Calling It: Online Video is Now Old Media - and Was TikTok Just Dethroned?

This Week: It’s the first week of August and here’s what you need to know (plus a TikTok limerick at the bottom!).

Online Video is Old Media: The gogo growth days of social video are fading. It’s time to admit that we’re in a maturing industry now. During online video’s rapid growth, capturing creators and signing up new users were paramount. But now everyone already logs into YouTube, Meta and TikTok – and brand affinities are mostly set. There are few new eyeballs left to entice. Platforms mostly copy each other rather than innovate – what I call the carcinization of social. But investors and Wall Street still demand quarterly growth. From market share poaching to cutting costs and building adjacent businesses, today’s mostly new platform CEOs have changed strategy. 

• TikTok Takes on Twitter and Temu: Double T adds Twitter-like text posts to its core app, along with an ecommerce feature designed to compete with Temu, Shein and Amazon – along with billions spent hoping to convert western users into live-stream shopping addicts. This feels like a company with a stagnating core property.
• Introducing Mark “Efficiency” Zuckerberg: Meta’s approach? Build new video features more closely aligned with YouTube and TikTok, along with a grand unification of back-end video management, creator tools, multi-language support and analytics across FB, IG, and presumably Whatsapp and beyond. And taking a page from the BigCo CEO playbook, Zuckerberg bragged about Meta becoming more efficient, with “both cost savings.. as well as shifts in capital expenditures into 2024” driving the results.
• Big Red Hangs 10 on the Adpocalypse: Over at YouTube their core advertising business looks more and more like the traditional advertising business. The “adpocalypse” of the last three quarters led to a first-time 9 month drop in YouTube ad revenue. But with an improving economy, Q2 ad revenue rebounded by 4.4%, "reflecting further stabilization in spending by advertisers" according to Google CFO Ruth Porat. Zaslav, Iger, Burke and Bakish could have said the same thing. Last week’s 17% price increase for YouTube Premium, along with steady hikes to YouTube Music and TV, were also ripped right out of the old media playbook. 

Forget disruption. TikTok, Meta and YouTube today seem more like ABC, CBS and NBC back in 1980, or Yahoo, CNet and @AOL in 2000. I’ll have more about this – and how you need to change to survive – in a post later this week (linked here next week) .

Battling TikTok by the Numbers: Is TikTok still on top when it comes to short form video usage? Meta says it’s now delivering 200 billion daily Reels views, netting $10 Billion annual revenue. Zuckerberg claims parity – as TikTok grossed $10B last year. YouTube chimed in with its own rosy results, claiming 2 billion verified users watching Shorts every month – bigger than TikTok and Reels. When it comes to hearts and minds, TikTok is still far ahead. But the “stealing market share” moment has arrived for short form video too.

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QUIBIS:   

YOUTUBE

• Automated AI-voice dubbing coming to YouTube globally.
• YouTube Studio adding small but useful tweaks.  
• Good to see Double Verify adding Shorts to its YouTube fraud verification product.
• Rene Ritchie’s top five weekly highlights are again a good read – alas I failed to get a mention (I moderated his Open Sauce panel – it was indeed epic!).

META

• That was quick – Threads gets a follower feed to complement the algorithmic one.
• Does FB influence politics? New studies search for clues.
• Inside Meta’s Horizon Worlds reboot – VR is clearly not mature media, but Roblox and Epic still lead here.

TIKTOK

• TikTok’s drinking problem.
• Testing whether sounds and images from TikTok meme videos can be freely repurposed.

OTHER CREATOR ECONOMY

• Odd-man out – why Snap is screwed (and more proof of a maturing social video industry).
• Harry McCracken has the best take on Twitter, “X”, and the everything app.
• Things are better with NIL – but still not great - except for the 1%
• Exploring the psychology of why Mr. Beast videos work – from Phil Agnew and Jay Clouse. 
• Kick CEO says bigger contracts, better streaming to come.
• I found a cool AI tool to help you rewrite your LinkedIn Bio. Quirky is best!
• 10 Charts describing how the world is changing – from VC Rex Woodbury.
• Internet cafes were once a thing. Now they’re almost gone.

GENERATIVE AI

• Stable Diffusion announces version XL 1.0. Give it a try here.
• Spotify CEO teases new AI features to create ads and summarize podcasts.
• Axios explores the unauthorized AI-generated South Park shorts from Fable Studio.
• Maybe AI stands for “Astonishing Infatuation” over at LinkedIn as it tests an AI coach to add to its suite of other AI tools.

TIPS

• YouTube collected creator tips at VidCon a month ago – and just posted the best of them.
• Can 3 experts help a travel creator double her TikTok followers in 30 days? (spoiler, no, but worth a read) 

NEWSLETTER SPOTLIGHT: Want to keep up on the intersection of media, creators, and advertising? Don’t miss Brian Morrisey’s weekly newsletter “The Rebooting”. Morrisey is an OG media vet, smart, insightful, and always ahead of the pack. This week he talks about how events are core to today’s modern media companies, and interviews a top Bloomberg exec on AI and news. Well worth a sub. 

(**note this is a newsletter collab, but I read Brian religiously and link more than occasionally).

LIMERICK OF THE WEEK – which I posted to TikTok.

There once was a platform named TikTok

Where users danced and sang 'round the clock

But now text posts abound

A new trend’s been found

And the Twitterverse is fully in shock

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! 

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