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TOGETHER WITH |
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It's Thursday and the standalone Hulu app has survived to see another day. Despite subscribers’ fears, the Mouse House says “there are no current plans to sunset the Hulu app.” Whew. |
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Today’s News |
👀 YouTube gets a new AI tool 🤖 TikTok microinfluencers earn big 💸 Podcasts scored $9.2B in 2025 🏈 Tom Brady brings trivia to YouTube 🐦 Duolingo forces users to focus
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AI WAVE |
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YouTube wants to make it easier to use AI - and also protect you from it. |
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YouTube’s new AI tool can add your likeness to other creators’ Shorts |
The AI announcements: YouTube offered up some big reveals at this year’s Google I/O tech conference, including the announcement of several new and upcoming genAI-powered products. A Gemini-powered tool for YouTube Shorts is one of the most intriguing new additions. |
That feature—called Gemini Omni—is located in the Shorts Remix menu and employs Google’s proprietary AI model to reimagine videos. Creators can use it to turn their live-action content into animated clips or change the identity of the individuals depicted in those uploads. In other words, Gemini Omni can put you anywhere—even in someone else’s Shorts. Videos changed with Gemini Omni will receive digital watermarks and will link back to the original clips. Creators can opt out of Shorts Remix features at any time. |
In addition to Gemini Omni, Google I/O attendees got a first look at Ask YouTube, a conversational chatbot that will surface video recommendations based on conversational prompts. |
The context: For YouTube, enabling AI features and protecting creators against them is a balancing act. |
The platform made its Google I/O announcements just one day after expanding its likeness detection tool to all creators. Now that those users can (in theory) regulate unlicensed deepfaked versions of themselves across YouTube, the platform can roll out products like Gemini Omni while keeping the use of those creative aids under control. |
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First time at Cannes Lions? LIONS Creators ambassador Bia Granja shares her advice. |
To help first-time creators navigate Cannes Lions, we asked LIONS Creators ambassador and Creator Economy Rocks founder Bia Granja for her best advice on making the most of the week. Here’s what she had to say: |
What tips do you have for first-timers? |
Don’t try to do everything and plan ahead. Create a list of the sessions you CAN’T miss, book a few meetings before arriving, wear comfy shoes and leave room for serendipity. Amazing things happen when you go with the flow. |
What LIONS Creators sessions do you think are a must for any first-timer? |
"The Official LIONS Creators Festival Tour with Rob Mayhew,” for sure! It’s fun and gives you a really good overview of the Palais and the Festival. |
There’s a lot happening at the Festival. How do you cut through the noise and plan your time effectively? |
My secret is being a nerd and curating the most important sessions into a very cool spreadsheet with date/time/location, important info and a FAV mark for the things I really can’t miss. Best part? It’s open for everyone to make a copy. Grab it here. |
LIONS Creators | 22-26 June 2026 | Cannes, France |
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HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰 |
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Small accounts on TikTok are apparently making some more dough. |
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MONEY MOVES |
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Video podcasts are making more dough, too. |
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Podcasts raked in $9.2B last year. But what makes a podcast a podcast? |
The data: Podcast revenue is rising fast—and according to a new report, video shows are “changing the picture” for the entire industry. |
For its 2025 Global Podcast Economy Report, management consulting firm Owl & Co. compiled 300,000 data points from 1,600+ publishers. It also personally spoke to ~100 of those publishers, 74% of which reported growth in their podcast business in 2025 vs 2024. |
On a macro level, Owl & Co.’s report chronicled an impressive jump in global podcast revenue from $7.5 billion in 2024 to $9.2 billion in 2025. $6B of that $9.2B came from the United States, where podcast revenue for 2025 accounted for a full 2% of all digital ad earnings. Video podcasts alone accounted for $2.3B of the U.S.’s 2025 podcast earnings, a 13% YoY increase. |
Direct advertising drove the lion’s share of podcasting’s global revenue ($5.3 billion, up 28% YoY), followed by consumer purchases ($2.2B, up 22% YoY). Programmatic advertising, meanwhile, “remained stable,” accounting for $1.3B of revenue in 2024 and $1.4B in 2025. |
The question: That data leads us to a central question posed by Owl & Co.’s report. What, exactly, counts as a podcast? And at what point does a “video podcast” just become…a video? |
To start, Owl & Co. followed YouTube’s lead. The platform launched its first podcast charts last year, and (according to Lopez), decided not to judge podcasts based on any internal standards. Instead, it deemed shows podcasts if their creators said they were podcasts. |
Owl & Co.’s report added a few other identifying characteristics, noting that self-publishing is “a key distinction between TV and video podcasts,” and that podcasts “often, but not always” have an RSS feed. |
Ultimately, the report concluded that “what it means to be a podcast is changing, and that has implications for creation, monetization, and discovery.” |
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GAME ON |
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The athlete ➜ trajectory is real. |
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The show: As it turns out, Tom Brady’s football knowledge base is almost as big as his trophy collection. The legendary QB put his sports acumen to the test in the first episode of a new YouTube trivia show titled Chasers, which can be found on a YouTube channel of the same name. |
“Cards and collectables are on fire, but often times people don’t know where to start. Chasers, an original home-grown Shadow Lion social show, will be an open door that starts with great conversation and invites people of all ages into the space.” |
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In addition to serving as the inaugural celebrity guest for host Kevin Bonner, Brady is working behind the scenes on Chasers. The show comes from his production company Shadow Lion, and uses a format based around trading cards to make connections between its questions and its guests. |
In that sense, Chasers shares some commonalities with the chicken wing interview series Hot Ones, which similarly turns basic questions into explorations of guests’ personal histories. |
The context: In fact, Chasers draws from the same playbook as a growing number of sports trivia shows on YouTube. That’s no surprise given that quizzing is a category tailor-made for short-form consumption; after all, what better way to keep viewers watching than by making them wait until the end of a video to learn the answer to a stumper? |
Brady’s trivia show also brings him closer to a community of sports eggheads who frequently collaborate on quiz competitions. The biggest names in the sports world are eager to team up with creators—just look at Steph Curry—and YouTube’s Brandcast presentation made it clear that the platform is more than willing to facilitate partnerships between legendary athletes and rising creators. |
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WATCH THIS 👀 |
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The Duolingo Owl is coming for your distractions. |
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Duolingo is taking screen time limits to the next level |
The lock-in tool: Duolingo may be dialing back its “unhinged” marketing strategy, but the language-learning platform is still developing eclectic features to set itself apart from other apps. |
Focus Mode is a particularly clever example of that approach. By preventing users from accessing other apps until they’ve finished their studies, the optional feature keeps learners on task while also grabbing more screen time for Duolingo. As a recent review described it, “instead of begging for your attention, it’s taking your distractions hostage until you pay the language-learning ransom.” |
Check out one user’s video of Focus Mode here for a closer look at the feature. |
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Today's newsletter is from: Emily Burton, Drew Baldwin, Sam Gutelle, James Hale, and Josh Cohen. |
