YouTube, Instagram, SoundCloud, and other online platforms are changing the way people create and consume media. The Verge’s Creators section covers the people using these platforms, what they’re making, and how those platforms are changing (for better and worse) in response to the vloggers, influencers, podcasters, photographers, musicians, educators, designers, and more who are using them.
The Verge’s Creators section also looks at the way creators are able to turn their projects into careers — from Patreons and merch sales, to ads and Kickstarters — and the ways they’re forced to adapt to changing circumstances as platforms crack down on bad actors and respond to pressure from users and advertisers. New platforms are constantly emerging, and existing ones are ever-changing — what creators have to do to succeed is always going to look different from one year to the next.
Guest host Hank Green and Digitas CEO Amy Lanzi go deep on digital marketing, AI, and the influencer-creator debate.
Meta is tweaking how a string of posts looks on the platform, including adding labels that indicate if the post is one in a longer thread. This makes it much easier to see where the discussion continues, and is also a nice signal that someone’s thoughts go on longer than the first post. Now we need this on Bluesky...
As the fallout of the Chorus influencer program reveals, the Democratic establishment seems sclerotically incapable of existing in a media environment it cannot control.
Now, users with 100,000 followers or more can narrow down DMs with the addition of new filters and the ability to create folders. Creators can also customize shortcuts to navigate to certain categories of messages, such as requests.
Maybe this will help solve T-Pain’s missing messages problem.
Nearly one year after announcing its new “Hype” button, YouTube is rolling it out to 39 countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and others. The feature is meant to help highlight smaller creators by letting fans “hype” videos that will then appear on a dedicated leaderboard.
That means no more scrolling through profiles to find the second half of a reel. If a creator links their videos, you can jump directly to the next one by tapping the “Watch Part 2” button beneath the reel’s caption.
Congress seemed to think a scrolling video platform was a national security threat. What changed?
The Wall Street Journal interviewed several “clippers,” or the people who dice up longer videos into short, grabby clips that get posted to accounts across Instagram and TikTok. One person, whose clipping business earns $20,000 to $30,000 per month, told the WSJ that “the only way to be famous in today’s internet world is with clips.”
[The Wall Street Journal]
I love this description of falling into the rabbit hole of TikTok Live streams of farm workers and other manual laborers, calmly and quietly going about their work. It’s competence porn that highlights the divide between those of us making stuff, and those of us watching from our phones.
With platforms caving to pressure from payment processors, adult content creators are left to figure out what’s next.
If you’re Cassey Ho, AKA Blogilates, you get a few design patents and do some good old public shaming. I chatted with Ho about the world of online dupes for this Tuesday’s Vergecast episode.
In the second half of the show, I visit a textile recycling facility to learn about reusing leftover material from the fashion industry. It’s a fascinating look at the huge impact a small group of people can make.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly ignored the bipartisan law banning TikTok from operating in the US unless it’s separated from Chinese parent company ByteDance. Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) is calling for a new way to avoid a ban without breaking the law. In a draft bill, Markey proposes letting TikTok operate in the US as long as it provides transparency into its content moderation and keeps US user data out of countries like China.
[markey.senate.gov]
Starting today in the US, “we’re giving all streamers access to some of our best monetization and community building tools including Bits, subs, emotes, badges, and Channel Points,” Twitch says. Twitch is also making it easier to reach Affiliate status, which opens up additional streaming features.
[blog.twitch.tv]
Thousands of games and media have been delisted from two major platforms. Here’s how that happened.
