defined creativity as requiring a human person, then we would have had to conclude, by definition, that AI cannot possibly be creative.

But regardless of the debate over definitions of creativity and the creative process, the products generated by the latest versions of AI are novel and useful. We believe this satisfies the definition of creativity that is now dominant in the fields of psychology and science.

Furthermore, the creative abilities of AI’s current iterations are not entirely unexpected.

In their now famous proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, the founders of AI highlighted their desire to simulate “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence” — including creativity.

In this same proposal, computer scientist Nathaniel Rochester revealed his motivation: “How can I make a machine which will exhibit originality in its solution of problems?”

Apparently, AI’s founders believed that creativity, including the originality of ideas, was among the specific forms of human intelligence that machines could emulate.

To me, the surprising creativity scores of GPT-4 and other AI models highlight a more pressing concern: Within U.S. schools, very few official programs and curricula have been implemented to date that specifically target human creativity and cultivate its development.

In this sense, the creative abilities now realized by AI may provide a “Sputnik moment” for educators and others interested in furthering human creative abilities, including those who see creativity as an essential condition of individual, social and economic growth.

Erik Guzik, Assistant Clinical Professor of Management, University of Montana

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

AI Creative Summit: Your New Workflows, Our New Event

Ride the wave and learn how to harness the power of AI for your creative processes! NAB Show and Future Media Conferences are teaming up to present the AI Creative Summit. This series of training events, sponsored by Dell Technologies and made possible by NVIDIA, is set to teach and empower the creative industry by demonstrating how artificial intelligence tools can amplify and streamline creative workflows.

The inaugural event, happening virtually September 14-15, is an online conference that offers an exclusive opportunity to engage with some of the industry’s leading trainers and experts from the comfort of your home or office for just $25. This will be followed by an in-person, two-day immersive experience that will take place in conjunction with NAB Show New York, running October 24-25 at the Javits Center.

August 7, 2023

Posted August 7, 2023

Accelerating Innovation with Advertising Intelligence

Click the image to get the AWS ebook.

Learn how organizations including Publicis, FreeWheel, TripleLift and Amazon Ads are using AWS cloud-based tools to accelerate time to market for predictive analytics workloads and analyze media for contextual signals to improve personalization.

Get the AWS ebook at this link: Accelerating Innovation with Advertising Intelligence.

July 10, 2023

So What Does Everyone Else Think About AI? (It’s the Beginning or the End or Both)

TL;DR

To find out what people really think about AI and what they want from it, The Verge teamed up with Vox Media’s Insights and Research team to poll more than 2,000 US adults.
The results tell the story of an emerging, uncertain, and exciting technology — where many have yet to use it, many are fearful of its potential, and many still have great hopes for what it could someday do for them.
One finding is particularly clear: AI is expanding what people can create and there is ambivalence about the ethics of copyright theft.

Learn more about AI in our sessions at NAB Show New York, held October 24-26.

Evan Shapiro: What’s Changing (and Changed) in Media Consumption

TL;DR

Media cartographer Evan Shapiro delivered the closing keynote address at Streaming Media East, providing a close look at the latest consumer data in the global streaming marketplace.
It’s critical for stakeholders to understand shifts in demographics in the world’s population, Shapiro says, in order to identify untapped markets.
Younger generations are more likely to pay for services they want, he says, because they’ve been trained to do that since birth.
Shapiro predicts that the current advertising recession in the US will end in July, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the outlook is rosy.

Evan Shapiro loves to talk. And that’s a good thing, because his insights into the Media & Entertainment industry are invaluable, plotting the effects of disruption as the streaming universe changes its gravitational pull and reforms itself around new business models. The media cartographer and ESHAP CEO — known for his detailed maps and accompanying analysis charting the media universe — provided a close look at the latest consumer data at the Streaming Media East conference. You can watch the full session, “The Mind of the Modern Media Consumer,” in the video below.

(Shapiro has been talking up a storm lately, making the rounds on multiple continents with his latest presentation, “Yes, And: How To Survive The Media Apocalypse.”)

Shapiro spoke about shifts in consumer demographics, how streaming is changing the television landscape, and survival tactics for an increasingly volatile ecosystem. He also predicted that the current advertising recession will end in July, with new data to back up that claim, and identified the biggest areas for growth.

Click here or on the image above to view a larger version of the 2023 media map. Cr: Evan Shapiro

“Constant disruption is now the operating system of our ecosystem,” Shapiro said in his opening remarks, noting that his job is to help stakeholders survive what he calls “the current media apocalypse.”

In a global marketplace, Shapiro said, it’s important to understand the demographic changes in the world’s population. “One of the things that you have to know is that the population on the planet Earth is completely different now from what it is when most of us were growing up,” he said, pointing out that 63% of the world’s population is now under the age of 40. “So If you’re over the age of 40, you’re in a minority for the first time in your life.”

Watch the full session, “The Mind of the Modern Media Consumer,” above.

But what’s even more critical to understand, says Shapiro, is how the demographics break down across regions: 33% of the world’s population is under 20, but that number changes drastically by region. In North America it’s 25%, and in Europe it’s 21%, but in Asia and Latin America that figure jumps to 32%, and in Africa it’s a whopping 51%.

“Half of the fastest growing economies on the face of the earth are in Africa,” he says. “So think about the world as you think about your business, look for opportunity outside of where you’re operating today.”

The Mr. Beast Game Show, TikTok OH NO, and the Truth About Instagram Algorithms

BY JIM LOUDERBACK

TL;DR

Jimmy “Mr. Beast” Donaldson tweeted about his vision to produce a game show for traditional TV. Neat idea, and another step towards global media domination for one of the world’s great creators.
A nascent effort to bring creators together to collectively advocate is brewing – which I strongly support – but that’s not all. Top League of Legends players have also walked off the job.
TikTok joins Snap in developing an in-app AI chatbot. Part of Double-T’s push to replace search, this one’s called ‘Tako’. It could be a powerful addition. Or it might just make the focused short video app just a bit bulkier and more unfocused.
Although nearly 6 in 10 US adults have heard of ChatGPT, only 14% have actually used it, according to new research from Pew. That’s dramatically different from the creator universe, according to a new study from Epidemic Sound.

This Week: Mr. Beast wants to produce TV, collective action for the creator economy, weird new chatbots, algorithm insights from Adam Mosseri and why I think we’ve achieved peak research. Hi, I’m Jim and I helped build VidCon, OG-MCN Revision3, PC Magazine and TechTV. It’s the first week of June and here’s what you need to know.

Mr. Beast Wants to Produce a TV Game Show: Jimmy Donaldson tweeted about his vision to produce a game show for traditional TV. Neat idea, and another step towards global media domination for one of the world’s great creators. After announcing this, Alex Piper of Night Studios (who would likely help produce it) posted a teaser response highlighting which media buyers reached out – but also which ones didn’t. Hmm. I’d like to see THAT list. Now I’m even more excited to see Marc Hustvedt‘s upcoming presentation at VidCon! Maybe he’ll get a chance to chat with Paramount’s head of streaming Tom Ryan – who’s doing a mainstage session too.

Collective Action Comes to the Creator Economy: Directors’ strike. Writers’ strike. Actors’ strike. They always seemed so far away from the creator economy. But not anymore. A nascent effort to bring creators together to collectively advocate is brewing – which I strongly support – but that’s not all. Top League of Legends players have also walked off the job, protesting Riot’s move to slash developmental leagues for amateurs. And some of the top journalists covering the industry are also now on strike – including Amanda Perelli and Sydney Bradley. I hope these collective actions get resolved quickly, but until then I encourage you to support the players, journalists, and creators any way possible.

Tic-Tac-Toe Uh-Oh: TikTok joins Snap in developing an in-app AI chatbot. Part of Double-T’s push to replace search, this one’s called ‘Tako’. It could be a powerful addition. Or it might just make the focused short video app just a bit bulkier and more unfocused. That name too! Quick, say it fast out loud three times – “TikTok Tako”. Yeah that’s what I thought as well. Maybe they’ll rebrand “Taco Tuesday” while they’re at it. Also, now you can send Snap’s chatbot a pic and get a snappy GenAI response. A qdp-fueled descent into debauchery will surely follow.

Trading on Creator Success? Imagine a stock fund focusing on creator-heavy businesses. Could it outperform the market? That’s the hypothesis of Conor Begley‘s latest stock index concept. First up – Lululemon – and more companies will be added soon. Alas, early returns are not great. But this is an idea worth testing.

🌟 UPDATE: Looks like Lululemon was up biggly Friday after releasing earnings. So, I guess this might be working after all!

AI Use Not Widespread: Although nearly 6 in 10 US adults have heard of ChatGPT, only 14% have actually used it, according to new research from Pew. That’s dramatically different from the creator universe, according to a new study from Epidemic Sound. After talking to 1,500 creators, they found that 93% of “monetizing creators” are using AI tools. And based on my discussions last week with a variety of exciting startups, even more super-useful tools incorporating AI are on the way. Paradoxically, though, AI as a promoted feature will fade away. Our tools will be laced with the stuff, thus becoming outrageously more capable. But like electricity, wireless internet, and video compression it will silently fade into the background. Where it belongs.

Peak Research Has Arrived: Another relatively self-serving creator economy study – this one from creator marketing platform Aspire, finds YouTube is the most profitable monetization platform and helps marketers price their partnerships. Along with Epidemic Sound’s study highlighted above, we may have reached peak research. Remember, aside from Pew, these studies are directional, not projectible.

QUIBIS:

Transparency is good: Adam Mosseri explains how the Instagram ranking algorithms really work. Mosseri also addresses “shadowbanning” head-on.
YouTube updates US election misinformation policies, will stop taking down 2020 election denial videos.
TikTok has stored lots of sensitive information about top creators on servers based in China. Another brick in the wall?
Elgato starts building custom versions of its Stream Deck – first up, a Discord-specific version with tailored buttons, code and more.
MIT Tech Review calls the Montana TikTok ban “junk” and “ridiculous”.
After signing top streamer Kai Cenat, Rumble’s lax content moderation policies come under fire.
Related – Cenat’s new “Kai ‘N Speed” show debuts strongly on Rumble.
Trouble in creator-fintech? Willa shuts down Willa Pay, pivots to matching gig economy workers with clients.
Could BeReal be pivoting to a Snap-like messaging platform?
More consolidation in the podcast world as PodX Group buys Listen.
California weighs a “preserve journalism” law. Meta says it won’t play along.
The Sidemen are expanding their fried-chicken empire across the UK.
Great idea – Smooth Media launches fractional COO service for creators.
Insider releases list of 23 top Creator Economy experts. Thanks to everyone who nominated me, I’m proud to be on the list!

CRYPTIS & GENIES:

NVidia and ad-giant WPP will build an AI engine to better persuade you to buy things you don’t need.
New AI-based Discord moderation bot promises to do better than humans. Could be a game-changer for creators. Pro Tip: mute audio before clicking.
AR/XR/VR back in the spotlights as Meta unveils Quest 3 and Apple to launch AR/VR headset today at WWDC. Apple apologists are already tamping down the hype. Could this be Lisa 2.0?
Cryptis and Genies, living together.
Want to harness the power of AI to quickly make TikTok’s, Shorts and Reels? Check out “Supercreator” (SPONSORED LINK).

Tips of the Week:

OG talent manager and exec Dan Weinstein teases out 6 tips for sustainable creator growth from his experience managing hundreds of creators (and now running Underscore Talent).
Want to be a creator economy expert? I break down Insider’s list of the Top 23 experts to find patterns to help you get there next year! Oh, and thanks to everyone who nominated me, I made the list!

Thanks 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!

If you’re interested in working together as a sponsor to reach the leaders in the creator economy, check out Inside the Creator’s sponsorship packages and/or email me at jim@louderback.com.

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!

Next, Listen To This!

June 15, 2023

Posted June 12, 2023

Reimagining Media Workloads in the Cloud

Access key industry solutions demos and dive deep into panel sessions with AWS from NAB Show.

June 12, 2023

How AWS Is Transforming the Business of Sports

Get the free ebook at this link: How AWS is changing the game.

June 12, 2023

Jim Louderback: Twitch Enrages Creators Again — Why Can’t they Learn? Plus the Dark Side of Baby Gronk and Good News for Shorts Creators!

BY JIM LOUDERBACK

TL;DR

Twitch has disastrously decided to prohibit burned in display and audio ads.
We’ve got more than everything you need to know about Baby Gronk, Baby Diggs and the NIL-spawn Livvy. I really hope we’re not seeing the next Honey Boo-Boo here, but in hindsight this should have been expected when NIL became legit.
We’re five months into the Shorts monetization chapter, and it’s mostly atrocious. However, there’s a light.

This Week: Twitch turmoil, Baby Gronk, Shorts improvements, what Apple’s new headset means for creators, and much more! Hi, I’m Jim and I helped build VidCon, OG-MCN Revision3, PC Magazine and TechTV. It’s the 2nd week of June and here’s what you need to know.

Twitch Enrages Creators Again: Back in 2010, the YouTube network I ran – Revision3 – had a legal agreement that allowed us to run burned in sponsor ads on our videos (negotiated by the amazing Damon Berger). Other networks wanted to do the same, but YouTube wouldn’t let them. And then they put the legal screws on us to try to box us out too. Luckily common sense prevailed, and brand deals provide creators with much of their income. Most platforms encourage it. But instead of learning from history, Twitch decided to repeat it – to disastrous results. After the rapid roll-back, I assume this was more of a comms failure rather than an actual return to 2010, but the result was the same. It just added to the anomie and distrust creators already felt towards the platform. A suggestion: Maybe Twitch needs to pressure test these changes with a trusted creator council before launching. And if one already exists, a compositional change might be appropriate. Also note that simulcasting was banned, and partner agreements torn up – and those changes stay (HT Publish Press – happy anniversary!).

Here Comes Baby Gronk! Here’s more than everything you need to know about Baby Gronk, Baby Diggs and the NIL-spawn Livvy. I really hope we’re not seeing the next Honey Boo-Boo here, but in hindsight this should have been expected when NIL became legit. This unsettling interview with Baby Gronk’s Dad ($) reminds me of that night I spent on the couch with Mama June in 2013. 2023’s recipe for disaster: A “pretty good at this internet stuff” Dad with a 10-year-old “product”. Can’t we just let kids be kids?

There’s a Light in the Darkness? We’re five months into the Shorts monetization chapter, and it’s mostly atrocious. However, there’s a light (over at the Frankenstein place). It’s Premium, which is delivering 5x the percentage revenue of long-form, according to Matt Gielen. And it looks like YouTube is even more committed to having Shorts become an entry point for search, as Google’s DeepMind AI is now generating Shorts descriptions, promising to supercharge discoverability. But creators are still trying to figure out how it works. Matt Koval shares insight from his client work, where he mostly recommends putting Shorts on a separate channel from longer-form video. Perhaps there’s strength in the community here, as YouTube’s new #ShortsFriends initiative aims to connect creators to each other to jump-start growth. Hopefully the picture becomes clearer soon, so we can time warp back to when YouTube delivered meaningful revshare across all video formats.

How Apple’s Vision Pro Will Change the Creator Economy: Lots of digital ink spilled last week on an expensive tech product that won’t be available for a year. Ben Thompson’s take is worth reading, while most of the rest was either breathless adulation or predictable predictions of failure. I’m reminded of Bill Gates’ quote about how we overestimate short-term impact but underestimate the change 10 years later. Yes it’s pricey, but $3,500 is relatively cheap for an Apple category buster: upon release the first Mac cost $7,000 in 2022 dollars, while the Apple Lisa – perhaps a better comp – would cost $30,000 today. A few thoughts on how creators will evolve in the long term:

Headcasting from events will become popular as we teleport inside our favorite creator’s head at the Met Gala, Coachella, VidCon and other experiences.
Roblox creators find a lucrative new market for goods and experiences.
Superfan hangouts with creators become more intimate, personal, and engaging – and offer a new avenue for AI-based constructs to drive revenue.
Digital collectibles and badges take off (just don’t call them NFTs).
A new class of creators currently suffering through middle school will dominate the Tubefilter top 50 by 2033.

For more on how I’m thinking about Vision Pro, check out this week’s Creator Feed podcast.

Don’t Kill the Golden Archive! Insatiable demand for AI training data brought down the Internet Archive – and has also indirectly led to Reddit and Twitter charging for API access too. You can witness the Reddit impact today, as a 48-hour Reddit blackout is underway. It’s the 2023 tragedy of the commons. Hopefully brewster kahle and team will figure out how to grant access without breaking the system – and maybe even make some money too. Let’s not inadvertently kill the things we love as we build the future.

QUIBIS:

New details on Instagram’s Twitter clone – due out any day now.
Instagram to follow the herd and add a chatbot to its platform as well.
Linktree buys competitor Bento and lays off much of its Aus and NZ team as it focuses on the US. CEO memo here.
TikTok lets more creators upload 20-minute videos and create paywall gates.
Major labels cooling on TikTok stars.
TikTok CEO accused of lying to US Congress.
TikTok under fire for building auto-face tuning into app, and adding to a dysmorphic pandemic.
TikTok helps marketers get started on the holiday season – I can smell the tinsel from here.
A CEO explains what her TikTok addiction was like – and how she broke up with the app.
Twitter to allow creators to download opt-in email addresses and will start paying creators too. Great for creators, but ending comment blocking is decidedly not so.
Animation vets to launch “Potatoverse” on Roblox, animation platforms, podcasts and beyond. But will they license the Spirit music?
Death of Gimlet and Parcast signals a new phase in the podcast market – profit over growth.
The D’Amelios venture into talent management with new agency.
Neat Mr. Beast promotion lets Feastables customers watch secret video – but only until mid-July.

CRYPTIS & GENIES:

Marc Andreesen throws cold-water on AI Preppers.
You might have heard about crypto-staking and wonder what it is. Well now you know.
Another crypto explainer – why the new ERC-4337 Ethereum standard has the potential to simplify and unlock NFTs for mass adoption.
Want to get more out of GenAI? OpenAI just released 6 strategies to help you get better results from ChatGPT. A must read for creators and marketers alike.
Use AI to quickly make TikTok’s, Shorts and Reels with “Supercreator” (SPONSORED LINK).

Tip of the Week: Phil Ranta with a great way to think about your social media use – less doom -scrolling and more research and meaningful interactions.

Research Study of the Week: Most creators know about AI, while around 2/3rds are using it in some way, according to a new study from tools vendor Lightricks. Despite wide usage, the study also reported widespread concern about AI – from deepfakes to copyright infringement. The study also looks at monetization – which appears to be up for most creators. This study was executed by YouGov, so it’s likely more reliable than some of the others we’ve talked about. But the methodology is not well defined. Grade: B – Directional, not Predictive.

Where I’ll be: Going to VidCon? See you there – I’m hosting and moderating sessions on both the industry and creator track! Also check out my “how to VidCon video”, updated for 2023.

If you’re interested in working together as a sponsor to reach the leaders in the creator economy, check out Inside the Creator’s sponsorship packages and/or email me at jim@louderback.com.

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!

Next, Listen To This

June 12, 2023

Can AI Can Replicate Human Creativity? (Yes and Then… Oh, No)

By Chloe Preece, ESCP Business School, and Hafize Çelik, UNIVERSITY OF BATH

It can… but falls apart when asked to produce something truly new.

The ‘Portrait of Edmond de Bellamy’ was produced by a generative adversarial network that was fed a data set of 15,000 portraits spanning six centuries. Christies/Picril

Is computational creativity possible? The recent hype around generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Dall-E and many others, raises new questions about whether creativity is a uniquely human skill. Some recent and remarkable milestones of generative AI foster this question:

An AI artwork, The Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, sold for $432,500, nearly 45 times its high estimate, by the auction house Christie’s in 2018. The artwork was created by a generative adversarial network that was fed a data set of 15,000 portraits covering six centuries.
Music producers such as Grammy-nominee Alex Da Kid, have collaborated with AI (in this case IBM’s Watson) to churn out hits and inform their creative process.

In the cases above, a human is still at the helm, curating the AI’s output according to their own vision and thereby retaining the authorship of the piece. Yet, AI image generator Dall-E, for example, can produce novel output on any theme you wish within seconds. Through diffusion, whereby huge datasets are scraped together to train the AI, generative AI tools can now transpose written phrases into novel pictures or improvise music in the style of any composer, devising new content that resembles the training data but isn’t identical. Authorship in this case is perhaps more complex. Is it the algorithm? The thousands of artists whose work has been scraped to produce the image? The prompter who successfully describes the style, reference, subject matter, lighting, point of view and even emotion evoked? To answer these questions, we must return to an age-old question.

What is Creativity?

According to Margaret Boden, there are three types of creativity: combinational, exploratory, and transformational creativity. Combinational creativity combines familiar ideas together. Exploratory creativity generates new ideas by exploring ‘structured conceptual spaces,’ that is, tweaking an accepted style of thinking by exploring its contents, boundaries and potential. Both of these types of creativity are not a million miles from generative AI’s algorithmic production of art; creating novel works in the same style as millions of others in the training data, a ‘synthetic creativity.’ Transformational creativity, however, means generating ideas beyond existing structures and styles to create something entirely original; this is at the heart of current debates around AI in terms of fair use and copyright – very much unchartered legal waters, so we will have to wait and see what the courts decide.

The key characteristic of AI’s creative processes is that the current computational creativity is systematic, not impulsive, as its human counterpart can often be. It is programmed to process information in a certain way to achieve particular results predictably, albeit in often unexpected ways. In fact, this is perhaps the most significant difference between artists and AI: while artists are self- and product-driven, AI is very much consumer-centric and market-driven — we only get the art we ask for, which is not perhaps, what we need.

So far, generative AI seems to work best with human partners and, perhaps then, the synthetic creativity of the AI is a catalyst to push our human creativity, augmenting human creativity rather than producing it. As is often the case, the hype around these tools as disruptive forces outstrips the reality. In fact, art history shows us that technology has rarely directly displaced humans from work they wanted to do. Think of the camera, for example, which was feared due to its power to put portrait painters out of business. What are the business implications for the use of synthetic creativity by AI, then?

Synthetic Art for Business

Synthetic creativity on demand, as currently generated by AI, is certainly a boon to business and marketing. Recent examples include:

AI-enhanced advertising: Ogilvy Paris used Dall-E to create an AI version of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid for Nestle yogurts.
AI-designed furniture: Kartell, Philippe Starck and Autodesk collaborated with AI to create the first chair designed using AI for sustainable manufacturing.
AI-augmented fashion styling: Stitch Fix utilized AI to capture personalized visualizations of clothing based on requested customer preferences such as color, fabric and style.

The potential use scenarios are endless and what they require is another form of creativity: curation. AI has been known to ‘hallucinate’ — an industry term for spewing nonsense — and the decidedly human skill required is in sense-making, that is expressing concepts, ideas and truths, rather than just something that is pleasing to the senses. Curation is therefore needed to select and frame, or reframe, a unified and compelling vision.

Chloe Preece, Associate Professor in Marketing, ESCP Business School and Hafize Çelik, PhD candidate in management, University of Bath

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

June 4, 2023

What’s Behind the $100 Billion+ Creator Economy (Hint: It’s Not Creativity)

creator economy social media social video mobile phone

TL;DR

The Creator Economy comprises more than 200 million people globally, contributing to an industry expected to be worth over $100 billion by end of this year.
Creator-led brands have emerged as valuable partners for well-known companies, sports teams, leagues and other entities looking to expand their audience by tapping into the niche audiences of content creators.
Multi-language audio tracking represents an opportunity for creators to grow their reach. YouTube reported that dubbed videos made up approximately 15% of watch-time in a channel’s non-primary language.

Jim Louderback: YouTube Algorithm Insider Explains What’s New, and Revelations from an Expert Model of the Creator Economy

BY JIM LOUDERBACK

TL;DR

YouTube algorithm chief Todd Beaupré explains how it really works in a must watch video for anyone building on YouTube.
OG creator Peter Hollens’ recent essay passionately explains why creators really do make the best social media managers.
Researchers from Cornell and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology just released an economic and quantitative model of the influencer economy to explain how it works and divulged some interesting conclusions.

This Week: New insights on audience satisfaction and content optimization from YouTube’s internal algorithm czar, copyright challenges for the video and AI age, and new academic research on the influencer economy. Also updates on the post-creator landscape, TikTok’s Creator Marketplace and much more. It’s the end of May and here’s what you need to know.

YouTube Algorithm Chief Explains How It Really Works: A must watch video for anyone building on YouTube featuring Todd Beaupré. Top insights include “don’t think algorithm, think audience”, and an exploration of how YouTube takes the long view via “satisfaction” – and how that complements watch time. He also shares how YouTube evaluates new creators and helps them find an audience and how to think about optimizing Shorts, podcasts, and long-form. Todd also expands what “satisfaction” really means in a LinkedIn comment. Love hearing from the source, more please YouTube! (Pro tip: YouTube lets you adjust playback speed. It’s even better at 1.5x).

From F* Pay Me to F* Hire Me: OG creator Peter Hollens 🟣 has been an advocate for creators nearly forever. One of Patreon’s first investors, he’s now focusing on the post-creator experience. And his recent essay passionately explains why creators really do make the best social media managers. And also why companies that hire creators build real competitive advantage. The article also lays out the thesis for his latest startup, but is worth reading beyond the self-promotion. Other examples are emerging too, including Too Faced’s new creative director Sara Echeagaray, Sophie Lightning’s stint at Nerf and now Made by Gather, and many more. But it’s not just another promotional avenue, as success creators can directly translate those skills to building success for you.

From Andy Warhol to YouTube Swatting: Copyright in the video/AI age is a vipers nest of contradictions. Our institutions – from government to top platforms – remain woefully behind the times, which creates minefields for creators and artists alike. First up, an awful story about how a vindictive creator uses YouTube’s creaky copyright strike system to attack competing creators. Hey Big Red, why is strike “swatting” still a thing? Next, the US Supreme Court narrowed fair use by slapping Condé Nast for its transformative interpretation of an Andy Warhol painting. Peter Csathy explains why this ruling could have huge implications for generative AI. Copyright needs to be reinvented for the AI and digital age – but we’ve known that for nearly 30 years.

Academics Discover the Creator Economy: When should creators demand reciprocal exclusivity during brand deal negotiations? Now there’s a scientific answer! Researchers from Cornell and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology just released an economic and quantitative model of the influencer economy to explain how it works and divulged some interesting conclusions. In addition to exclusivity optimization, they also predict when long-term hookups are better for both parties and much more. Read the dense and non-peer reviewed paper (or download my free GenAI summary sourced from ChatPDF, Bing and ChatGPT). And expect more academic scrutiny on Creator Econometrics in the months ahead. That’s a good thing.

QUIBIS:

NBC builds a social media consulting team – with a focus on Olympic athletes.
Good post from TikTok’s Jerry Soer on how to use the Creator Marketplace to drive results – I’ve used it and I’m a fan. Thanks, Adrienne Lahens, for resurfacing it.
No surprises here – TikTok sues Montana.
Interesting essay on persuasion from media and marketing expert Brad Berens, Ph.D.
GenZ dream – get paid to watch TikTok!
YouTube shuts down stories. Phil Ranta is sad. I’m all like WTF and good riddance.
Meta with another round of layoffs, this time in the creator and music partnerships area, among others. Hard to claim you are creator-first when you cut back on the support teams ($).
Popular streamer Amouranth joins CarynAI, launches “your sexy and playful girlfriend”.
Top game streamer Kai Cenat spurns Kick, announces new show on Rumble.
Interesting Twitter stream from Peter Kafka, exploring the ad vs. sub split in YouTube’s $40B annual revenue.
Perhaps preparing for a long strike, SAG-AFTRA signs comprehensive deal with Cameo. Could OF be next (probably not, but it probably should).
Oracle started reviewing TikTok’s source code – but The Information begs to differ ($).
The “Ad Recession” has definitely arrived, says Simon Owens – who suggests doubling down on subscriptions and other paid revenue. Unfortunately, it also means cutting back, layoffs and fire sales.
Should you be monetizing your Discord server? – Part 1 of a timely tutorial series.
The latest social media trends and fads (HT Brendan Gahan).
Rex Woodbury dives into how Duolingo grew its massive TikTok audience.

CRYPTIS & GENIES:

Li Jin explores the potential of the Lens Protocol, a creator-friendly open social graph that lets you keep your followers as you change social platforms.
OpenAI releases white paper laying out how government should regulate superintelligence.
Adobe brings cool new GenAI tools to Photoshop.
AI ad reads could soon come to your Spotify podcasts.

If you’re interested in working together as a sponsor to reach the leaders in the creator economy, check out Inside the Creator’s sponsorship packages and/or email me at jim@louderback.com.

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!

Next, Listen to This:

May 29, 2023

Traditional Media Companies Aren’t “Computable,” and That’s Where AI Actually Poses a Threat

TL;DR

A new report from studio-funded thinktank ETC, “AI & Competitive Advantage in Media,” authored by the org’s resident data scientist and AI expert, Yves Bergquist, explores the impact of generative AI on the media.
Bergquist argues that generative AI impacts the media industry less by disrupting its traditional content creation process and more by giving social content creators the tools to make large amounts of truly cinematic, studio-like content.
Social media’s strength is its enormous library of content, which allows it to conduct millions of content market-fit experiments per minute.
There’s still a place for deliberate, curated, data-driven development decisions about what audiences want to see, but studio-style content needs to be integrated and immersive.

The single biggest impact of generative AI for large content producers and distributors isn’t about disrupting the media-making process. It’s that it gives its fiercest competitors — content creators on YouTube and TikTok — more tools to eat further into everyone’s daily video consumption that the media industry is battling for.

According to a fresh report by studio-funded thinktank ETC, “AI and Competitive Advantage in Media,” generative AI “potentially disrupts the already unfortunate economics of the media business: stable demand (never more than 24 hours in a day) and exploding supply.”

In the report, Yves Bergquist, ETC’s resident data scientist and AI expert, argues that what’s happening in the media industry is proximate to what already happened in manufacturing: automation of the craft of making a product (i.e., making the product computable).

By computable they mean that content is produced in volume and is “machine readable” in terms of every aspect of its creation to distribution to feedback from audiences being data and therefore available for dissection

Traditional media companies currently are not “computable” in the sense that they produce products linearly, one at a time. It is scarce, whole, long-form (not conducive to being sliced and diced by an online audience) and unstructured (its narrative DNA is not yet machine-readable).

This is going to have to change if studios and streamers want to part of the bigger picture in a few years’ time.

ETC divides the creative process into three parts. Bergquist dubs the ideation part, where creatives “sense” what an audience wants to see, “zeitgeist intelligence.”

Then there’s the core of the creative process, where creatives define their voices and make strategic decisions about what product will be crafted.

Finally, the product is made.

AI’s immediate impact is on that final phase. But by automating production, “Generative AI not only puts more emphasis on Zeitgeist-sensing and creative decision-making, it gives creative decision-makers tools to quickly and cheaply tinker, experiment, and prototype.”

At the same time, traditional media companies “risk losing their monopoly on the craft of high-quality content.”

Generative AI empowers social creatives to quickly and cheaply craft “studio quality” content threatening the status of traditional media. They can do this because their knowledge of what the audience wants is crowdsources by links, likes and recommendation algorithms. The content produced is computable in the sense that it can all be digitally mined. And the scale of content production means there’s enough supply to fit cater for every audience whim.

But ETC spots a weakness. Social media platforms and content creators reliant on those platforms lack any real understanding of their audience, claims ETC. It is just “basic content match-making”.

Instead, studios and especially streamers, can strike back against pure AI content generators by using the data they have at their disposal more intelligently.

“Programmatic content distributors like TikTok match content with audiences without any semantic understanding of why this content resonates. It’s just a programmatic marketplace that computes the content de facto.”

With generative AI bringing high production value tools to social creators, we can expect a new category of “short-form linear content” to emerge on social platforms.

Studios, on the other hand, “have the longest experience and the largest dataset available to not only develop an intelligence go their audiences, but to draw them into a deep relationship with their franchises.”

Media organizations, “especially those with a streaming service,” have both the data and a unique capability to understand the cultural zeitgeist. They can use AI to better “know” what audiences want, Bergquist says.

ETC also suggests that it’s the large media organizations that have the financial backbone “to create highly integrated and replicable AI-driven virtual production workflows.”

It contends that traditional media players will need to differentiate through immersive, multi-platform, world-building franchises, a trend they are already pursuing of course.

This, says ETC, “is the greatest opportunity for large media organizations to leverage virtual production and generative AI together to quicken and cheapen the cost of producing these multi-format immersive pieces. This new form of computable content will run on game engines.”

In so doing, this “revolutionizes the way stories are told,” with integrated narratives spun across linear and immersive media products.

There are warnings, though.

“Media organizations don’t have a software culture, nor can they support large AI R&D assets. They could partner with (or acquire) key AI research organizations to leverage their data to create their own proprietary content and audience intelligence models, but this is a heavy lift.”

ETC also identifies a need for intuitive “human-ready” and “business-ready” interfaces for AI models, which continues to be the greatest bottleneck for AI in enterprise. Too often, says Bergquist, organizations can’t connect models and business needs.

“Whoever can redesign their organizations and workforce needs to best create a ‘culture’ of AI and data will move faster than its competitors.”

Education, insists ETC, is the largest opportunity in AI today.

While everyone seems to agree AI represents a big financial opportunity to automate some production and postproduction workflow it begs a question: Does taking knowledge of the craft out of creative work affect creative decisions and creative output overall? Or, put another way, does knowing the craft make a creative a better decision-maker? ETC has no answers for this, and perhaps we’ll only find out in time.

More globally, what the media industry needs right now is a distinct and actionable AI vision.

May 24, 2023

Posted May 23, 2023

So What Do Audiences Think About the Use of AI in Hollywood?

TL;DR

A new report titled “Reading Between the [Picket] Lines” from global insights and strategy firm NRG reveals that streaming viewers largely support the WGA strike and are cautiously open to the use of AI in the entertainment industry.
The findings are based on a survey of 3,000 US consumers, aged 13-54, who subscribe to at least one streaming service and consume a minimum of four hours of streaming content per week.
While more than 60% of respondents are aware of the strike, only 13% feel they have a comprehensive understanding of the strike and its underlying reasons.
Among those who feel they understand “a lot” about the strike, a staggering 74% say that they support the WGA’s decision to strike.
When it comes to the role of generative AI in the entertainment industry, viewers are yet to fully make up their minds about where they stand, yet more than two-thirds expressed concern about the use of AI in Hollywood.

Next, Listen to This

May 24, 2023

Posted May 22, 2023

Jim Louderback: YouTube’s Massive Impact on the US Economy, a Brandcast Touchdown, and Updates on TikTok’s Montana Mess

BY JIM LOUDERBACK

TL;DR

Although creators were everywhere YouTube’s Brandcast, NFL Chief Roger Goodell stole the show at YouTube’s advertiser party last week.
YouTube released its “YouTube impact 2022” report, touting $35 Billion of US economic impact, 390,000 FTE (Full Time Equivalent) jobs in its “creative ecosystem” and over 55,000 US channels with more than 100,000 subscribers (according to Brendan Gahan, it mushrooms to 320k worldwide).
Do you use an ad-blocker on YouTube? If so, you’re not only docking YouTube, but you’re fleecing creators as well. YouTube is experimenting with blocking access to ad blockers as it tries to right the revenue picture.

This Week: Updates from YouTube’s Brandcast and NFL Chief Roger Goodell’s surprise appearance, also new unskippable ads and AI for advertisers. Also, a look at the eye-popping “YouTube impact 2022” report, along with various topics related to creators, including new tools from Meta and the psychology of support. Also the decline of the modern internet webpage, the rise of AI replicated creators, TikTok’s Montana mess and developments in the world of NFTs. It’s the fourth week of May 2023 and here’s you need to know.

YouTube Brandcast Focuses on NFL, AI: Although creators were everywhere, NFL Chief Roger Goodell stole the show at YouTube’s advertiser party last week. Big Red spent billions to stream American football this fall, and they clearly need strong advertiser – and viewer – support to make money. Unskippable ads are coming too, which means more money for creators – hopefully – but more blowback from users. And following Meta’s lead, they also leaned into AI for advertisers. Quite the contrast to the dispirited upfronts from traditional TV platforms, reeling from the Hollywood writer’s strike. Creators don’t have a union (yet), thus their star power was prominently displayed. Alas, my invite got lost in the mail, so I can’t share any other fun Brandcast details. Attendees did walk away with a free Sunday Ticket subscription, which will cost regular folks nearly $500. If anyone has a free “Sunday Ticket” invite left over and wants to support this newsletter, send it my way – I’ll give you a shout-out here next week!

YouTube Impact Report 2022 Released: In a related story, YouTube released its “YouTube impact 2022” report, touting $35 Billion of US economic impact, 390,000 FTE (Full Time Equivalent) jobs in its “creative ecosystem” and over 55,000 US channels with more than 100,000 subscribers (according to Brendan Gahan, it mushrooms to 320k worldwide). Yes sub metrics are suspect, but still. Those are killer numbers. If YouTube were a country, their US GDP contribution alone would slot them in between Estonia and Senegal. For all the handwringing about TiKTok, Snap and Instagram, the report paints a picture of a dominant creative and economic force, and one that’s growing 15% or more annually. And unlike the studies we discussed last week, YouTube worked with a legit research firm, Oxford Economics, to conduct its surveys. Want to see what a real methodology statement looks like? Download the whole study and head to page 25. Finally, a study that’s projectible, not just directional.

Ad Blockers Steal from Creators: Do you use an ad-blocker on YouTube? If so, you’re not only docking YouTube, but you’re fleecing creators as well. YouTube is experimenting with blocking access to ad blockers as it tries to right the revenue picture. But because creators get a share of revenue, less ads served means less money for creators. Support your favorite creators. Watch ads on their channels. Otherwise, those creators might have to stop.

Why We Support Creators: There’s more you can do to support your favorite creators though beyond just watching ads – from tipping to buying merch. But why do we do it? It’s not altruism, says Derek Yang, but instead one (or more) of four primary motivators – from status to identity. Yang’s post dives deep into each of these, helping creators and brands refine their monetization strategy and motivate fan support.

TwitchCon Facing Competition: Might be trolling, might be truth, but it looks like upstart game streaming platform Kick is developing its own event to compete with TwitchCon. Some chatter suggests it might even debut in Las Vegas the same weekend too. I went through this in 2018 when I was running VidCon and creator Tana Mongeau launched a competing event called “TanaCon” the same weekend about a mile from us. My advice for Twitch: Take the high road, be gracious, and double down on your own attendee experience. And reach out if you want more battle-tested advice!

Montana Bans TikTok: The proposed ban was signed into law. Although easy to circumvent, the precedent of a state banning TikTok will continue to tarnish Double-T while unleashing a torrent of lawsuits that will likely hit the Supreme Court eventually. First up – five Montana-based creators are suing for first amendment protection. In a related story, the Supreme Court continued to agree that internet platforms are not liable for the content they serve – and their moderation – by ruling for Twitter and dismissing a related case against YouTube. Will the Montana ban hold up? IANAL, so I asked my favorite creator lawyer (and CEO of Creators Legal) Eric Farber:

“Section 230 and the TikTok/Montana ban both deal with digital platform rights, but from different angles; while 230 focuses on user content liability, the TikTok ban brings up questions of national security, data privacy, and the practicalities of enforcing such a ban, all while raising significant constitutional concerns. It is unlikely the Montana ban will hold up on the federal level.”

New Facebook Tools for Creators: Facebook continues to lean into creators by adding new resources for creators to its “Professional Dashboard”. Good to see, but does anyone else think Meta’s creator resources are all over the place? There’s that dashboard, the Meta Business Suite, Adam Mosseri’s Instagram channel, Zuckerberg’s video site on Facebook, Facebook for Creators and much more. I’d love to see everything come together – maybe they need to take a “page” from Linktree?

QUIBIS:

The era of instant virality is over – how to navigate changing TikTok growth patterns.
Roblox just rolled out its vision to embrace all ages. Will be interesting to see it develop.
News for Font Nerds – TikTok releases its own custom font. And unlike Instagram’s attempt, it looks good!
The decline and fall of the modern internet webpage.
Why you shouldn’t chase the latest creator platform (*cough* Bluesky *cough*).
Instagram’s Twitter-like app due soon – maybe even June. Perhaps at VidCon?
The beginning of AI replicated creators – Caryn Marjorie charging $1 a minute to chat with a GenAI virtual version of herself. My take: it’s a logical parasocial progression and will develop into a major revenue source for many creators.
Discord moving towards simplified handles, which is good. Many users are not happy.
Kajabi adds its own payment platform – with no fees for creators beyond the standard monthly platform subscription.
Some interesting social statistics here for creators, although it’s unclear how current (or trustworthy) the data is – still waiting for Social Insider to respond. YMMV.
As Earned Media Value (EMV) takes off, creators are delivering upwards of $4,000 ROI for each “free” post. Anyone else see a problem here?
Another TikTok fund launches, this one for visual effects creators (and it’s small).
Another brick in the wall for TikTok, as ex-Bytedance employee sues, claims US data shared with Chinese government.
How to make an effective creator media kit – with examples. Insider also shares Instagram examples ($).
Congrats to MatPat – now on Broadway!
Linus Sebastian steps down as CEO of Linus Tech Tips to focus on content. Smart move – creators can’t do everything.

CRYPTIS & GENIES:

Meta shuts down events in its Metaverse – producers are not happy.
Perhaps NFT royalties will be saved – what you need to know about ERC721-C.
Bridging the physical / digital NFT divide – Pudgy Penguins launch on Amazon. Not much heat yet, but an interesting development.

Tips of the Week:

How to negotiate like a pro – tips and strategies from lawyer/creator Eric Farber and Hashtag Pay Me (who are now partners).
More from Video Creators – mistakes even top YouTubers still make – from channel design to calls to action and more.

Quote of the Week: From Ben Thompson’s Stratechery essay on Google’s AI push:

“The PC revolution, the Internet revolution, and the AI revolution (can be) viewed as three applications of the defining economic feature of digitization — zero marginal costs — to information:

“The PC allowed for zero marginal duplication of information.

“The Internet allows for zero marginal distribution of information…

“AI is zero marginal generation of information.”

If you’re interested in working together as a sponsor to reach the leaders in the creator economy, check out Inside the Creator’s sponsorship packages and/or email me at jim@louderback.com

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!

Next, Listen to This:

May 21, 2023

Posted May 16, 2023

Jim Louderback: Get Paid for Views, Not Ads; Meta’s Surprising New Strategy; and Influence Beats Work for Young Adults

BY JIM LOUDERBACK

TL;DR

Meta is taking an interesting approach to paying creators in a new Facebook Reels test. Rather than sharing revenue – as it did with prior tests, it plans on paying for views instead.
The latest IZEA influencer study is out – fielded in December 2022 via 1,200 U.S.-based consumers.
IZEA competitor “The Influencer Marketing Factory” released an omnibus overview of the creator economy and research too.

You can read from Jim Louderback here.

Meta innovates, creators quit, Google flips and much more. It’s the third week of May 2023 and here’s what you need to know. Also, if you like this newsletter, I’d appreciate it if you would nominate me to be part of The Insider’s new list of creator economy experts. Thanks in advance!

I’m a Creator and I Quit! The latest IZEA influencer study is out – fielded in December 2022 via 1,200 U.S.-based consumers. It found that 61% of 18-29 year-olds in the U.S. would quit their job if they could make a living as an influencer. The study also found that more than 1 in 5 (of that 18-29 group) already consider themselves an influencer. Almost half of those influencers have less than 1000 followers, while 56% are employed full-time.

40% of Users Tip Creators and Most Creators Make Over $50k a Year (say Wut?): IZEA competitor “The Influencer Marketing Factory” released an omnibus overview of the creator economy and research too. Their study talked to 1,000 U.S. users and 660 U.S. creators, and found that more than 40% of users tip, and more than 60% of content creators make over $50k a year. Clearly not a random sample. In addition, their data shows that a whopping 94% of creators have adopted AI into their workflow. There’s a lack of transparency about methodology in both Izea and TIMF’s study – and some of TIMF’s data seem way off base. Given Izea’s track record I find more veracity in their data – but take both as directional, not projectable.

Get Views and Get Paid: Meta is taking an interesting approach to paying creators in a new Facebook Reels test. Rather than sharing revenue – as it did with prior tests, it plans on paying for views instead. Meta will transition some creators into this new model and invite more creators to participate. Instagram will be added in select markets too. Somewhat like Spotter and Jellysmack’s model – where creators get paid today for expected future earnings regardless of platform sales or economic environment – the program aligns even better with a creator’s efforts. Creators don’t sell ads, but they do drive views.

As with most programs like this, success will hinge on revenue per view (RPV), what views are included and how many creators are part of the program. Hopefully it won’t mirror what creators have seen in TikTok’s pulse program, where CPVs range from $3-$20 CPV, but the number of revenue-generating views was abysmal – via Insider ($). I can imagine different RPVs by content type – perhaps beauty and cute animals are more highly valued by advertisers than pranks or DIY. A higher CPV in some categories might drive more creators into that space.

Drive views and get paid – perhaps THIS is the future of creator monetization.

QUIBIS:

Twitter hires a new CEO – I unpack what it means here.
YouTube targets ad-blockers in push for more revenue.
Meta brings AI tools to select advertisers – with a broader roll out due later this year
Useful new study shows you the best times to post on FB, IG, YT, LI, TT, TW and PI.
Structural or cyclical? Podcast ad revenue growth slows dramatically in 2022.
Pluto co-founder is building a “free” ad-supported TV that includes a second screen for persistent marketing messages.
Cosmetics company Tarte still doesn’t get it – and seems incapable of learning from past transgressions.
Stop treating creators like ad units, argues Zach Blume from PortalA.
TikTok Shop soars in Indonesia, but may be delayed in the U.S.
How Mr. Beast hacked Instagram – good story from Night’s CEO Reed Duchscher.
Interesting look at a handful of non-traditional media monetization schemes.
LinkedIn removes inactive accounts from follower totals.
It’s the Pinterest grand unification theory of Pins (likely positive for creators)!
How TikTok and GenZ are fueling a nostalgia obsession.
Twitch rolls out clipping tool to facilitate posting top moments to TikTok, Shorts and Reels.
Jellysmack invests in Fourthwall, presumably to add to its suite of tools for creators.
Quel dommage: France cracks down on influencers.
More creator deals: Electrify invests in Veritasium.

CRYPTIS & GENIES:

Google gave a bear hug to AI at its annual developer conference – good stuff for creators there. They’re brining TikTok, Reddit and (more) YouTube to search results too.
Google also begins opening up access to its AI music-generation service.
Spotify kicks thousands of AI songs off its platform – what are they afraid of?
EU tightens up the regulatory requirements for GenAI.
I think there’s a great opportunity to build a “NALLM” – or Network Attached Large Language Model – that sits in your home or office and only includes your personal/corporate data and is protected from the broader internet. PrivateGPT gets us closer to my vision.

Tips of the Week:

Tim Schmoyer and Video Creators share tips on how to break through when you run out of content ideas.
Great tips for creators and managers on how to optimize brand deal agreements – from Creators Legal founder (and rockstar entertainment lawyer) Eric Farber.
Why you shouldn’t be obsessed by your LinkedIn analytics (from me!)
Related from Phil Ranta – get people to like you.

What I’m Watching: The funniest corporate speech ever – from Google’s CEO at IO last week.

If you’re interested in working together as a sponsor to reach the leaders in the creator economy, check out Inside the Creator’s sponsorship packages and/or email me at jim@louderback.com.

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!

Next, Listen to This:

May 9, 2023

Posted May 9, 2023

What To Do If Your IP is Being Stolen By Generative AI

TL;DR

Though generative AI may be new to the market, existing laws have significant implications for its use. Now courts are sorting out how the laws on the books should be applied.
In many cases it poses legal questions that are still being resolved. For example, does copyright, patent, and trademark infringement apply to AI creations?
Lawyers — who perhaps stand most to benefit from the muddied waters — offer advice tailored for creators, AI developers, and business users on what to do.

Creators

When it comes individual content creators and brands, the onus is on them to take steps to protect their IP.

Stable Diffusion developer Stability.AI, for example, announced that artists will be able to opt out of the next generation of the image generator.

“But this puts the onus on content creators to actively protect their IP, rather than requiring the AI developers to secure the IP to the work prior to using it — and even when artists opt out, that decision will only be reflected in the next iteration of the platform. Instead, companies should require the creator’s opt-in rather opt-out.”

According to Appel, Neelbauer and Schweidel, this involves “proactively looking for their work in compiled datasets or large-scale data lakes, including visual elements such as logos and artwork and textual elements, such as image tags.”

Obviously, this could not be done manually through terabytes or petabytes of content data, but they think existing search tools “should allow the cost-effective automation of this task.”

Content creators are also advised to monitor digital and social channels for the appearance of works that may be derived from their own.

Longer term, content creators that have a sufficient library of their own IP on which to draw “may consider building their own datasets to train and mature AI platforms.”

The resulting generative AI models need not be trained from scratch but can build upon open-source generative AI that has used lawfully sourced content. This would enable content creators to produce content in the same style as their own work with an audit trail to their own data lake, or to license the use of such tools to interested parties with cleared title in both the AI’s training data and its outputs.

Customers

Customers of AI tools should ask providers whether their models were trained with any protected content, review the terms of service and privacy policies, “and avoid generative AI tools that cannot confirm that their training data is properly licensed from content creators or subject to open-source licenses with which the AI companies comply.”

Businesses

If a business user is aware that training data might include unlicensed works or that an AI can generate unauthorized derivative works not covered by fair use, a business could be on the hook for willful infringement, which can include damages up to $150,000 for each instance of knowing use.

Consequently, businesses should evaluate their transaction terms to write protections into contracts. As a starting point, they should demand terms of service from generative AI platforms that confirm proper licensure of the training data that feed their AI.

Appel, Neelbauer and Schweidel add that they understand the real threat of generative AI to part of the livelihood of members of the creative class, “at the same time both creatives and corporate interests have a dramatic opportunity to build portfolios of their works and branded materials, meta-tag them, and train their own generative-AI platforms that can produce authorized, proprietary, (paid-up or royalty-bearing) goods as sources of instant revenue streams.”

The Separate Set Ups for XR, MR, and Virtual Production

TL;DR

A new white paper from graphics technology vendor Brainstorm examines the technologies that enable extended and virtual production, and the pros and cons of each approach.
It argues that scenes filmed in a volume using background plates on LED walls will be “baked” in if there are any issues requiring tinkering in post.
“We may have to re-shoot or enter in long and complex postproduction, meaning all the time and cost savings of virtual production disappear,” the paper says.

Jim Louderback: The TikTok-YouTube Ad Battle, Text Comes to AI Images, BlueSky and More

BY JIM LOUDERBACK

TL;DR

The TikTok/YouTube war for creator hearts and minds is accelerating. YouTube added Shorts to its “Video Reach Campaigns”, which uses AI to help marketers place ads.
Stability AI – parent of image gen tool Stable Diffusion – just released a beta from its partner Deep Floyd called “Deep Floyd IF”, which supports text along with image generation.
There was a time when I really wanted to get into Clubhouse. And then once I did get in, it quickly succumbed to the Yogi Berra effect.
TikTok is working on a special label for creators to flag whether their videos were AI generated. This is similar to disclosing video sponsors, but I’m less optimistic it will make a difference.

This Week: The latest developments in the short-form video space, where YouTube and TikTok are battling for your attention and money. Plus, a cool new tool that lets you create images with text using AI. Also, thoughts on BlueSky ascending and Clubhouse dropping. It’s the second week of May and here’s what you need to know.

Short Form Video Monetization Heats Up: The TikTok/YouTube war for creator hearts and minds is accelerating. YouTube added Shorts to its “Video Reach Campaigns”, which uses AI to help marketers place ads. Big Red also added a new Select option to Shorts ads as well. Both promise to increase Shorts revenue for creators. TikTok announced that its “Creativity Program Beta” is now available to all creators in the U.S. It’s still a fund, not revshare, and will likely not include meaningful payouts – even if they are bigger than the $.04 CPV creator Nicole Marks-Martinez sees today. But if you’re a premium publisher (read old media), TikTok has something new for you – an expansion of Pulse to give brands access to videos from “trusted partners”. In a related story, at least some creators are cashing in over at TikTok’s secret UGC video factory. Looks like TikTok wants to lean into brands and media companies rather than support digital-native creators, but we’ll see how it nets out.

Text Finally Comes to AI Image Generators: So far, it’s been easier to clone a Warhol or Monet than add text to AI-generated images. But now auto thumbnail generation at scale – with text, AB testing and much more – is almost here. Stability AI – parent of image gen tool Stable Diffusion – just released a beta from its partner Deep Floyd called “Deep Floyd IF”, which supports text along with image generation. It’s far from perfect – but offers a glimpse into a fully automated future, one that’s much closer than ever. I created a handful of fun “Inside the Creator Economy” images, but only about 20% were usable. Some of the fails were super intriguing (look for those in the post comments). Give it a try here and post your best images in the comments below.

Skeeting and Tweeting in the Clubhouse: There was a time when I really wanted to get into Clubhouse. And then once I did get in, it quickly succumbed to the Yogi Berra effect: “no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”. And now with Clubhouse laying off half its staff, streamed voice-only events seem as quaint as N95 masks, PCR tests and buckets of hand-sanitizer. Now I’m outside the BlueSky velvet ropes, which the cool kids flash-mobbed last week. Yogi Berra’s coming for BlueSky too – but he’s also coming for all the big social platforms. Just as lemony fresh imaginary friends won’t save Snap, BlueSky’s new hotness won’t last. Another templated social network – at least to me – seems as antiquated as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

Sorting Out Deep Fakes: TikTok is working on a special label for creators to flag whether their videos were AI generated. This is similar to disclosing video sponsors, but I’m less optimistic it will make a difference. The technology will likely outpace efforts to rein it in – and it’s unlikely that unprincipled creators will flag their videos this way. Platforms will likely engage in an ultimately fruitless “whack a mole” effort focused on labelling, demonetizing or deleting AI-generated videos. I posted a crazy sci-fi solution to authenticate human-generated video, but in the end I forecast a return to authenticity and the continued rise of IRL creator experiences.

QUIBIS:

Snap launches its own Creator Marketplace called the “Snap Star Collab Studio”. Try saying that three times fast.
Amazon makes its TikTok-like feed of product videos available to everyone in the U.S. It’s better than it sounds.
Facebook’s charm offensive targets creators.
Phew: YouTube brings “sort by oldest” back to channel pages and promises even more “For You” style customizations in the future.
WPP doubles down on the creator economy and genAI.
Reddit wants to compete with Discord, adds new chat channel feature.
It’s official – podcasts are now part of YouTube Music. But podcasts aren’t doing that well there, at least so far.
Trending music becomes the latest ad-targeting option for YouTube too.
Fandom leans into creators and gaming.
Meta adds new ways for users to customize their Reels feed.
Stratechery explores a “Unified Content Business Model“, exposing the brilliance of YouTube, Netflix’s scale and how it’s all freemium in the end.
Roblox sharpens its appeal to older kids and adults.
Hard-working creator Alyssa McKay makes serious money on Snap.
Bytedance’s sensitive words tool includes TikTok-specific phrases.
Tubebuddy announces “Emerging Creator Awards”. Alas, non-YouTubers need not apply.
Ouchie: Meta forbidden from monetizing kids.
This Wednesday: TikTok World, streaming live. And Thursday brings Google IO – watch here.
How social media is changing college football.
Another story about how AI is changing media.

CRYPTIS & GENIES

New EU legislation might force GenAI companies to disclose training data – copyright lawyers can’t wait.
Sports Illustrated jumps into NFT-based ticketing.

TIPS OF THE WEEK:

Creator Brianna Seaberg has a quick checklist detailing how to reach out to creators – what to say, and what not to do. And in a related post, MarTech explains how to avoid pissing creators off.
Turning it around – tips for creators to reach out to brands from Hashtag Pay me.
After 22 time-zones in two weeks, I share my top tips for beating jetlag.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Viral Traffic Was Always Garbage” – Brian Morrisey in his awesome newsletter The Rebooting.

If you’re interested in working together as a sponsor to reach the leaders in the creator economy, check out Inside the Creator’s sponsorship packages and/or email me at jim@louderback.com.

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!

Next, Listen to This:

April 30, 2023

Posted April 26, 2023

IABM: Broadcasters Need to Clarify Cloud Economics (and Expectations)

TL;DR

The broadcast tech market has grown 4% since 2018 to reach $67 billion by end of 2021, according to the IABM
A lack of understanding about cloud and cloud economics is hindering adoption due to cost models and a lack of fully scalable, cross-platform storage.
Virtual production volumes equipped with LED walls are no longer considered bleeding-edge, the report finds.

NAB Show Names 2023 Product of the Year Award Winners

TL;DR

NAB Show named the winners of the fifth annual Product of the Year Awards during a live awards ceremony April 18 at the 2023 NAB Show in Las Vegas.
Winners were selected by a panel of industry experts across 15 categories, including three Best Overall Awards in the categories of Create, Connect and Capitalize.
To be eligible, companies had to nominate products they were exhibiting at NAB Show. The products also had to be available for delivery within the 2023 calendar year.

NAB Show has named the winners of the fifth annual Product of the Year Awards.

The announcement came during a live awards ceremony April 18 at the 2023 NAB Show in Las Vegas.

A panel of industry experts selected winners in 15 categories, including three Best Overall Awards in the categories of Create, Connect and Capitalize. To be eligible, companies had to nominate products they were exhibiting at NAB Show. The products also had to be available for delivery within the 2023 calendar year.

“Every year, NAB Show is excited to see what new, innovative breakthroughs our nominees have made to transform how content is created, connected and capitalized throughout the media and entertainment industry,” said Eric Trabb, senior vice president and chief customer success officer at NAB. “The winners of the 2023 Product of the Year Awards have demonstrated how they can help storytellers face the challenges of the present and future by revolutionizing the content lifecycle at all its stages.”

This year’s winners are:

CREATE CATEGORY

Audio Production, Processing and Networking

Audio Design Desk, Inc	Audio Design Desk 2.0
Calrec Audio	Argo
Clear-Com	Arcadia with HelixNet Integration
DanAds	Audio Ad Creation
Dotterel Technologies Limited	Konos

Cameras

ARRI	ARRI ALEXA 35
DJI	DJI Ronin 4D and the DJI Inspire 3
FUJIFILM North America Corporation	FUJIFILM X-H2 Mirrorless Digital Camera
Insta360	Insta360 ONE RS 1-Inch 360 Edition
Sony	FR7

Camera Support, Control and Accessories

Angenieux	Optimo Primes IOP
Atlas Lens Co.	Mercury Series
Canon	Canon Flex Zoom lenses – CN-E14-35mm T1.7 L S/SP wide-angle zoom lens and the CN-E31.5-95mm T1.7 L S/SP telephoto zoom lens
cmotion GmbH	Mainstation MST1
DJI	DJI RS 3 Pro and DJI Transmission
Domo Broadcast Systems	Eclipse TX Wireless Camera Transmitter
FUJIFILM North America Corporation	FUJINON HZK25-1000mm F2.8 CineBox PL Lens
Hudson Spider	Hudson Slider
LEMO Corporation	LEMO 12G-SDI 4K Ultra-High-Definition Transmission Push-Pull Connectors
Mark Roberts Motion Control	AJS-2 Autojib
Sony	VENICE Extension System 2
VidOvation	VidOlink Reacher II
Zinema Motion GmbH	THOR Camera Robot System

Graphics, Editing, VFX and Switchers

Maxon	Cinema 4D 2023
MYT Works	Cinetique Camera Motion System
Ross Video	Ross Video Carbonite Ultra 60 – Bigger, Faster & More Powerful
STYPE	GreenKiller chroma keyer
Tarantula AI Inc. (d/b/a KeyCast)	KeyCast
Vizrt	Viz Engine 5
Zero Density	Traxis Tracker: The Ultimate Camera Tracking Hub

Location/Studio Lighting

Aputure	INFINIBAR PB3, amaran 150c, MT Pro, and the amaran COB 60x S
ARRI Cine Technik GmbH & Co. Betriebs KG	Orbiter Projection Optics 25℃ and 35℃
BB&S Lighting	Reflect 4-Bank System
Creamsource	LNX Mounting System
Elation Professional	Fuze Max Profile and the Proteus Maximus™
FLUOTEC / GTM INC	Vegalux 300 HP™
Guangdong NanGuang Photo & Video Systems Co., Ltd.	NANLUX Evoke 900C
Kelvin	Kelvin Epos 600, 600W Full Color Spectrum RGBACL LED COB Studio Light
Kino Flo Lighting Systems	MIMIK 120 / Image Based Lighting Tile
LiteGear, Inc.	LiteMat Spectrum 8
Senna Ltd.	Masterpiece

Radio

DTS / XPERI	DTS AutoStage Broadcaster Portal
Nautel	VX Series
Gaian Solutions	Vani – An HD Radio Network as a Service Over ATSC 3.0
ip-studio powered by Telos Alliance	IP-Screener
Radio.Cloud	Radio.Cloud’s Live Studio
Tieline the Codec Company	MPX II Codec

Remote Production

Advanced Image Robotics	AIRcloud™
Amazon Web Services (AWS)	AWS Studio in the Cloud
Cobalt Digital	Flexible BBG-2110 JPEG-XS Converters
CueScript	CueTALK Cloud
Dalet	Dalet Cut
Evercast	Evercast desktop app
FUJIFILM North America Corporation	FUJIFILM and Adobe/Frame.io Camera to Cloud Integration
Haivision	Haivision StreamHub and Haivision Pro460
Nextologies	SDI Player and AVDS2
Program Productions, Inc	ProCrewz® Enterprise Resource Management System
SHOWRUNNER	SHOWRUNNER
Splashtop	Splashtop High-Performance Remote Production Technology for Broadcasting & Media
Streann Media	Streann Studio
Telos Alliance	Axia® Altus Virtual Mixing Console
TVU Networks	TVU RPS One
Vislink	5G-Link

CONNECT CATEGORY

Cloud Computing and Storage

Avid Technology	Avid \| NEXIS F2 SSD
CloudSoda	CloudSoda
DigitalGlue	creative.space 3.0
LucidLink	LucidLink FileSpaces
Gaian solutions	SUHAaaS – Secure Home Automation Software Upgrades
Hewlett Packard Enterprise	HPE ATSC 3.0 Broadcast Core Network
Matrox Video	Matrox ORIGIN
MinIO	MinIO
Nextologies	Nextologies’ Control Panel (CP)
Quantum Myriad™	All-Flash Scale-Out File and Object Storage
Rohde & Schwarz	SpycerNode2
SDVI	Rally
Storj	Storj: the latest iteration (faster media file download and upload speeds)
Studio Network Solutions	EVO Cloud
Wasabi Technologies	Wasabi Cloud Sync Manager
WEKA	WEKA® Data Platform (Fourth Generation)
Viking Enterprise Solutions	Cloud Native Obsidian (CNO) Edge Appliance
OpenDrives	Atlas Core Software-Defined Storage (SDS)

Hardware Infrastructure

ABonAir Ltd.	AB612 – 4K/UHD Wireless Video System
AJA Video Systems, Inc.	AJA Dante AV 4K-T and 4K-R
Black Box	Emerald® DESKVUE
Cobalt Digital	Sapphire 8JXS-8S Bulk Conversion
LEMO Corporation	LEMO 12G-SDI 4K Ultra-High-Definition Transmission Push-Pull Connectors
ST Engineering iDirect	MCX8000 Multi-Carrier Satellite Gateway
TSL	X-Connect IP Routing Control System

IT Networking/Infrastructure & Security

Gaian Solutions	SUHAaaS – Software Upgrades & Home Automation by NextGenTV Broadcaster
Nevion	VideoIPath Federation Support
NEP Group	TFC Link

Monitoring and Measuring Tools

22HBG – Elenos Group	TX Control
Avateq Corp.	AVQ1030 – ATSC 3.0 MIMO Receiver and Analyzer
Bridge Technologies	VB330 with new SCTE 104/35 & visual recording functionality
InSync	Technologies FrameFormer
Shure Incorporated	AD600 Axient® Digital Spectrum Manager
SSIMWAVE, an IMAX company	SSIMWAVE VOD Monitor
Touchstream	ISP Insights: Plugging the Gap in Content Delivery Monitoring
Triveni Digital	ATSC 3.0 Translator
Witbe	Witbox+
Zixi	Intelligent Data Platform (IDP)

CAPITALIZE CATEGORY

AI/Machine Learning

Adobe	Text-Based Editing in Adobe Premiere Pro
Digital Nirvana	MediaServices IQ V.2
EVS	XtraMotion 2.0
Gaian solutions	The M3 – Mobius Monetization Mechanisms framework for NextGenTV
MediaKind	MediaKind Atlas Upscale
Magnifi by VideoVerse	Magnifi Digital Highlights Pro Featuring AI-enabled Ball Tracking
Newsbridge	MXT-1
Perifery	Perifery AI+
Prime Focus Technologies	CLEAR® AI – Video Reframing and Transformation
SoundNodes	SoundID AI
Supermicro	Liquid Cool AI Development Platform
Verimatrix	Verimatrix Streamkeeper
Veritone	Veritone Generative AI
VoiceInteraction	Audimus.Media

Streaming

Amazon Web Services (AWS)	AWS Elemental MediaConnect Gateway
APP CATS LLC	CrowdLIVE INTERACTIVE
Backlight	Zype Apps Creator
Fabric	Origin
Harmonic	VOS®360 Ad
MediaKind	MediaKind Aquila with SG1
OBSBOT by REMO TECH Co., Ltd.	Tiny 2
QUANTEEC	QUANTEEC
Synamedia	Quortex Link
Teradek	Prism Mobile
Zixi Inc.	Zixi D2C Gateway

Asset Management, Automation and Playout

Amagi	Amagi NOW
Alteon.io	Alteon.io
Ateliere Creative Technologies	Ateliere Connect
Fincons and Mediaset	Dynamic Ad Insertion
MEDIAEDGE	MEDIAEDGE SHARE
Perfect Memory	COGNITIVE ASSET MANAGEMENT
Prime Focus Technologies	CLEAR® Localize
PRODUCER – Maker Machina	SaaS, Film Project Management Software
qibb by Techtriq	qibb – the integration platform for future-proof media solutions
WiseDV Inc.	WisePlay / Playout

Digital Signage & Display Systems

AOTO Electronics	RM Series-Fine pixel pitch LED display for Virtual Production
Brompton Technology	Tessera G1
Gaian Solutions	Mobius DTaaS – SaaS Factory
MEDIAEDGE	MEDIAEDGE SHARE
Sony	ELF-SR2 – Sony 27″ Spatial Reality Display

BEST OVERALL in the CREATE category is:

FUJIFILM North America Corporation

FUJINON HZK25-1000mm F2.8 CineBox PL Len

The BEST OVERALL in the CONNECT category is:

ABonAir Ltd.

AB612 – 4K/UHD Wireless Video System

The BEST OVERALL in the CAPITALIZE category is:

MediaKind

MediaKind Aquila with SG1

May 1, 2023

Posted April 25, 2023

How SVODs Are Shifting Their Business Models

TL;DR

There is currently a huge push towards ad-based business models among ad-free subscription-based services. Introducing advertising allows companies to maximize revenue while lowering the cost of entry and thus attracting more users.
More than three-quarters of SVOD streamers plan to introduce ads by 2025, with nearly 60% of those planning to implement a hybrid model that combines an ad-supported tier alongside a premium, subscription-based one.
Adoption of third-party video analytics is well underway. 39% of ad-based services don’t fully trust their ad server data, yet only 25% use third-party ad analytics.

The AI-Based Future for Video Compression

TL;DR

VVC is one of a number of video compression technologies in use by the industry as it transitions from HEVC.
Beyond that, AI is expected to be used to optimize video streaming bandwidth and to enhance existing compression schemes.
The video industry won’t abandon established and proven methods too early. Instead there will be a mix of both approaches as AI research expands.

Spotlight on VVC

Unsurprisingly given its own stake in the development and licensing, InterDigital makes much of Versatile Video Coding (VVC/H.266) as the standout video codec that will take over much of the work from existing lead standard HEVC.

Based on research by codec specialist Bitmovin, H.264/AVC continues to be a popular choice for live and offline encoding, but InterDigital thinks this is likely to be overtaken by both H.265/HEVC and AOM AV1 within the next two years.

The VVC (H.266) is based on H.265/HEVC and offers up to a 50% bit rate reduction.

Alongside InterDigital, major semiconductor companies including Qualcomm, Broadcom and MediaTek are among the largest contributors of intellectual property into the VVC standard. They will integrate into Android smartphone chipsets, helping to drive VVC adoption into mobile. More widely, hardware decoders are under development to provide support for VVC on TVs, STBs and PCs.

Chinese technology giants Alibaba and Tencent each have their own versions of VVC codec (S266v2 and TenCent266, respectively).

NHK and Spin Digital are also developing real-time software VVC decoders to support UHD live streaming and broadcast applications.

Therefore, InterDigital believes, VVC is likely to become the favored codec as UHD services proliferate with expectations that it will be universally accepted and used from 2026 onward.

However, it says, “VVC may not replace H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC entirely, but instead the industry is likely to advocate the coexistence of multiple codecs during the transition.”

Looking further ahead though and codecs like VVC, HEVC and AV1 will likely be superseded by technologies based on neural networks.

“The days of static, block-based codecs may be coming to an end,” InterDigital notes. “Traditional coding techniques use hard-coded algorithms and, although these are entirely appropriate for saving bandwidth, their advancement is still based on traditional heuristics.

“New coding methods, notably those exploiting the power of AI, are poised to supplant current wisdom within the next five years.”

Enter AI

Machine learning techniques are being researched by the major video standards organizations worldwide. The MPEG JVET Adhoc Group 11 is working on NNVC (Neural Network Video Coding) in an attempt to create an AI-based codec before the end of the decade.

The paper explains that there are three primary areas of focus: dynamic frame rate encoding, dynamic resolution encoding, and layering.

In dynamic frame rate encoding, the AI aims to encode video at the minimum frame rates necessary to encapsulate the content without sacrificing quality. News broadcasts might be encoded at 30fps, whereas live sports content benefits from 60fps.

“Using ML to train AI to identify the type of content, it is possible to significantly reduce the encode compute requirements, approaching a 30% reduction overall for content with limited movement between frames.”

Dynamic resolution encoding extends existing compression techniques that streaming content providers employ today. Here, the resolution-bit-rate choices are determined on a scene-by-scene basis to optimize file storage requirements and streaming bandwidth using encode ladders. Using AI, however, would remove the requirement for encode ladders.

“Replacing this ‘brute force’ approach not only reduces computation, but also helps improve sustainability by banishing unnecessary energy usage,” says InterDigital.

This applies to offline encoding as well. Netflix, for instance, has been using AI to avoid exhaustive encodes of all the parameter combinations, with neural based methods discovering the optimum selection to reduce file sizes.

The third AI focus on layering is aimed at delivering higher-resolution content. Using scalable techniques, UHD videos are encoded using a base layer at HD resolution along with an enhancement layer that conveys the extra data required to reconstruct UHD frames. HD-only receivers ignore the enhancement data, whereas a 4K-capable product uses the additional layer to decode and reconstruct the entire video stream.

AI-derived methods are also likely to extend beyond these traditional techniques. For example, AI could reconstruct video using low-resolution reference images alongside metadata describing the context, “delivering a credible approximation to the original video with a significant reduction in bandwidth.”

While ML and AI have a place in helping define current and future video coding, InterDigital says that the industry isn’t about to drop its existing tools and models.

“The industry concurs that traditional video coding tools presently outperform AI-based alternatives in most areas today,” it states. “There are over 30 years of engineering effort and hundreds of companies involved in perfecting video compression standards; this isn’t easily replicated or supplanted by introducing AI into the discipline.”

For instance, the complexity of neural networks “is often exceptionally high” which leads to a proportional increase in energy usage.

“This leads to the inevitable questions around the scalability of such solutions, and the impact of media on environmental sustainability,” InterDigital says.

There are other challenges with AI-based video development. One of them is measurement. While the video standard is fully described and verified against agreed metrics, “when using AI, it is sometimes difficult to explain exactly how the implementation operates; there must be an understanding on how AI-based algorithms adhere to the specifications and produce standards-compliant bitstreams.”

Part of the work of the JVET AhG11 is to establish clear rules by which AI methods can be assessed and made reproducible.

Then there’s the sheer pace of development in AI, which has resulted in generation of synthetic media. With synthetic media, instead of transmitting an image for every frame using existing compression techniques, systems can use AI to identify key data points describing the features of a person’s face. A compact representation is then sent across the network, where a second AI engine reconstructs the original image from the point data.

Consequently, InterDigital thinks it may become unnecessary to send video frames, and instead systems might describe scenes using metadata.

The next evolution is data-driven synthetic media, created in near-real time and used in place of traditional media that could see hyper-personalized video advertising created and delivered within seconds.

“Cloud and device AI processing capability will undoubtedly need to develop substantially for this to happen at scale,” says InterDigital, “however the future for video coding and transmission certainly seems destined for significant transformation.”

May 4, 2023

Posted April 24, 2023

Jim Louderback: Saving Journalism on TikTok and YouTube, Plus 7 Surprisingly Successful Shorts Formats

BY JIM LOUDERBACK

TL;DR

The YouTube Shorts team shared fascinating insight at #IJF23 about how the algorithm really works – and how different it is from long form.
Dueling panels at #IFJ attempted to pit YouTube vs TikTok but ended up elevating both.
Big dust-up over the AI-generated Drake and Weeknd song released early last week. Everyone loved it – except the two artists and their label. And everyone else who creates authentic media.
Big news from Snap’s Partner Summit – now more creators can get in on the revenue.

This Week: Interesting creator economy insight from my visit to the International Journalism Festival (#IJF23) last week. Revealing data from the Shorts team and the TikTok and YouTube creators were surprising. I also spoke about LinkedIn (see tips section below). Also a Snap summit, AI fakes and megatrends too! It’s the last week of April and here’s what you need to know.

Seven Surprisingly Successful Shorts Formats: The YouTube Shorts team shared fascinating insight at #IJF23 about how the algorithm really works – and how different it is from long form. They gave tips on how news and factual creators should build views and audience on Shorts and laid out the seven formats that drive the most views. No surprise – they still won’t commit to longer than 60 seconds. But they did encourage creators to experiment and use analytics. Fifty billion daily views can’t be wrong. Related – Video Creators with more insight on Shorts growth and Paddy Galloway’s more pessimistic research findings.

Could TikTok and YouTube Save Journalism? Dueling panels at #IFJ attempted to pit YouTube vs TikTok but ended up elevating both. Google News brought top YouTube journalists – including Chloe Abraham and Johnny Harris – to talk about how they’re building the creator economy of journalism. Over on the TikTok side, Washington Post’s TikTok star Dave Jorgenson was joined by execs from Brut and The News Movement to explore TikTok. No sparks ensued, as the panelists were more alike than different. Read my story about the sessions and let me know if you agree with my startling conclusion: TikTok, YouTube and other social video platforms might actually save journalism.

AI-Generated Creator-First Media Is Not Going Away: Big dust-up over the AI-generated Drake and Weeknd song released early last week. Everyone loved it – except the two artists and their label. And everyone else who creates authentic media. But this is not going away. Creators and artists can either embrace it and build new business models or put their heads in the sand and sue everyone. Imagine, for example, if Taylor Swift started her own “Swiftify” service that included all her music – but also encouraged fans to develop GenAI Swift songs too. And she promised to share revenue for top creations? Swifties would subscribe for sure and everyone would make money. Is this the end of music as we know it, or a great new opportunity for creators? Share your thoughts in the comments below. For a more far-out think piece, check out Stratechery’s take.

Snap Expands Revenue Sharing: Big news from Snap’s Partner Summit – now more creators can get in on the revenue. It’s a welcome expansion of the monetization options we’ve been talking about here for the last few weeks and could transform Snap into a viable creator economy platform. But it’s also a diffusion of vision, according to Casey Newton, who sees these moves as a hazy way to become just like everyone else. I think Snap can do both, and that this is great news for creators – for now. The hard work comes from expanding the platform and offering more opportunity to creators while still charting a unique course.

Three Megatrends that Will Change Media: Media cartographer Evan Shapiro explores the rise of “Yes, AND” across all forms of media – from broadcast to streaming to creator-first platforms. It’s all about the cults, he insists. Worth a read. Also, he wants to change “Creator Economy” to “Community Economy”. I’ve been calling it community-centric media for years, so of course I agree. Still not changing the name of this newsletter though.

QUIBIS:

Download the decks used by 36 Creator Economy companies to raise nearly a billion dollars of venture funding.
I guess I’ll never return that old Netflix DVD now.
Casey Newton explores Snap’s future in the aftermath of its Partner Summit.
Beware of lazy reporting. This story from Net Influencer highlights a study from 2022 as if it were brand new (I covered it here on 11-28-2022). The data is from May 2022. It’s ancient history.
Instagram ups links in bio to 5. Some think Linktree is dead. I think it’s more nuanced – the smaller companies will die, but Linktree (and a handful of others) provide much more value.
The D’Amelios won’t buy TikTok after all. Dang, that would have been epic.
Newsletter plug: I really like the “Film Booth” newsletter, great stuff last week about focus, burn-out and thumbnails. Worth subscribing to (scroll to bottom of Ed’s site).
TikTok leans into performance marketing.
Good essay on “Eventness” from Brad Berens, riffing off the end of TNG. You can skip much of the trekkie stuff at the top, but anyone creating live experiences should read this.
Jellysmack will distribute creator-first videos on Spotify.
Kai Cenat banned from Twitch (again).

GENIES and CRYPTIS:

Reddit wants money from GenAI companies for scraping its data. I wonder if they’ll share it with creators?
AI will make the internet beautiful – unleashing all sorts of creators and creativity. I support that!
Startup culture beware – AI will also lead to the democratization of company formation – like how the internet and streaming enabled the creator economy.
Interesting report on brands and NFTs show that there’s been little decline in interest or activity.
Nike drops its first .Swoosh NFT sneakers
Roblox releases resalable digital items – just don’t call them NFTs!
Forget ads – here’s how GenAI makes money.
Stability AI releases an open-sourced Large Language Model to complement its GenAI image tools.

Tip of the Week: I gave a workshop at #IJF23 on how journalists can use LinkedIn to build their personal brand – you can download the slides from that presentation here. It’s relevant to anyone looking to grow on LinkedIn.

If you’re interested in working together as a sponsor to reach the leaders in the creator economy, check out Inside the Creator’s sponsorship packages and/or email me at jim@louderback.com.

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!

Next Up, Listen to This

June 27, 2023

Posted April 24, 2023

Why Streaming Has to Become More Social, Interactive, and Immersive

TL;DR

Deloitte’s latest Digital Media Trends survey says “subscription fatigue” among consumers is getting worse, making it even more challenging for SVOD streamers to retain customers.
Millennials are the most likely to have made changes to digital media subscriptions due to economic pressures.
Americans spend $48 per month on video streaming services — and half of those surveyed say that’s too much.

Next, Watch This

Watch the NAB Show session, “Immersive Storytelling: Expanding Audiences with XR in Games, Education, and Location-Based Entertainment” that examines the growing convergence between traditional entertainment and advanced technology and what’s next on the horizon for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and extended reality (XR).

April 19, 2023

Posted April 18, 2023

Jim Louderback: The Platform Helping Mid-Level Creators Pull Down Six Figures a Week On Snap – Plus Old Media Titans vs. Scrappy Underdogs (Again)

BY JIM LOUDERBACK

TL;DR

Snap has turned super-lucrative, at least for authenticated creators. I sat in on an eye-popping Rich Greenfield-moderated creator panel (free reg) with Savannah Demers, King Bach and Tati Bruening.
Brian Morrissey with a thoughtful essay on how Barry Diller and other traditional media titans are girding for war against AI and Large Language Models.
We trust creators more than celebrities. That’s just one of the surprising conclusions from Izea’s new “Trust in Influencer Marketing” study.

This Week: How to make six figures on Snap, Izea’s surprising study on how much we trust creators, and what to do when your creator career wanes. Plus, Montana bans TikTok, new Reels features and much more. It’s the third week of April 2023 and here’s what you need to know.

Grinding For Crystals: Snap has turned super-lucrative, at least for authenticated creators. I sat in on an eye-popping Rich Greenfield-moderated creator panel (free reg) with Savannah Demers, King Bach and Tati Bruening. Bach said creators can make way more on Snap than YouTube and six figures in a week is not uncommon. It’s all about crystals, added Savannah, the more you post, the more crystals you get. Want more crystals? It’s all about “how good is your clickbait”, she added. Crystals mean money, explained Tati, redeemable for ten cents each. Rich and I will be talking about this and more on stage at VidCon – see you there! And in related news Instagram plans to expand Reels revshare with many more creators “soon”.

Established Media – Embrace or Obstruct? Brian Morrissey with a thoughtful essay on how Barry Diller and other traditional media titans are girding for war against AI and Large Language Models. It’s a familiar story that played out repeatedly during the rise of the creator economy, and typically leads to heartbreak for the courtroom crusaders. Remember when Viacom sued YouTube in 2007 and famously shunned the popular platform until a settlement in 2014. Bad strategic move, as the MTV parent lost an entire generation of kids – and subsequently had to buy Awesomeness and VidCon to rebuild relevance. But that won’t stop the old guard from trying – thus accelerating their slide into irrelevance.

We Trust Creators More Than Celebrities: That’s just one of the surprising conclusions from Izea’s new “Trust in Influencer Marketing” study. Fielded in mid-December 2022, it finds that even older consumers are jumping on the “buy from influencers” bandwagon. Best platforms? Still YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, but TikTok is rising – and GenZ leads the way. Good stuff, but directional, not predictive.

Your Trip is Short: Let’s face it, the creator lifecycle is even shorter than an NFL player. Very few YouTubers from 2010 – for instance – are big now. The shelf-life for TikTokers is even more fleeting. What do you do? One option: work for other creators behind the camera. Or get a job and create for the company too (NYT$). Companies are waking up to the unique value that creators can bring – even training their employees to create on the side. Just make sure you don’t sign your rights away when you take the job.

QUIBIS:

Instagram rolls out new Reels features, including a “What’s Trending” section, updated analytics and better editing tools.
Patreon lays out its “creator-first” approach to generative AI tools.
Montana votes to ban TikTok – perhaps Missoula (where Hank Green and VidCon reside) will secede.
New Twitch CEO meeting with creators, wants to improve sponsor options.
Instagram’s Creator Marketplace is in trouble, but plans to expand access to brand agencies (how about approving my application?)
One of my favorite media reporters, Janko Roettgers, rises from the Politico ashes with a new newsletter and site. Subscribe today!
NeimanLab explores why video podcasts are a big thing.
Creator Juice shares details on how creators use the money it invests in them.
Twitter relaunches Super Follows – lowers barrier to entry to 500 from 10k.
New social network for creators – CreatorLand – wants you to sign up. Alas, I could only get on the waitlist and it didn’t recognize my LinkedIn followers.
Passionfruit rounds up the top five video editors for TikTok.
Not Good: Meta Verified doxxing its users. Doesn’t anyone there understand creators?
Good interview with Lionsgate’s director of digital marketing about the right way to run a TikTok brand account.
A tearful farewell to DreamSMP.
Substack Notes is cool and worth checking out – but not sure it will do a better job killing Twitter than Twitter itself.
BBTV proves that the skeevy MCN will never die.
Paid membership for creators explored in detail.
I didn’t even know there was an “International ASMR Day”, but YouTube did.
A16z releases a rosy “state of Crypto Q1 2023” report. I found the zero-knowledge part particularly fascinating.

GENIES:

ChatGPT is a reasoning engine with knowledge. But that’s likely to change.
Stability.AI releases next version of Stable Diffusion – called “XL”. Try it now.
Facebook developing AI-generated “Advanced Stories” to get you to post more content.

Tip of the Week:

Meta shares details on how to optimize your campaigns for Facebook and Instagram.
Everything you need to know about whitelisting and dark posts.

Where’s Jim: This week I’m hosting Creator Squared at The Nab Show Monday and Tuesday (Vegas baby) and then speaking at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy on April 22. Then hanging out first weekend at Jazzfest NOLA! Hope to see you at one of these awesome events.

Thanks 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!

If you’re interested in working together as a sponsor to reach the leaders in the creator economy, check out Inside the Creator’s sponsorship packages and/or email me at jim@louderback.com.

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!

Next, Listen To This:

April 15, 2023

Posted April 14, 2023

SVOD: Scale and the Curse of the Serial Churner

TL;DR

Market data platform Antenna highlights five factors of importance in the year ahead: pursuing scale, revenue optimization, dual revenue streams, owning the customer relationship, and customer segmentation.
Perhaps the most important battle is now around owning the customer relationship, but customer segmentation could be the defining topic going forward.
With an increased focus on profitable growth, SVODs are becoming more aggressive in their efforts to maximize revenue, even at the expense of some topline subscriber growth.

Owning the Customer Relationship

An increasingly important battle is the competition for the customer relationship. 53% of Gross Adds that Antenna observed in 2022 came through a distribution platform — Apple, Amazon, Roku or Google — not directly with the services themselves.

“D2C models are great for brands because they do not share margin with retailers or wholesalers, and they fully control the customer relationship. When an SVOD service wins a customer through a distribution partner, they typically share the economics, and the distribution partner controls portions of the customer data and communication (sometimes, a lot of it).”

These distribution arrangements can potentially deliver substantial incremental customers. And in environments like Amazon channels which load the services’ programming directly into their app, SVODs can save product development and upkeep costs because they do not have to operate their own proprietary app.

Antenna says, “Balancing the benefits and challenges of distributing in third-party environments is a key issue that Services will consider as they manage to profitable growth in the coming years.”

Cr: Antenna
Cr: Antenna
Cr: Antenna
Cr: Antenna
Cr: Antenna
Cr: Antenna
Cr: Antenna
Cr: Antenna
Cr: Antenna
Cr: Antenna

The final theme is one that Antenna think will be a defining topic for subscription marketers for years to come: customer segmentation.

There are many different approaches for segmenting consumers, but two which it believe are especially important for subscription marketers are re-subscribers and serial churners.

Re-subscribers are consumers who sign up for a service after previously cancelling it and made up 23% of all gross additions in 2022.

“Netflix has a high re-subscriber number simply because so many Americans have already subscribed to the service at some point in the past. Put another way, Netflix is running out of Americans who have never tried Netflix!“

On the other end of the spectrum, Peacock had almost no re-subscribers in 2020 because it launched in April of that year, but already by 2022, 20% of their Gross Adds were observed by Antenna to be re-subscribers.

Serial churners are those individuals frequently moving in and out of services — often to chase hit shows they want to watch at that moment.

Antenna measures them as individuals who have at least three cancels in the past two years among the 10 premium SVOD services it measures.

So by that definition, one in five Americans is a serial churner and accounted for 29% of sign-ups in 2022, up from 15% in 2020.

Netflix is seeing a particularly pronounced growth, with serial churners making up 32% of sign-ups in 2022, versus 13% in 2020.

Per Antenna, “It is crucial that services segment out these serial churners. For one thing, their survival curves are much steeper than the rest of subscribers, resulting in lower customer lifetime values. If a service is not distinguishing between these two segments, then their analysis of cost of acquisition will be misleading.”

While changing macroeconomic conditions have played a factor in all these changes, the adjustment is also suitable in the context of a more mature market and a more fickle – or more sophisticated — consumer.

April 14, 2023

Posted April 14, 2023

How Connected TV Can/Should Enable Content Discovery

TL;DR

LG Ad Solutions study highlights the importance of TV homepages as the focal point for content discovery amid increasing amount of content available on CTV.
Consumers reported spending an average of 5.7 minutes between the time they turned on the TV and when they started watching content.
A fifth of viewers say they are watching less linear cable and satellite TV than 12 months ago.

Build the Perfect NAB Show Experience.

Add the Amplify+ VIP package to your NAB Show registration for only $99 and gain access to an exclusive community online and at the Show. Plus, you’ll enjoy year-round networking, education, content and Show perks so you’re always in the know at and between Shows.

For $99, you’ll gain access to expedited VIP entry at the Main Stage theater, access to the NAB Amplify+ VIP Lounge and Wi-Fi Hot Spot located in Central Hall lobby, and an exclusive invite to the NAB Amplify+ VIP Party on Monday, April 17 at Aria Jewel with expedited VIP entry starting at 10:30 p.m.

Beginning May 2, you’ll also find a full article in your email inbox each Tuesday offering exclusive NAB Show conversations, sessions and recaps. You’ll also be granted VIP perks when you register for NAB Show New York, October 25 – 26, 2023.

April 25, 2023

Posted April 13, 2023

Live Video: How Broadcasters Can Meaningfully Engage with 5G, Cloud, and IP

TL;DR

Haivision’s latest Broadcast Transformation Report analyzes technology trends in live video contribution, 5G, cloud, IP and sustainability.
The results indicate that adoption of network technologies including cloud, IP and 5G continues to evolve, while on-premise operations remain absolutely critical in the broadcast industry.
In addition, the findings highlight that broadcasters recognize the important benefits that 5G cellular networks offer for broadcast applications.

Evan Shapiro: Streaming Habits Have Shifted (Again)… Here’s How and Why

TL;DR

Nearly four years deep into the streaming wars and emerging from post-lockdown subscription hangover, the state of streaming TV is best described as “in flux.”
US consumer streaming behavior is shifting rapidly and is doing so somewhat differently at the far ends of the demographic spectrum.
Life experience — how we were raised to watch TV — still seems to influence how we consume TV now.

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

TL;DR

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.
Matt Gielen from Little Monster shares his home-grown process to value a YouTube back catalog to help you value your videos fairly.
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.
Twitter and Substack are now at war. If you have a Substack newsletter, you can no longer use Twitter to promote it.

LEARN MORE AT NAB SHOW: Creator Squared Sessions at NAB Show

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!

If you’re interested in working together as a sponsor to reach the leaders in the creator economy, check out Inside the Creator’s sponsorship packages and/or email me at jim@louderback.com

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!

April 7, 2023

Posted April 7, 2023

Citibank: The Creator Economy Will Be Worth $75 Billion by 2024

TV television glitch metaverse web 3 regulation

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CREATIVE ECONOMY: Creator Squared Sessions at NAB Show

TL;DR

Around half of creator economy revenues stem from ad-based video platforms like YouTube.
A creator’s average net revenue is inversely proportional to the number of creators that use the platform.
The role of AI and Web3 technologies are highlighted for their near-term potential to supercharge the entire sector.

LEARN MORE AT NAB SHOW: Creator Squared Sessions at NAB Show

Jim Louderback: A Creator Economy in Transition + Pew TikTok Survey Finds Broad Support for Ban

BY JIM LOUDERBACK

TL;DR

One of the top global early-stage VC firms just updated their Creator Economy forecast, and it’s a must read.
Pew’s latest research – released Friday – shows that more than half of Americans are in favor of a TikTok ban, and more than a quarter aren’t sure.
Substack is only the most recent company to ask its users to pay to play. But instead of verified check marks, Substack re-opened its 2021 investment round.

LEARN MORE AT NAB SHOW: Creator Squared Sessions at NAB Show

This Week: A comprehensive analysis of the creator economy by global VC firm Antler shows an industry in transition, a new Pew report finds that only 22% of Americans oppose a TikTok ban, while 40% aged 18-29 didn’t know TikTok was owned by a Chinese company. Also, Substack’s head-scratching investment round, Wired’s takedown of live-streamed shopping, and the rise of video podcasts. It’s the first week of April and here’s what you need to know.

Fascinating Look at the Creator Economy in 2023: One of the top global early-stage VC firms just updated their Creator Economy forecast, and it’s a must read. With a mix of quantitative data and directional interviews, Antler concludes that “we see the industry moving toward consolidation rather than rapid growth—for now.” But “It is not failing—it is evolving and changing direction.” The report makes 6 salient predictions about platform trends and predicts creators will focus on building closer relationships with fans, diversify revenue streams, launch their own branded product lines and use Generative AI to go global. Author Ollie Forsyth and I chatted on stage at Creator World in Singapore last November, and he continues to deliver salient insights for all of us. Also I’m honored to be one of Antler’s 50 creators to watch this year.

Only 22% of Americans Oppose a TikTok Ban: That’s what Pew’s latest research – released Friday – shows. More than half are in favor, and more than a quarter aren’t sure. Other interesting nuggets: over 40% of Americans 18-29 didn’t know TikTok was owned by a Chinese company, while 88% across all ages don’t trust Chinese social companies. However, 75% also had misgivings about American social platforms too. How do teens and tweens feel? Unknown, as they weren’t included in the study.

For more on this story, check out Colin and Samir’s take on the potential TikTok ban, while the Today Show leans into creator ramifications. Marketers are also wary – and some are pulling back. Plus, it’s more than just TikTok – three other Chinese apps are among the top 10 in the US too.

Beware Social Platforms Begging for Money: Substack is only the most recent company to ask its users to pay to play. But instead of verified check marks, Substack re-opened its 2021 investment round, specifically for newsletter authors. More than 4,700 newsletter writers committed to invest over $5M for the not-yet profitable venture. Brian Morrissey put it best – and put it in context – when he wrote, “this is Willie Sutton skipping the bank to head to the library.” I appreciate the aligning of incentives here, but it should have been at either a substantial discount, or an outright grant based on standard metrics and vesting timelines.

Live-streamed Shopping Is a Dud in the West: That’s what Wired just concluded. “I haven’t seen one success case,” says an expert in the story. She might not be looking hard enough. Last week at Shoptalk, Max Benator and Orca showed off a pop-up live shopping experience with TikTok that mirrored a similar effort at SXSW. I’ve seen his rodeo and it’s impressive. There’s a difference, though, between China and the U.S. In the U.S. we want to be entertained, while in China they are OK with being sold to. Smart marketers are also using live shopping as part of broader awareness and conversion campaigns – and seeing $2 CPMs and $.10 cost per click from those live streams. The truth is out there if you only look for it.

The Rise of Video Podcasts: Looking for a long-form way to engage audiences and drive revenue? Perhaps a video podcast is the right approach. Both YouTube and Spotify are investing to build video-based conversational formats into their platforms. Spotify announced a new white-glove service with select Creative Juice creators, while YouTube expands via a new lockup with Slate. Video podcasting is nothing new, it started in 2003 and was popular on iTunes before YouTube was a thing. But up until five years ago it was relatively dormant. Not anymore. Riverside has a good overview of video podcasting – and now might be the time for more video creators and brands to dive in.

AI Is Bad, Mkay: In an open letter to, well, everyone, a who’s who of the AI industry called

TL;DR

Provenance

Lanier’s Role

Open Source Concerns

The Benefits of Speaking Up

Subscribe

TL;DR

READ MORE: The Next Wave of Creator Marketing: New Study from LTK and Northwestern University Retail Analytics Council (LTK)

READ MORE: Influencer or creator? Here’s how marketers can know who to hire (Digiday)

READ MORE: What Brands Need to Know About Creator Marketing in 2024 (Adweek)

Subscribe

TL;DR

READ MORE: The Creator Economy — Getting Creative and Growing (Citi)

READ MORE: The creator economy could approach half-a-trillion dollars by 2027 (Goldman Sachs)

READ MORE: 5 charts showing the creator economy’s recent evolution (Insider Intelligence)

READ MORE: The creator economy is a $250 billion industry and it’s here to stay (Business Insider)

READ MORE: Find me a zebra and you can have the job (Business Insider)

READ MORE: Top Creators 2023 (Forbes)

READ MORE: 51% of creators make less than $500 per month, according to a new survey (Business Insider)

READ MORE: Creators Uncovered: Insights from a Nationally Representative Study of US Creators (Keller Advisory Group)

AI Comes To the Creator Economy

READ MORE: Top investors name the 14 most promising creator economy startups in 2023, from Beehiiv to Midjourney (Business Insider)

READ MORE: How creators are using AI: A survey of 2,000 influencers delves into the top tools, ethical dilemmas, and more (Business Insider)

WATCH MORE: The creator economy is changing, but can it thrive? (Financial Times)

Subscribe

TL;DR

What Creators Want to Make

Creating Impact

Creator, Collaborator, Partner

Visit our dedicated resource for the creator economy here.

Subscribe

Watch media universe cartographer Evan Shapiro’s keynote address, “What’s Next” at the 2023 NAB Show New York.

TL;DR

READ MORE: Evan Shapiro Reveals “What’s Next” for Media in the User-Centric Era — Part 1 (NAB Amplify)

Streaming Ascendant: Growth and Challenges

Adapt or Perish: The New Metrics of Media Advertising

Shapiro’s “7 Rules of Gravity for the User-Centric Era”

Subscribe

Watch media universe cartographer Evan Shapiro’s keynote address, “What’s Next” at the 2023 NAB Show New York.

TL;DR

The User-Centric Era of Media Is Already Here

Local News Isn’t Just Surviving, It’s Thriving

The Future of FAST

Subscribe

TL;DR

READ MORE: Buying media technology in the age of efficiency (Caretta Research/Bubble Agency)

The Economy of SaaS

Generative AI Interest

Trade Show Value

Subscribe

TL;DR

READ MORE: Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends 2024 (Gartner)

Next, Watch This:

Subscribe

TL;DR

Subscribe

Subscribe

What is Creativity?

Generative AI Doesn’t Belong in Either Category

The Big Risk: A Generic Spiral

Can We Enjoy AI and Also Preserve Creativity?

Artificial Intelligence: Understanding the Potential for Media & Entertainment

Subscribe

TL;DR

Creating and Casting Raxana

Other AI Anchors

The New Face of News?

WHERE IT’S AT: NAB SHOW NEW YORK INSIGHT THEATER

Subscribe

TL;DR

New at NAB Show New York: Photo+Video Lab

So what is the Photo+Video Lab? It’s a space where the worlds of photo and video converge, where image-based, still photography fuses with motion capture, where you find the inspiration to try something new.

It’s a space to connect — not only with the end-to-end workflow for your craft, but with your community. Content creators. Photographers. Videographers. And so many others… through photo walks, meetups, Q&A sessions, demos, exhibits, workshops and more. View the full schedule of events here.

Dive into a full-on immersion into the photo and video world with an integrated workflow experience that will allow you to sample the latest tech and gear side-by-side from iconic brands and innovative newcomers.

Subscribe

TL;DR

What’s New and Notable?

READ MORE: Interview: Evan Shapiro – Charting Disruption With Graphic Content (IBC365)

Your Favorite Map Is Here ⬇️

Surviving the Media Apocalypse