Creators

If you’re a celebrity promoting a new movie or your latest album, you used to follow a standard playbook of late night shows, magazine cover stories, or daytime talk shows. Now you have to do all that and eat chicken wings with YouTubers or give your hottest take while riding the subway. The New Media Circuit is a powerful driver of views, likes, and comments — but does it actually sell anything?

That’s according to Nielsen’s media distributor Gauge report, which tracks how much time viewers spend watching TV across the networks and streaming platforms owned by different media companies each month.

Recently, the comedian behind Adam Ruins Everything made a promotional video for World that he’s since taken down. Now, he’s addressing blowback he received by calling his ad for the eyeball-scanning crypto company “one of the dumbest things I have ever done” and saying what he “honestly” thinks about the company.

Six months after the coupon hunting extension Honey was accused of cheating shoppers and influencers, it appears the PayPal-owned tool is still losing users. According to 9to5Google, the number of Chrome extension users continues to drop — at one point 20 million people used the extension. Now, that number is down to 15 million.

Unionized workers at Politico allege the company violated its contract by using AI-generated content in a live blog — and are escalating their complaint to arbitration this summer. The union says the AI-generated summaries contained factual errors and language that’s off-limits for writers. The result of arbitration could set an important precedent for an industry that’s seen countless AI disputes in recent years.

The cheaper subscription, which cuts ads on “most” videos, but not music, is expanding to Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil too, after launching in the US in March. It’s rolling out gradually, so check the Premium Lite site to see if you’re eligible to sign up — I’m still not, but my colleague Tom apparently is.

The company is paying a group of creators to refer people to Instagram, Business Insider reports. Influencers can earn $100 for every new user or 1,000 visits to the Instagram app, with a $20,000 limit.

As reported by The New York Times:

Luke Nichols, who runs the nearly 15-million-subscriber-strong YouTube channel, partly blames fame:

The preliminary finding in an investigation opened last year says TikTok breached the Digital Services Act’s requirements to publish information about the content of ads, which users are targeted, and who paid for them. Now it’s TikTok’s turn to respond and try to avoid a potential fine worth up to 6 percent of its annual turnover, just weeks after it was fined $600 million for breaking the bloc’s GDPR regulations.

The company says its new ad system will use AI to place ads in videos at “contextually relevant” moments where viewers are most likely to be engaged. YouTube announced the feature on Wednesday at its annual Brandcast event for advertisers.

During an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, President Donald Trump said he’d “be willing” to extend TikTok’s June 19th deadline if its China-based parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t reach a deal to divest the app’s US business in time. China backed out of a potential deal last month after Trump imposed up to 145 percent tariffs on goods imported from the country.