Inside Beehiiv's $33M Series B, feat. CEO Tyler Denk

Welcome to Creator Upload, your Creator Economy podcast. I'm Lauren Schnipper.

And I'm Joshua Cohen.

Oh, Joshua. So first of all, last week's episode, I know we don't like to talk about the past, but it was, in a word, amazing. All about TikTok. Is it gonna be banned? I've gotten a lot of feedback. That was incredible. And I just wanna say you're welcome, everybody. Cause it was basically all shout out.

To producer Adam for his movie theater esque trailer.

The trailer was. That was not me. That was all Adam. Sorry, that was Adam. Yeah, no, that was amazing. It was Amaz and James Hale, by the way, from Tubefilter getting those creator. I feel like this is my Oscar speech. But listen, I'll take whatever platform I can get for getting those creators and small business owners to give us their clips. Just what a collaborative, primarily me effort.

It did really tie the pot together. And also Jason, great editing as usual.

Oh, well, Jason goes without saying, of course. Well, I want to just. I got a text from Melody H. Who has a small business. She's from Waco, Texas. She's somebody I know, but I don't know how you're supposed. I feel like you're supposed to keep these things anonymous. So I'm gonna do the text, I'm gonna read the text messages. Okay. She said, it makes me so mad hearing these small businesses talking about their businesses they built on TikTok and losing all their customers. You in all caps, never owned those customers if the only connection you had was TikTok. Are you people not creating email? SMS list, question mark, question mark, question mark. I lost my Instagram and 30,000 followers and you know what I learned? My business was barely impacted by it. And it made me realize I was wasting way too much money on social media planning. We rebuilt with super fans and got on TikTok and Facebook, but mostly our sales come from our direct communications from emails or ads we pay for. Anyway, my two cents as a small business owner who could care less about if TikTok is banned, one less platform we have to keep up with. Thank you. Mic drop point is anybody creators. Small business owners should not be wholly reliant on one platform for their business, period. And if you are doing that, you. You're making a mistake and your business probably doesn't have product market fit and you should be creating and owning your own audience, which is a really great segue into talking about who we're having on the podcast as an interview today, which is Tyler Dank, who is the CEO and co founder of Beehive, which is a newsletter company. And one of the things he's going to talk about is how newsletters are a great way in which people, creators, influencers, whatever, publishers can own their audience. And I think we're in a new day where people realize that even having like millions of followers sometimes on these platforms isn't as impactful as having a smaller group of audience that you actually really quote, unquote, own. In other words, you have all of their information contact, you know that these people want you, they opt in to your product service, and that is so much more valuable. So I would spend, if I were Those people on TikTok, worried, much less time worried about what's happening to TikTok, because by the way, even if it doesn't get banned, they can change an algorithm on the drop of a hat and your business could be screwed. Do not rely on these platforms solely. And I really appreciate it. That was an unsolicited email from a Melody out of Waco, Texas. Josh, do you have any thoughts on that?

So I am excited for your conversation with Tyler. Sorry, Tyler, I couldn't be there for it. But I'm sure Lauren was able to hold up her own kind of. At least in my absence.

Keep going.

Look, I don't disagree. That's Melody's experience. Just to play devil's advocate for a second, you can't deny the impact that TikTok has had on a large number of small businesses and the efficacy it's had for those small businesses to reach consumers that they wouldn't have had in the first place. So our anonymous texter out of Waco, Texas, says that they got locked out of their Instagram with 30,000 followers, but they still built up a lot of their sales, presumably, and a lot of their customer base through that Instagram initially.

Sure.

So to say that you need to diversify is different than saying you can do without.

I didn't say that you need you can do without. I didn't say that. I just said that if you have to do without TikTok, first of all, you shouldn't be relying on these platforms because anything can happen at any time that can make it 100%. You can use them as a funnel, but you should be concentrating less on like, oh, God, what's happening if TikTok goes away? Because my point is, is like, I literally have been at Facebook when I work there, when we change an algorithm and businesses go under because they're too reliant on a platform so the lesson here is not about not using these social platforms. It's about they can change on a dime, whether it's an algorithm change or a ban. And you should use them as one prong of a lead generator. You should have various other ways in which you do that. But if you're gonna solely rely on any platform, you will get screwed 100% of the time period. Like, it will happen. There's YouTube, Adpocalypse, there's. Sure, yes, you know, anything can happen. It's like, it's sort of just like this argument that, like, their businesses are going to go under. Well, you should have spent time doing these other things and not relying on one platform. You know what I mean? So I respectfully think you're full of shit.

Totally fair to its part two. TikTok has been going on a bit of a PR offensive recently.

I wonder why.

They just announced their safety report and stated that the platform now has 500,000 sellers in the US alone on TikTok shop. And the report basically goes into all these different measures that the company is taking to ensure the quality of the products and the safe consumer experience that TikTok viewers can have there.

Yeah, feels super safe.

TikTok states that in the second half of 2023, they declined 2 million seller account registrations and and nixed 37 million product listings as part of its attempt to root out fraudulent vendors. TikTok has also handled 68,000 takedown notices from brand owners during the second half of the year. This is from Mary Hubbard, the head of TikTok shop Americas for governance and experience. That's a cool title.

Best titles of safety initiatives ever. Project Texas go on.

As we enable thousands of businesses to sell millions of products. The TikTok Shop Safety Report demonstrates our continued investment in creating safer and trustworthy shopping experiences for our community. End quote. Note those numbers were all for the US alone. The global TikTok Shop base now includes more than 15 million sellers worldwide, with countries like Indonesia serving as e commerce hotspots. They're doing what they can to push this, Lauren. We'll see what happens.

Yeah, no, they're doing. Yeah, I feel super safe now. It's like when somebody's pointing a gun at your face and it's loaded and they're like, I'm not gonna pull the trigger.

It's a little dramatic.

It's a little dramatic, is it?

Let's tone it down a little bit.

Okay. All right, let's get on to some bigger stories. Okay. Google had its earning report of which YouTube, obviously a huge part of that. Josh, can you break that down for us?

Yes, Lauren. So YouTube's parent company, Alphabet, had its Q1 2024 earnings report. Alphabet, just still a monster, reported $80.5 billion of revenue with a net income of more than $23.6 billion. The bulk of that revenue is still from Google search. But YouTube ads are playing a bigger and bigger role. So in Q1 2024 alone, YouTube generated $8.1 billion in ad revenue. That's up 20% from Q1. Of 2023, they generated $6.7 billion in ad revenue. Then estimates from Wall street were $7.7 billion. YouTube beat that. But what the big takeaway here is is $8.1 billion in ad revenue for YouTube in Q1 is massive. There's only two other quarters where YouTube has generated more ad revenue. One was Q4 2023, where it generated $9.2 billion. And the other was Q4 2021, where it generated 8.6 billion. Just to offer you some more comparisons, in Q2, 2023, YouTube generated 7.6 billion. And in Q3 2023, YouTube generated 7.9 billion. So this is just a monster Q1 for YouTube. And if they can maintain this trajectory throughout the rest of the year, they're going to have just, like, crazy revenue, the likes of which we haven't seen from YouTube before. Also, during the earnings call, Google chief Business officer Philip Schneider revealed that the number of channels that upload to YouTube shorts has grown by 50% year over year. Where did that number start at? Who knows, but probably in the several millions, tens of millions. And also said that shorts monetization has quickly grown into one of the platform's strongest revenue streams. Again, from what to what? We don't know. But YouTube's at least talking about Shorts a lot in their quarterly earning reports. I think, to hype up advertisers, especially given the climate of competitors that we just talked about. So it'll be interesting to see if they start to reveal some different numbers, breakout shorts in any meaningful way in the not so distant future. Also worth noting, not in this quarterly earnings report, but just in general, as a reminder for everybody, subscriptions brought in $15 billion of revenue for YouTube during the 2023 calendar year. They now have more than 100 million subscribers signed up for YouTube Premium and YouTube Music, with 8 million signed up for YouTube TV.

Interesting. Fascinating. Yeah. I mean, as we've been hearing on and on, is that connected TVs are the number One sort of fastest growing surface for YouTube. So that is not surprising.

YouTube Brandcast is coming up, the big dog and pony show for advertisers in a couple of weeks in New York City at the David Geffen Theater.

Ooh, are you going to be there, Josh?

I am going to be there. Of course I'm going to be there.

You're going to be there, of course.

And I'm excited to see what they talk about. My guess, lots of shorts, monetization, and even more television monetization. You get all these media buyers in a room who are used to buying on tv. You want to show them how this is the same thing. Yo, just move your dollars over here.

It's the same thing. Everything old is new again. It's great.

Don't worry about it. Move your TV dollars over here.

Don't worry about it.

We'll take care of them just fine.

We got Jordan matter. He's doing 30 minute plus content. No big deal.

Yeah, no big deal.

No big deal.

No big whoop.

Okay, great. All right, Big second story I want to sort of talk about today is Instagram updating its Algori. So I'm gonna read directly from the blog post on Instagram. Historically, because of how we've ranked content creators with large followings and aggregators of reposted content have gotten more reach and recommendations than smaller original content creators, we think it's important to correct this to give all creators a more equal chance of breaking through to new audiences. It goes on to say, to do this, we're introducing four changes. One, a new input to ranking that will give smaller creators more distribution, Two, replacing reposts with original content and recommendations, Three, adding labels to reposted content, linking to the original creator, and four, removing content aggregators from recommendations. This is huge. So it's not talking about if you follow somebody in an aggregated sort of like Instagram account, it's not saying that you won't see that content, but they're talking about recommendations. And this really speaks to, once again, sort of like competing with TikTok. Because if there's one thing that TikTok has sort of become known for is it's a really amazing place to be discovered. They're recommendations. External algorithm is, as we've always said, a magical Chinese sort of algorithm. It's very easy to be discovered, grow, but not necessarily easy to maintain that audience. But so Instagram and these other platforms are trying to find new ways in which they can sort of convince, you know, baby creators, new people that could be big eventually to go on their platforms and be discovered. So this is talking about recommendations specifically and how they're really going to prioritize original content and not necessarily those with like giant audiences, which is hard because now it's going towards that TikTok thing where like, well, I spent all this time building up this audience and now you're not going to continue recommending it, like, wtf, right? So I think this is actually a really, really big kind of piece of news. Josh, what do you think about this?

I think the attribution to the original poster of content, if they can figure this out. How are they going to figure this out, Lauren? I have no idea. I feel like there's going to be a multitude of ways around it.

I mean, they're going to get it wrong so many of. So much of the time. They're going to use AI, I'm sure.

And yeah, but at least they're doing it now and they're doing it in such a way where Adam Mosseri is saying that, hey, we want to come out and do this. I mean, it's interesting because Instagram has leaned both ways on this, where they've had mini kind of creator summits, where they've had these meme accounts come and they've really embraced them in some capacity. I think Mark Zuckerberg has even interacted with a few. And then they go the other way and they say that we're banning them or we're doing our best to get rid of them. This, I think, is a better happy medium where they say, okay, those things can exist. We're going to have some type of attribution so the original owner can get credit in a meaningful way. Sidebar to this. YouTube's been doing this for years through its Content ID platform that has generated hundreds of millions of dollars for the original posters of content whose material ends up on other people's channels.

Right. I mean, this is effectively a form of Content ID is what you're saying, right?

It's about time that it exists. There was no monetary incentive for them to really do this before, so that's why it took so long. But I'm happy it's coming just for the kind of overall health and well being of that ecosystem. Look, and I understand that there is something to meme channels. It does take a skill to comment on these things. And curators are a thing and they should be rewarded, but not nearly as much as they have been, especially without giving credit to the people that originally posted this stuff.

There's a Whole section on this blog post that literally says, removing aggregators from recommendations. As part of our efforts to reward original content, we want to further discourage content aggregators by making them ineligible for recommendations across Instagram. Them is fighting words. That's huge.

Those are fighting words.

That's huge.

And so on the other side of this, with the prioritizing smaller creators, I love that they're just gonna have to find a happy medium. And I think all platforms have to do this. It's like, you don't want to not recommend Mr. Beast and all these creators that got you to where you are anymore in favor of these smaller channels, but you have to show these smaller channels that there's some trajectory, some path that they can get on to become those big channels one day. And this has been a problem for all different platforms, whether It's Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and more. You really need to incentivize both your big creators to continue posting in a major way, and also these small creators to get recognition. TikTok, I'd argue, has gone a little bit too far and hasn't kind of figured out the longevity side. They've gone a little too far into advocating for small creators and bubbling up any single piece of content that seems to be very of the moment, but then not providing that longevity side. Yes, Instagram, these other platforms seemingly have done the opposite. There's a happy medium in there somewhere. I don't know how to thread that needle. It'll be super cool to see if Instagram figures are that.

Yeah, I don't know if there is. We'll see. Okay, up next, we have our interview with Tyler Dank, CEO and co founder of Beehive. Welcome, Tyler Dank to creator upload. You are the CEO and co founder of Beehive newsletter company. Very exciting week for you guys. You raised $33 million. Series B, am I correct? Series B. Yeah, Series B, yeah. So talk to me a little bit about this raise. And more specifically, you held off a million bucks for other sort of your community to invest in. So talk to me a little bit about this raise.

Yeah, it's been a pretty crazy week, I would say. So the raise. Yeah, we raised 33 in total, led by NEA for a few different reasons. One, I think the space that we're in is very competitive, and one thing I don't want to sacrifice at all is talent, so hiring the best possible people. The other thing that I think would be interesting to your audience is really just like, monetization is a huge focal point of Ours where for decades the legacy email players like a mailchimp or Constant Contact or whoever, like they are good for sending emails. Where we really differentiate is we help our users grow faster and monetize. And the way that you monetize currently is either premium subscription, so you can charge $10 a month, $20 a month for people to access your content, or your community or via advertisement. So we have a ad network. We're working with brands like Netflix, HubSpot, Betterment, BetterHelp, a bunch of other amazing brands and basically place them into your newsletter and you monetize for creating the same content and sending it out. So how that all is involved with the fundraise is I think we had a realization that one we were under investing in the ad network in terms of staff and talent. So moving forward, hiring engineers that are specializing in machine learning and ad tech, building out a sales team, building out an operations team, really building like a multi billion dollar ad network that makes it so easy for content creators to be able to create a newsletter and have continue to have brands like Netflix and other massive brands sponsor their newsletters so they can get paid a lot in a very seamless process. So that's probably one of the biggest focal points of the fundraise. And then obviously for us, we just surpassed a billion emails per month in March.

That means you're sending out a billion emails for a month. Is that what that means, sending a.

Billion emails a month? Probably 1.2, 1.3 now this month. But while that sounds like a lot, and it is for a SaaS business email company, for an advertising business companies, like I mentioned earlier, a billion impressions a month is a drop in the bucket. And so what we need to make our product more enticing to those advertisers is tens of billions of impressions and emails being sent per month. And so part of the fundraise as well is to really accelerate the amount of acquisition we're doing. And that's publishers, that's larger publishers, those are enterprise publishers, those are content creators on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Threads, you name it. We want to bring more newsletters onto our platform and then obviously help them monetize.

So let's just talk a little bit about newsletters specifically. It sort of feels like everything old is new again. I mean, it's the written word, Tyler. You know, it seems, you know, just old school. Right. But we're seeing this huge resurgence. I mean, the whole market in general is kind of huge. Like what do you think is the value? Obviously getting Paid is a huge reason. But there's a lot of different opportunities for creators with how they can diversify and monetize. Why newsletters like why. Why should that be something that creators should, should be thinking about?

Yeah, I feel like very timely is the news of TikTok, right? So if you spent three to four years building your audience on TikTok and then now it is potentially being divested or banned in the country, where do you transport that audience? Is it to an Instagram or to Twitter or wherever you want to grow your audience or YouTube? But I think whether you move it from one platform to another, what remains is the risk of losing what you had worked so hard to gain, which is that audience. And there are very few channels. Email and maybe sms, where, for example, if you are using mailchimp and no longer like their product or it was too expensive or you liked what we were doing, you can pick up your list and move it to our platform. Vice versa. If we are not doing. Dog is right now.

He's very excited about the race. Go on.

He's very excited. If we are not doing an amazing job serving our users, you can pick up your email list and move it somewhere else. So the interoperability of email is really powerful. And then I just think broadly, yes, whatever is old is new again. But at the same time, every person over the age of 16, I think, checks their email, whether it's for work or receipts or flights or whatever. So you're kind of naturally drawn to this. It's nearly impossible as a working adult to detach entirely from email. Where I haven't used Snapchat in three years now, it's very easy for me to detach from other social platforms. So I think that is part of the resurgence of why email kind of remains.

It's funny, I'm reading this book called the Anxious Generation, which is all the rage if you're a parent talking about kids being addicted to their phones and. And not just kids, by the way, all of us. But just specifically talks about kids and how their brains are really developing in those middle school years and they should not be spending all those time online. And I feel like it's almost like the newsletter certainly that I subscribe to, I feel like I'm being educated. Right. So it feels like you're expanding your brain. I'm reading things, I'm learning things, ideally from experts in this space. So I totally. And I think also what you're talking about, sort of reading between the lines is owning your audience. Right. And really Being able to just to your point, take them, convert them to other platforms of, you know, effectively your choosing.

Yeah, I think the big thing there, I mean, owning your audience really is like there's the interoperability that I talked about earlier, but there's also just the fact that the email doesn't need to be the end product or your biggest revenue stream. It is a top of funnel to say, here's a bit of information, here's a new course that I launched, here's a new T shirt line that I just created. And you can drive people from email, which again, people are checking daily because they kind of have to, to whatever product it is. So whether you're dropping new merch or launching a community or hosting an event in LA or wherever, email is an incredibly effective channel to do that. So, yeah, I think that's like a huge part of it.

What's the capabilities of video within newsletters on Beehive?

So email gives and it takes away or I guess never gave in the first place. It is a fairly legacy text, so video naturally embedded into the email doesn't work. And the email itself, you can click on a Thumbnail redirect to YouTube and watch there. So there are like technical limitations to email relative to other platforms. But I guess like the other thing, just the nail, like the owner audience is. Yes, TikTok's algorithm is amazing. You can move your audience to an Instagram, but we've already seen that game played in 2016, 2017, where they encourage you to create some certain type of content. Their business strategy changes, they change the algorithm and the 100,000 fans or likes you built up is no longer going in front of 100,000 people. And that is very different again from email. When you send an email to 100,000 people, with the exception of spammy content that may end up in spam or bulk or whatever, those hundred thousand people receive that email. So it's really just like a direct one to one.

That was the big thing when I was at Facebook, is that people would be really mad. They got all these likes and not everybody sees it. And we used to have to be like, there's a real estate problem, I've got newsfeed. And people want to see their friends and their fans. And so there's only a limited number of sort of things you can put in front of people. And so people resented the fact that they had to pay to get this audience to get their content in front of the audience. But to your point, it's like, well, just then Collect it yourself. And I think that's where everything is sort of moving is like this sort of. I think that we've learned a lot from really big audiences on platforms are not necessarily as strong as smaller one to one relationships that you can build on Something like a newser. Can we talk a little bit about. I just want to kind of end with you reserved about a million bucks for the community. Why? What was the motivation as of recording this? You are oversubscribed and you just posted that if that's the only place you posted it on LinkedIn like 10 hours ago. So well done you. So tell me why you decided to do that.

Yeah, I mean since the beginning we've been like very open and myself personally of like building the company. I share metrics, I share milestones, I share new features that we're launching. Like I'm very open about how we're building the business very intentionally. There's like a few reasons for that. One, I think people will appreciate the transparency. And then there's also a whole segment of people who don't really give a shit about emails maybe today, but they are interested in startups and building a company and so I can attract them by following me. So almost like a content creator myself. So from doing that for the past two and a half years, I think people have really aligned with either myself or the team and how relentlessly we are building this company and how transparently we're doing it. So long winded way of saying we have some fans who have admired the journey of following it and then also being users of the platform and kind of having an inside look. And so over the past two and a half years we've had dozens and hundreds on any given week of people engaging, sharing how much they love the company and also how much they love to invest. And for us it's just like at this stage it becomes harder and harder to just free up cap space from like a legal and financial perspective. So we used we Funder give them a free shout out. They've been super helpful but we used them to do the crowdfund. And so as we were rejiggering the allocation of the Series B, what investors are putting in, what amount, We Funder was pretty top of mind in chasing us and we just had that kind of community it factor with our users and figured there's no better time than to make room for. So we reserved a million dollars as part of the round. We announced the B round officially yesterday and then today to kind of spread out the PR into a two day ordeal, announced that we reserved 1 million for our users. We are going to prioritize our earliest users first. So we've raised over a million dollars in two hours, which was the limit. So now we have a different problem, which is we have about $2 million of investments as of this recording and people want to invest 10, 25, 30,000, but there's not room for that. So that's a problem for another.

A good problem to have.

Yeah, it's a good problem to have. Right. You know, I love it. All right, well, we're really excited. So where can people find you? I know you have a newsletter. Where should they find it?

I'm surprised I haven't brought this up myself already, but yeah.

Shocking.

Bigdesk energy.com it's actually mail.bigdeskenergy.com Bigdesk energy.

I don't know if I knew that was the name. I love it. I love it.

Yeah, yeah. Bigdesk Energy. So that's like me building in public on steroids. It's everything we're doing behind the scenes, that's the company, me sharing the stories. But I'm also doing it building on my own platform, which is very meta in a way.

Yep, of course. And you can go to Beehive. It's B E H I I V. I just want to make sure.

Yeah, we spell it. We spell it like morons. So B E E H I I v dot com, two E's, two I's. And then on Twitter as well, dank tweets.

I love it. All right, thanks so much.

Appreciate it.

Thank you so much, Tyler, for joining. I think it was great with just you and I and.

No, Josh.

I'm really sad I wasn't there. Partly because I'm a Beehive user and huge Tyler Dunk fan and equally huge Beehive fan. I think it's a fantastic platform and solves a ton of the issues for newsletter operators that they may or may not have known even existed. Their support's great too. I really love how he's building in public as well. He's very transparent with all of these numbers.

Well, that's what he talked about a lot. If you were there, would have heard about just why they they left the 1 million on the table for other people to invest. He's really been very open in sharing the good and the bad. I mean, it's hard. We talked a little off camera, if you will, about it is not easy. Startups are not easy. But he's trying to Know the good, the bad and the ugly and all things. So it's very cool how he's building and what he's building.

Yeah, entrepreneurship's a roller coaster, but congrats for them for raising some dough. Excited to see what happens with it.

You know, I've built this audience who are typically homebodies and I'm very much a homebody and I'm like, you know what? Build this brand around this idea of this person who loves to be at home, who loves to put on their comfiest outfits, who has a furry friend who likes to curate their space. That's that character that I've built. And I'm like, how do we cater to this person?

You just heard from Adrian Vasquez, a creator on TikTok, who's our creator on the Rise this week brought to you by Gospel Stats. He is talking about his new brand homebody. Josh. Tell us about Adrian.

So Adrian Vasquez, he is a New York City based ballin on a budget, interior designer enthusiast who got his social media start by making toy review videos with his son. He realized he had this knack for YouTube. He took a job making content for million dollar listing New York realtor Ryan Sirhan. By the way, I love Ryan Sirhan. Do you love Ryan Sirhan?

You've talked to me about this a lot and I've never watched the show and like you literally are always like, do you know, tell me you know, you know him, right? Like you want to talk about.

You ever watch a million dollar listing? Was that just a New York thing?

I don't know. I don't. I just. Yeah, I live in la. Like, it's all a million dollar listings, you know what I mean?

Back in the heyday of Bravo, Ryan Sirhant was very fun to watch on television and he's a great guy. I'm in a text chain with him as some mutual friends and he seems to be one of the nicest people in the world, always willing to help.

Did you just text name drop right now? Is that what you just said?

Yes, I just name drop.

Did everybody hear that? So make sure you hear that. Yeah, okay. Okay, great.

Any case, so he was making content for Ryan Sirhan and then that sparked his love of interior decorating. He revamped his own digital presence to focus on decor. He now has nearly 2 million followers across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram following his upcycling DIY adventures. And back in April, he parlayed that social media success into launching his own apparel and home Goods brand called Homebody, which along with starting a long form YouTube series that spotlights unique homes, is his big focus for 2024. A great channel, very cool story. Go check out Adrian Vazquez.

Awesome, Josh. Okay, upload cell phones. What do you got, Lauren?

This is a huge upload. It feels like 2007 to 2013 online video news. But there's this creator in college, Wesley Wang who uploaded this short called Nothing except everything the short had now is four some odd million views on YouTube. It was uploaded about seven months ago. After he uploaded the short, Darren Aronofsky noticed it emails this dude, Wesley Wang asking him if he wants to drop out of Harvard and come just make movies. Then they created this bidding war which tristar eventually won and they're going to adapt his Nothing except Everything into a feature film.

That's amazing. It does feel very early days. I always say, talking about the early days of my career. YouTube was thought as an incubator for TV and film. So there were a time I was a part. I produced the Annoying Orange pilot for Cartoon Network. Annoying Orange still going strong. Dane Bodenheimer is the creator behind that. And that was the thing that was what we did. That was how I started my career was like figuring out how to transition these YouTubers to TV and film. And look at that happening all over again.

It was the only possible trajectory back then though too. Or not the only possible one. But the main one, I don't agree.

With that because the trajectory was these people were making a lot of money on YouTube. But it was, it was, it was thought as the only possible diversification of revenue. Right? It was like that was the definition of success. I'm going to use this to go somewhere else. Not really taking into account the fact that like they were making a lot of money on the platform and they were doing really, really well. And like what I learned through a lot of different sort of projects in that world is that like it's okay to just be great on digital and like it doesn't define you if you don't sell a bunch of tickets in movie theater. Obviously we're in another world where like nobody's kind of going to the movies. So like that, you know, many big movie star even get people in butts and seats. But yeah, that was what it was back in the day. So it is silly and funny to see that connected TV, YouTubers making movies. Everything old is new again.

This is definitely a song. It's number one.

It must be a song, right? It's a song.

It Is I think an indicator of a time now where Hollywood is looking at this upcoming talent and taking them seriously again. Where back then it seemed kind of fatty. It's like, ooh, what's all this online video stuff that I don't really get but my kids might like now it's like all these people are watching this stuff anyway. Rackaraka, which was a huge YouTube channel, just had a really successful A24 film. Kane Pixels also got tapped by A24 to make a movie about this backrooms that he created on YouTube. And now we have Wesley Wang getting reached out to by Darren Aronofsky. I think this is just going to become more of a thing though.

Any downloads?

Josh, Lauren, Maybe this is a download for you, upload for Everybody else. But UMG and TikTok came to a deal. Yeah, I think Universal Music Group took advantage of the opportunity. You gotta think that they just got everything that they wanted, right?

I mean they must have gotten everything they wanted because like TikTok is. TikTok needs these wins right now big time. So I'm assuming that they got what they wanted.

So Universal Music Group artists will be back on TikTok in the not so distant future.

Good for them.

Taylor Swift was already there because she's just above it all.

She gets to do what she wants to do.

She gets to do what she gets to do.

Okay, Uploads really quickly in your earnings. You didn't really talk about Snap, which I think is really interesting. Their stock jumps 25% Q1 earnings massively beating projections. And 9 million people are now paying for Snapchat plus, who knew?

Yeah, going crazy. Even up more since then.

So I know somebody that was at Snap the day that the whole TikTok thing happened and apparently they were all like elated, like losing their minds, like so stoked. So don't sleep on Snap. Like they're gonna be coming in hot right now and like prepping nonst for whatever's gonna happen with TikTok.

Yeah, they're poised to really take advantage of this opportunity.

Yeah, no, totally. Downloads are obviously I would be remiss. Not to mention what's going on on the campuses and how the horrible sort of what's escalated into violence. Jewish students being blocked to go their classes. And you know what I feel like are very well intentioned, misguided young people that are putting a lot of people in danger. So I pray every day that it will get better. And you know that is taking up my social media feed. So I'm gonna be off social media for a minute and hoping for better days. Josh I think we did it.

Lauren, I think that's it. I'll see you as an up and coming Instagrammer. Just telling people all about diversification.

Original content baby.

And to get on the newsletter probably too. Use Beehive and if not there next week on Creator Upload. Today's show was produced by Lauren Schnipper. Joshua Cohen. Hey, that's me. And Adam Connor. It's edited by Jason King and original music is by London Bridge. Check him out on Instagram. Londonbridge Music. Make sure you subscribe to Creator Upload wherever you listen to podcasts while you're there, give us a rating, leave us a comment. Hit us up@inforatorupload.com we love hearing from you. It's my favorite thing to read the emails. If you like our show, please recommend it to a friend. If you love it, just recommend it to everybody. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.