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It's Thursday and Snapchat is giving U.S. users free access to its first open prompt image-generating AI Lens. So, will you be dressing up with AI instead of raiding Spirit Halloween this year? |
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Today's News |
📈 Gospel Stats drops its first report 🇿 UTA's ZCON hits Los Angeles 💸 ShopMy snags a $1.5B valuation 📱 Meta's AI "Vibes" are doing just fine 🗓️ 20 Years of YouTube: In 2024…
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GOSPEL STATS 📈 |
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The database: The database that powers Tubefilter's creator economy insights is going wide. Gospel Stats—an intelligence platform from the team behind Tubefilter and the Streamy Awards—has issued its inaugural YouTube Sponsorship Landscape Report. |
Readers of Tubefilter columns may recognize Gospel as the data source behind our Weekly Brand Reports and Top 50 rankings. By tracking sponsorships across tens of millions of YouTube channels, Gospel uncovers details that don't show up in other sources. Gospel and Tubefilter co-Founder Joshua Cohen noted in a statement, YouTube sponsorship traffic "isn't counted in Google's official ad revenue," and added that "sponsorships have been a blind spot in the creator economy. So we built a platform to make them visible and give the industry a clear, data-driven view of where these dollars come from and where they're going." |
The stats: Now, Tubefilter is sharing Gospel's findings with the rest of the creator economy. Here are a few key stats from the YouTube 2025 Sponsorship Landscape Report: |
65,759 sponsored videos were uploaded to YouTube in the first half of 2025. That sum represents a year-over-year uptick of nearly 54%.
Meanwhile, viewership across sponsored videos rose about 28% year-over-year to reach 19.1 billion.
YouTube's middle class—aka creators who average between 100,000 and 500,000 views per video—is fueling much of that growth.
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The context: Those numbers paint a picture of a rapidly growing creator economy—one that would have been inconceivable when Tubefilter first launched 17 years ago: |
"We thought when we first started out that creators are going to be the future of entertainment. We didn't realize they would also be the future of marketing, media, advertising, and more." | | | | - Joshua Cohen via Axios |
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As that future dawns, marketers are demanding more efficacy from creator campaigns and calling for the development of new measurement tools. |
Gospel has the potential to be a godsend within that ecosystem—and the YouTube 2025 Sponsorship Landscape Report offers a clear example of what the platform is capable of. Click here to see the data for yourself. |
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HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰 |
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THE BIZ |
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A $70M funding round just pushed ShopMy to a $1.5B valuation |
The funding round: ShopMy has announced a $70 million funding round, which places the New York-based creator commerce firm's valuation at $1.5 billion. |
That round was led by Avenir and supported by participants like Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Menlo Ventures. Previous funding for ShopMy includes an $8 million Series A from 2022 and a $77.5 million Series B announced last year. |
The firm: ShopMy's steady growth has been fueled by its prominent position within the creator economy. As one of several companies that plays matchmaker between creators and brands, the firm facilitates the completion of wide-reaching influencer marketing campaigns—and takes a cut of the resulting sales revenue in the process. |
According to the latest figures shared by ShopMy, the company works with over 1,200 brand partners, which it connects to a stable of 185,000 creators. The product recs shared by those influential affiliates result in $1 billion in annual platform sales. |
The context: The future of ShopMy will hinge on the growth of affiliate marketing and creator-led commerce, as more creators turn their audiences into owned distribution channels and brand platforms. |
For now, the latest numbers suggest that ecommerce is still a safe bet: an IAB report from spring 2025 found that the "digital economy" now accounts for 18% of the U.S. GDP, while YouTube recently announced that 61% of 14-to-24-year-olds use its platform to discover new brands and products. |
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PLATFORM HEADLINES |
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Consumers are picking up the AI "Vibes" Meta is putting down |
The launch: When Meta first unveiled its AI-powered Vibes feed last month, it wasn't exactly greeted with rave reviews. One reporter referred to the feed as an "infinite slop machine. At first, consumers seemed to agree. |
The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp initially positioned its AI video repository as a creative aid that lets users "bring your ideas to life with new AI visual creation tools or remix an existing video by adding music or changing the style to make it your own." These days, there's a lot of cultural consternation related to generative AI, so some resistance to the Vibes feed was to be expected. |
The switch-up: Now, however, recent findings suggest that users are coming around to Meta's Vibes. Citing data from SimilarWeb, TechCrunch reported that download numbers for the Meta AI app have shot upward since the late-September launch of the Vibes feed. |
In just four weeks, the number of daily active users across the iOS and Android versions of the Meta AI app went from 775,000 to 2.7 million (as of October 17). Daily app installs rose to 300,000 after sitting below 200,000 in previous weeks. |
The context: Meta isn't the only tech giant finding success at the intersection of generative AI and creative prompts. The Vibes feed is essentially Meta's answer to YouTube's Dream Screen, and AI slop channels have been dominating the charts on YouTube Shorts for months now. |
The buzz around AI-driven short-form video is likely to continue building as newer and more sophisticated platforms and generation models hit the web. Earlier this month, for instance, Sora soared to the top of the app charts after OpenAI equipped its video generator with a TikTok-style feed. |
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WATCH THIS 🎙️ |
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20 Years of YouTube: 2024 heralded the "influencer election" |
In February 2025, YouTube turned 20. The platform has gone through a lot over the past two decades, including an acquisition, an earnings glow-up, and multiple generations of star creators. In our 20 Years of YouTube series, we'll examine the trends that have defined the world's favorite video site—one year at a time. Click here for a full archive of the series. |
The video: In the midst of the 2024 election cycle, This Past Weekend podcaster Theo Von hosted the most consequential YouTube video of the year: an interview with Donald Trump that attracted 17 million views. One Trump reelection later, that presidential chat has come to epitomize the shifting winds of YouTube—and the rising influence of the creator economy within mainstream culture. |
The creator: Unlike early YouTubers who harbored Hollywood dreams, Von cut his teeth on MTV and found success as a stand-up comedian/podcast host before turning to social media. It was then, as he sought to grow This Past Weekend, that Von began appearing on YouTube shows hosted by Logan Paul and the Nelk boys. |
That social media push coincided with a so-called "influencer election," which sent politicians scrambling to book spots on creator-led podcasts. The campaign trail craze set the stage for Von's cross-platform ascension—but it was his political leanings that ensured he could take advantage of the opportunity. A year later, the podcaster is a key part of a pronounced rightward shift that has reshaped creator culture. |
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Today's newsletter is from: Emily Burton, Drew Baldwin, Sam Gutelle, and Josh Cohen. |
