#two years of promotional content and like 5 hours of livestreams and they have not given me a single

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

i want to compile a list of horror media that people need to watch before they call genloss groundbreaking incredible material. like yall are soooo so deeply entrenched in copium toting this thing around like its the best piece of horror media in the world when like. theres no horror. there has literally been no horror. how are we watching the same thing. go watch gemini home entertainment or marble hornets or daisy brown or unedited footage of a bear or this house has people in it and then come back to me. dont fucking talk to me until youve consumed some horror media thats actually good first!!!!!!!!

[gogtopia]

Your thoughts on the yt-twitch divide are so fun to read!! I’m currently doin a bit more research into it but YouTube seems to be trying to expand its content bidirectionally which is rlly interesting—there was a conference a month or so ago I went to where Susan Wojcicki and her chief data scientist talked about the algorithm and the ways that they’re currently trying to promote rlly short-form content (like YT shorts), which is why I was so shocked to see that they ended up bringing Sykkuno over, because streamers are the exact opposite of that short-form, tiktok-esque content with hours-long broadcasting. I honestly am just so interested to see where YouTube is going with this shift, bc then they’re playing a long game with every single type of audience, yk? You have the people who are looking for short, quick bursts of stimulation that they’re trying to push in YouTube shorts, the vast range (though on average abt 5-10 minutes long) of the shit they’re known for, and then streamers who are known to put out streams that are supposed to hook people for extended periods of time.

Personally I think that’s their issue, and why it seems so corporate—it literally is! They’re trying to spread themselves sooo thin covering every base of media consumers on the planet while lagging behind in maintaining what they already have. Recently, they announced a feature similar to raids (which I like but have some critiques of) for streamers, so it seems they’re putting in some technical effort to make YT streams a bit more bearable to Twitch viewers. But idk I don’t know how the hell that their model is feasible rn because it seems like a lot of people from a lot of different groups are unsatisfied with YouTube bc they can’t seem to balance their technical capability limits with the business side of things, whereas a platform like twitch or tiktok have one singular audience they need to tailor their platform to. I’d love to hear ur thoughts though they’re very well-written and I feel like PepoG when I read them lmfao

i rmr seeing you post abt going to that conference and i was like omg that’s so cool! i’m definitely not as informed on all this as you since most of what i know is just from streamers and chatting with my friends about it but i do think it’s super interesting. i knew that they were trying to push shorts and to me it kind of makes sense. beyond the fact that most social media apps will try to capitalize on trends for others, youtube is a video content platform. in many ways both shorts and streaming can be considered an extension of that. i do think it’s slightly funny that youtube is pushing shorts so hard and kind of flopping after they for the past several years have been pushing creators to make longer content via monetization and the algorithm so that most videos are at least ten minutes (i remember watching some mike’s mic video/podcast ep where he went into how the algorithm worked a year or so ago but i can’t for the life of me find it rn) even though youtube was in many way founded on shorter videos. so it’s almost like they’re trying to move backwards to capitalize on that short form content after they, to some extent, pushed that content away from their platform.

i definitely think they’re spreading themselves too thin with it. it’s better to do one thing well than everything poorly but i think many companies value profit over user experience and youtube definitely falls into that category. they need separate interfaces for shorts and streaming to be more successful if they want them to be a core part of their site, but obviously that takes time and resources to code/design/etc. i do think they have a shot at becoming a successful livestream platform, especially because twitch isn’t exactly a perfect platform to create for. i mean, ludwig and sykkuno are two creators with huge audiences immersed in that streaming culture. but i think it comes down to them listening to those streamers and their audiences. they need to listen more to their users otherwise these projects are going to fall flat, like i feel like YT shorts has been.

[fyexo]

200924 20 Questions With SuperM: The K-Pop Supergroup On Their New Album & Becoming ‘Like Family’ With Each Other

Last year, SuperM notched a huge win when their self-titled “mini album” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. The K-pop supergroup -- which consists of members of EXO, SHINee, NCT 127 and WayV -- had generated a huge amount of buzz before releasing a single track thanks to its star-studded lineup, and with the No. 1 bow, SuperM was off to an explosive start.

With Super One, the group’s first full-length out Friday (Sept. 25), SuperM continues its positive momentum. The hopeful, hook-stuffed album allows all seven members of SuperM to shine, while also expanding the group’s pop aesthetic and finding the right balance between singing and rapping. Songs like “Wish You Were Here,” “Better Days” and lead single “100” demonstrate SuperM’s dexterity -- and even though it’s still uncertain when their global fans will be able to see the songs performed live, the collective sounds prepared to put on an eclectic, wide-ranging show with these tracks.

Ahead of their new album’s release, the members of SuperM answered 20 questions about their musical backgrounds, leaning on each other during the pandemic, the highlights of Super One and more:

1. What’s the first piece of music that you bought for yourself, and what was the medium?

BAEKHYUN: An Avril Lavigne CD. I really liked her music when I was young so I remember going to a CD store with my brother to buy her album.

2. What was the first concert you saw?

KAI: I remember I went to my first concert when I was 16 years old. This was Usher’s concert when he came to Korea. Seeing him perform onstage inspired me to work harder towards my dream to become an artist like him. I still can’t forget the energy and the vibe of people around me and remember wanting to perform on a big stage like that.

3. Who made you realize you could be an artist full-time?

TAEMIN: My mom was the first person actually. When I was very young, she saw how much I enjoyed singing and dancing and encouraged me to audition. Since then, I started moving towards my dream to become an artist and performer. She helped me discover my passion at an early age and encouraged me to do what I love, and for that, I’m forever grateful.

4. What’s at the top of your professional bucket list?

TAEYONG: I just want everyone I work with to be happy, and work together for a long time. This includes not just SuperM members, but also the rest of the staff and the team behind the scenes that make it all happen!

5. How did your hometown/city shape who you are?

MARK: I think everyone is influenced by their hometown and where they come from. It’s really special to be a K-pop artist and perform in front of fans in Canada, where I’m from. When we performed in my hometown during the world tour earlier this year, it was such a significant “homecoming” moment for me. Canada always has a special place in my heart.

6. What’s the last song you listened to?

LUCAS: The last song I listened to is Justin Bieber’s new song, “Holy.” It’s a great song to listen to when you are feeling tired. I listen to it on repeat when I’m on the move during the day and it puts me in a good mood.

7. If you could see any artist in concert, dead or alive, who would it be?

TEN: I would choose Michael Jackson, because I always regret that I didn’t get to see him perform onstage live. I look up to him as an artist, and I’d love to see him sing and dance live at one of his concerts.

8. What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen happen in the crowd of one of your shows?

MARK: Well, one thing that happens at every show is how emotional I get seeing the venue packed with our fans. Before going onstage, I always take a peek at the audience from behind the curtain, and it’s hard to describe the exact feeling in words but it feels surreal — too good to be true, almost. Especially for a standing audience, it’s not easy standing for hours straight in a tight space, but their energy never goes down. I never feel tired onstage because of them. It’s still pretty crazy to me to see and feel their energy every time. I miss them!

9. How has the pandemic affected the way you’ve created music in 2020?

BAEKHYUN: The process of creating music, writing and recording songs, was pretty much the same. However, planning the album promotion during pandemic was a little different, since everything had to be done online. We had to think of fun and unique ways to interact with our fans, from creating our own reality show to holding livestream, AR tech-based concerts. We have a lot more creative content in store for our fans, so stay tuned!

10. What was your reaction to SuperM’s mini album topping the Billboard 200 chart last year?

KAI: Everyone was super happy. We put our heart and soul into the album and worked really hard on it, so in a way, we were looking forward to the results. When we saw that the EP hit number one on the chart, it was one of the happiest moments of our career.

11. What’s the biggest difference, creatively speaking, between last year’s mini album and Super One?

TEN: The mini album was more about introducing SuperM and our SMP-style performances, whereas for Super One, it shows more of our different musical styles and really brings out the dynamic qualities that we possess as a group. So, to put it simply, Super One is the completed version/look of SuperM. Also, what was important for us when creating this album was to include a message of hope and deliver that positivity and strength to listeners. Music can really lift your spirits when you’re feeling down, so I hope people find healing and happiness while listening to our music. That would make us very happy.

12. Why did “100” make the most sense as a lead single?

TAEYONG: “100” is all about speed and energy, so it’s the perfect single to showcase SuperM’s power as the opening act of Super One. It also helps convey the message that we are always moving forward at full-speed, giving our 100% in all we do.

13. What’s one song on the album that you suspect will be a big fan favorite?

LUCAS: I think fans will like “Better Days.” It’s a nice ballad song for a great start to your day. It also contains a message of comfort and empathy to help get through these difficult times. We hope our fans can feel the warmth of this messaging through our vocals and fluid rapping.

14. How has the group bonded during what’s been a wild 2020?

TAEMIN: We’ve been through a lot and have always been there for each other through thick and thin so naturally, we’ve gotten very close. They’re like family now. We didn’t have to “try” to become close, it just naturally happened -- as if we were destined to be in the same group.

15. SuperM has been part of a massive year for the global expansion of K-pop. How does it feel to see so many K-pop songs, albums and artists setting records?

MARK: This makes me really proud. I remember growing up in Canada, a lot of people at my school didn’t know K-pop. It was mainly just popular among Koreans. Now, so many people all over the world know about it and K-pop is getting so much attention. I feel honored and proud to be a part of this movement. Bringing the two cultures closer together and building that bridge through music is such a historic moment, and I can’t wait to contribute more to it and create great music for listeners worldwide.

16. What’s your go-to song that you’ve been singing along to lately?

BAEKHYUN: These days, I have Eric Benet’s “Still with You” on repeat, so I’ve been singing this a lot lately. This was one of my favorite songs in high school, and ever since I started spending more time at home, I’ve been revisiting some of my old favorite playlists. They bring me back to that moment when I was in school, aspiring to become an artist.

17. What movie, or song, always makes you cry?

TEN: This always changes, but when I can empathize with the characters in a movie or connect with the emotions in a song, it makes me cry. I recently cried watching the animated film, Grave of the Fireflies. I watched this for the first time when I was young, but re-watching it as an adult touched me in a different way.

18. If you were not a musician, what would you be?

LUCAS: If not a musician, I’d probably be a firefighter – a job that saves other people’s lives is truly inspiring to me. But if not a firefighter, I’d definitely choose a career that make people happy, just like what I try to do now through music and performing.

19. What’s one piece of advice you would give to your younger self?

KAI: I would tell my younger self to take care of yourself and stay healthy, because health is so important! I would also tell him not to be so hard on himself and enjoy the ride as a young teenager. This is the time for having fun and trying different things! Back then, I was so focused on my career and working towards my dreams that I didn’t spend a lot of time doing “regular teenager experiences,” which I wish I did more of!

20. What’s your message to fans who have been supporting SuperM -- and waiting for this album to arrive?

TAEMIN: It’s been almost a year now since our debut, and we are incredibly grateful to have so many fans cheer us on. We put our heart and soul into the album knowing that our fans have been waiting for a long time. While we’re sad that that we can’t meet them in person, we hope they can feel the positive energy through our songs and performances.

Jason Lipshutz @ Billboard

[1ddiscourseoftheday]

Fri 5 Apr

Louis is scheduled to perform!! He's on the lineup for Free Radio Hits Live on May 4 in Birmingham!! According to organizers he will do "a few songs!" JSKYYDVGFFYDSJV UMM, I mean, my my how terribly exciting, I guess he's going to be resuming promo activities for Two Of Us, though the exact details remain murky. The MTV program that was listed for tomorrow has been rescheduled for the 10th, and though he was discovered to be listed to attend the Football for Peace Dinner this Mon, his name was then removed from the list. But anyway, Two Of Us has moved up from the BBC1 C playlist to the B list (that's good!)

Niall was papped in L.A. in a shirt with two rainbows on it, promoted Soccer Aid, and spilled tea (sort of) in another epic ig Q&A. Will he attend the Met Ball? Maybe! Will the new album be out this year? Maybe! A hint about the new album? It will have music on it! Are you going to Masters (golf tournament) next week? Definitely. Well that's Niall for ya all right. He doesn't waffle when it counts though, even about non golf topics; Piers Morgan attempted friendly banter with Niall about Soccer Aid and Niall flatly shut his ass down. I look forward to more of this almost as much as the football part!

Liam is also in L.A. (did he and Niall jet over together? we'll never know) and surprised fans last night at a Lennon Stella show, popping out to sing Polaroid with her to the delight of the lucky crowd. A few short hours later he posted the perfect running in the L.A. hills sunrise pic, with a series of pics breaking down the process of getting the perfect running in the sunrise pic, which doesn't actually seem to involve much running but it's not like I'm worried about him not getting enough exercise. Enough sleep, maybe so, but not exercise. Liam also appeared looking very dapper in British GQ: obviously he'll never achieve the modeling heights Niall has, but he's out here giving him a run (heh) for his money! He rounded off a good day of content with a somewhat disturbingly erotic video of him enjoying a massage chair that I'm just gonna pretend I never saw starting... Now.

On the topic of staged running pics that probably don't involve a lot of running, there was Harry today getting papped in London looking sporty as hell in his leggings and colorful windbreaker (and matching nails) but with a smoothie sloshing around in a to-go cup, making honestly the most amazing faces- these are some classic meme pics for the ages. You can always count on Harry to come through there. If you prefer to see him looking serious and pretty though, you're also in luck! Beautiful HQs from the HS1 recordings were pulled from the photographer's website and are circulating, along with some HS1 speculation (never too late)- namely, was the famously mysterious Baby Honey actually just a Harry remix version of Mitch Rowland's soft bluesy song Honey Babe? Will we ever know? Signs point to no.

And a final note for lucky UK readers, tickets are available now for both Soccer Aid and Louis' show. For the rest of us, just tears and livestreams; business as usual basically.

[chaosd1]

You know, when I reblogged that, it was mostly to showcase an issue that’s been present for YEARS, but keeps cropping up every now and then because most of Channel Awesome’s fans still think it’s 2010. If I had a Patreon dollar for every person who asked me something about “____ DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY!” despite that not being a thing I’ve done for over half a decade, I would probably not have to worry about paying off that damaged tire, or any future repairs to my car and/or PC. Long story short, they aren’t very good at letting things go.

I know people who want me to share my story are hoping for the same level of juicy gossip or levels of hypocrisy or betrayal that have accompanied so many of these other stories but I’m sorry to say it’s not quite that interesting, or even remotely “gotcha” in any sense of the word. If anything it’s more a reveal of how the company feels about its low-tier producers, and symptomatic of the larger issue that they clearly DON’T want anyone but the Chicago crew, or anyone that’s possibly bringing in their own audience. Remember when JonTron and PBG posted on Blistered Thumbs? I’m pretty sure they’re still kicking themselves over that one. As a bit of background, I always wanted to be on the CA site in some form, and by the time I had a show to offer up, I was already pretty close friends with a lot of the producers. In fact, it was Julien (Sad Panda) who decided to post up one of my videos in his schedule slot as a way to offer me a test spot. It was well recieved enough, but video games were almost always relegated to BT at the point, so off I went.

Despite being the more “respected” site by some audiences, all snafu’s aside, I felt that Channel Awesome treated Blistered Thumbs producers as second class citizens. Posting on there was like the Wild West. You put up whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, and as often as you wanted, and hoped someone with a show that consisted of a three-hour long livestream split up into 15 minute increments wouldn’t end up pushing your video off the main page slider within the next few hours. It was very much for that reason I pursued some means to get myself listed on the main site by cleaning up the YEARS worth of spam and reported comments. After bringing it to the right people, I was permitted to post videos on the main site as well. It went well enough... for a while.

Once BT was shut down, a few of my friends (specifically MegaGWolf) were unceremoniously let go without an ounce of communication. (Most everyone on BT who wasn’t brought on to the CA “merger” had to find out via friends, as Michaud didn’t directly inform them.) Despite the promise of rebranding and stronger promotion, the BT audience didn’t really follow over to CA as the site didn’t really fit their desires, and the core CA audience was basically “NC, Linkara,and that’s it.” Views tanked and it was around the time I decided to move over to Youtube as the Blip waters were already pretty troubled.

At some point I started doing relatively well on Youtube, to the point CA felt like an annoying afterthought. I had to make special titlecards for CA as they had a ridiculous format I’d purposefully ignore later on just to see if they were paying attention. For example, the images were all supposed to be JPGS, though I always made them PNG, and since they were hotlinking them from my site anyway, WHY DID IT FUCKING MATTER?! It most felt like this ridiculous push for control and a power play that no one bothered to enforce anyway. Each time we scheduled we had to provide a link, a title, and a link to a special made titlecard. Did you have a special instruction or link you wanted to include when posting on CA? Good fucking luck they would ever include it, or spell half that shit correctly. Hell after a while, I figured it was pretty non-coincidental that after changing the title format from “MMO Grinder: Name of Game” to “Name of Game - ChaosD1,” views coming from CA were barely a percentile of the overall views I’d get from every other source. It wasn’t worth making them a stupid special title card and hopping onto a painfully broken scheduling site (a site that, by the way was designed for Sporting Events, and was so filled with non-updated dead links I occasionally would troll them by posting my category as “Blistered Thumbs” and “The Inebriati” both still available in the category dropdown menu. I’ll bet you they are still there to this day.

My issue didn’t come about until a sudden rule change. A rule I didn’t really have an issue with until the market started dying down, and my constant crushing depression over winter and my wife’s illness kicked in. Basically, “Post one video a month, or you’re stricken from the site.” later on that was changed to TWO videos per month and my show was almost always a ONCE per month deal. Seemed a bit suspect and draconian. There were people who didn’t post videos for several MONTHS that were still listed on the site, but they suspiciously had pretty strong followings elsewhere. Still I figured some form of warning or amnesty would take place to some extent. So in April of 2017 it was a pretty shitty month. Most of it was spent working on Eternal Crusade which was such a miserable slog none of us felt like doing much of anything else, there were no games to Sidequest for the suddenly required 2nd video per month, and I was pretty sure I was going to get some flak for it.Keep this in mind, I was WELL AWARE of the risk I was taking by not posting a second video, despite me rather often saying my show was monthly at the most. I figured they might know this, I’d get a warning, and that’d be the end of it. However, I was able to get out Eternal Crusade at the very end of April, but didn’t get around to posting it on the schedule until May 1st. May 1st rolls around, I check the site for any feedback and comments, and notice the video isn’t posted at all.... and I can’t access the scheduler anymore. One day late of posting consistently for 5 fucking years, and I’m locked out of the site like I stole a laptop from the studio. So I hopped on Twitter. Partially to express dismay, and partially because... I noticed I didn’t really have an audience on Channel Awesome anymore. I asked this very specific question and joked with some of the replies, most of whom confirmed my suspicion. They really only watched me on my site or my YT channel.

Still in talking with the CA chat in Skype, (I’d be on that Producer’s chat more often if I didn’t basically swear off Skype after Discord included screenshare. The producers and former producers really should make a Discord channel already.) they informed me that they’d probably reverse their decision if I just contacted Greg. While I didn’t think it was likely worth the effort, I figured I would anyway. Maybe pipe dreams of being included in an anniversary special some day. I just couldn’t wait to be the guy sitting slightly out of camera range in every shot with the one exception of getting to say “What should we do now, Critic?” for my first and only line in the movie. So I contacted Greg. It went a little something like this (for the Skype uninitiated, my words in Blue, Greg’s in grey):

So yeah, always fun to have to wait several days for a sentencing to the crime of being a day late on a post.

Of course, I cropped out the rest of the image, because the response without any contact in-between immediately afterward was this:

Yes I was being a sarcast there. I’m a sarcast... but when I’m last told “we’ll go through everything” and that is immediately followed up by “Sorry I took so long to get back, but... get lost scrub” I’m probably going to be a bit miffed about it. Of course this is CA and you can’t talk bad about them... or post something on Twitter they presume is talking bad about them, as this was the response to my sarcastic reply:

So yeah, Greg not quite understanding the concept of linear time (again I posted the tweet BEFORE I sent him the Skype message, not after) apparently you can’t even ask your audience where they still watch your videos most. They take it as a personal insult, like I didn’t enough appreciate those generous table scraps us low-tier producers had to fight over.

All things considered though, I knew the risk of not posting a second video in that month, and I valued my sanity over tossing out content for the sake of a suddenly imposed deadline. Could I have contacted Greg? Yeah, I suppose so, but why should I even have to? To be only a day late and have everything stricken without warning, like a robot looked over the feed and said “Well a month has passed, and there was only one so fired lel” without considering why, or even checking in on the employee in question, is the kind of corporate "numbers-only” bullshit that I swore off retail for. It’s fitting so many people in charge of Channel Awesome used to work at Circuit City is all I’m saying.

So that’s it. Nothing major, something I basically brought on myself, but still a fairly telling story of how you’d be treated as a content producer on that site.

And to all the current and remaining producers that aren’t showing up to the studio every day, or have a sizable enough audience to make a dent if you were to leave... they don’t WANT you there. They do not care about you. You are a liability. The very second they have a logical-to-them reason to cut your ass from the site, they will. Why put yourself through all that stress for a job that makes demands of you, without even paying you, promoting you, or benefiting you in any way? You know they don’t care about that site now that they are where they are with their YouTube channel. (Currently there are two producers that haven’t posted since December, that are still listed on the site. I must have been a special exception, or maybe it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a video as long as you keep telling them you don’t.) You’re white noise to them. Stay or go. As much as you think it might, it probably won’t make a difference to you... 

...but it definitely won’t make a difference to them.

[sleepymarmot]

Twilight Mirage liveblog 5/5 (finale & post-mortem)

64-67

Found a new shortcut to my heart: announcing your finale is going to be a mashup of The Quiet Year and Firebrands 

Why is it surpising that the Qui Err Coalition allies with the Waking Cadent? That was my first thought when Iota was making her speech! The Qui Err thinks the humans should leave, the Cadent thinks the humans should leave, sounds pretty compatible to me. 

What's the logic of “When Crystal Palace arrives, we will blow up this system”? It's not a bomb! But it will be in danger if a bomb goes off right next to it!

Oh no, Ali is doing the classic “shoot yourself in the foot on purpose” move

I don't get how Grand Magnificent got promoted from “got paid once to retire” to “is trusted to do actual missions for Advent”

Why the hell does Gig want to kill Ballad

The players keep underestimating how “horny” the scenes in Firebrands are and Austin is increasingly exasperated 

I would like to thank Jack from the bottom of my heart for choosing dance as a framing for making contact with Grand. Also I completely lost it at “there are talons on my shoulder”

I must have missed something, what's so bad about the Splice and Our Profit that everyone's so excited to fuck them over? The Mirage is made a renewable resource, right, so the Splice isn't a drain on anything?

The Echo-Ballad scene is so frustrating that I can't even feel appropriately bad about it! Come on Echo, just help Grand go back to Advent as an undercover spy, it doesn't have to be a competition this time!

I still don't understand Independence II… How do you send your new very conspicous and recognizable design to friends in rival factions without blowing your cover 

The timeline here is really weird… Echo rescues Grand and brings Ballad with them, Ballad calls off his people, Grand sends out his new mech design… And a week later, Grand's still on Qui Err territory having a friendly lunch with its leader? If going back is still an option, how is that going to look without making Advent seem like total idiots? Ah, it's only a day after? Okay…

I'm very glad the Volition problem was solved so peacefully!

5 minutes later: “Quire could die!” How about no??! I was so busy preparing to mourn Volition. I am completely unprepared to lose Quire just like that.

Memorious was alive and also an axiom worm this whole time? Wut

Fuck, do we need another opportunity to kill off Ballad?! This list of NPCs is making me very nervous, I don't want any of them to die… As soon as they said “tactical skirmish” I started screaming internally and likely won't stop until it is over… Wow, Ali, that was cold Oh no, Keith is really on a mission to murder Ballad

Grand how could you bring a bomb to Christmas dinner what the hell RIP bird leader / avian boss, he had an amazing unique voice and, in my head, a really cool cartoony design

Thanks for 9.5 hours of fun. Now I guess it's time for the 4 hour long brutal and heartbreaking final boss encounter

Full offence Gig, but I wouldn't log off even the real internet for lawn games

Signet fucking saved everyone single-handedly, twice. Two biggest threats. Incredible. What is the rest of the game even about

Seriously, do the players know something about Advent that I don't?! Otherwise please stop calling your cheesy space mafia “nazis”

I've been waiting for Even and Cascabel stealing time together since the beginning of the finale! For 11 hours! Finally! This finale is in dire need of more romance content I like that everyone immediately starting dragging all Bioware games at once

I don't see how a secular virtual reality is more of a “weird cult” than an augmented reality in which people maintain an actual religion worshipping the union of human and synthetic life for 30k years. Can we not do the hypocrisy again please. Why is it okay for the Divine Fleet to build their own take on utopia but when the NEH does it's portrayed as a threat and all characters treat it with suspicion and contempt

OK all these ideological debates are fine and dandy but people really should ask more practical questions like “you don't have to rush, why don't you just go back to the previous eco-friendly methods we have previously agreed upon” Glad Fourteen won, but ideologically, as you can guess from this entire liveblog, I'm with Our Profit

I don't like how Tender started with the intention of attacking Our Profit / the Splice but very much like how it somehow turned into her offering to help them and solve everyone's problems in one move

Grand Magnificent building a pseudo-Divine to blind the Crystal Palace with the power of bullshit is the ideal happy ending for him

Good on everyone for doing the best possible things with the Divines, except for the DFS for managing to do every possible bad thing simultaneously!!! My dislike of that faction is vindicated but at what cost Oh god it's even worse 

“Echo Reverie, who knew well both the value and the cost of violence, and who dreamt powerfully of peace” is such a beautiful and concise summary of their character arc God I just love how organically Echo and Gig's arcs led them to help a decolonized society lead independent, peaceful and joyful lives

A new Fleet with a healthier relationship between the Divines and everyone else is nice, thank you Signet

Oh my god, the ending titles are Gig interviewing everyone, that's so sweet!!! Really the perfect sentence to end this campaign with.

(I feel like a jerk mentioning it but… Whenever there's music overlayed with the voice track, it's almost always too loud and I have to strain my ears to hear the words… It's been like that since season one. Am I really the only one with this problem?!) 

Whew! Hard to believe this long, long listening experience is over. I have mixed feelings: sometimes it was exciting or inspiring, sometimes it was fun but I felt I could as well be doing something else, sometimes I listened to the outro and thought “this music and the montage for it in my head right now make me feel so much more than the episode I just heard”, and sometimes the ideology of the narrative or characters'/players' opinions and actions clashed enough with my worldview enough to poison the entire experience. What's new is that, unlike the previous arcs, I didn't have an urge to shake my friends and yell at them “you absolutely must listen to this!” and that made me sad. But that might be just me getting used to this show and taking its good features for granted.

Post-mortem

Oh god, the production of the final sequence sounds like absolute nightmare

Thanks for validating me with the speech about the Fleet's lack of engagement with its “original sin”, Austin 

Thanks, Janine, I hate it! This religion didn't need to get any creepier!

Yes tell us how many ears Tender has! I need to know!! Tender's fursona is the Russian food cat?! Amazing The livestream practically starts with googling animal pictures. Classic

Honestly Echo's disability was barely noticeable to me as a listener… There wasn't a lot of visible difference between the way they accessed the mesh and other PCs did, and after the nanites did activate, I don't think it was ever brought up again…

Yeah I'm genuinely upset that Tender and Fourteen didn't get together, by the way! Or at least have an overt romantic storyline! Give me that sweet sweet PC/PC romance my soul is starving Like I get what Jack is saying about the value of depicting friendship and normally I'd be on his side but 😭 😭 😭 On the other hand I didn't know Echo/Grand was a thing (And now feel kind of bitter it got more official endorsement than my ship that has more canonical foundation) This universe is actually about Austin inventing NPCs who have crushes on Keith's characters and then Keith pointedly avoiding the subject How could anyone forget about Tender's wild fangirling over Waltz lmfao

Austin calmly talking of all these things I screamed about above like “yeah that's what I intended”. Like on the one hand I'm glad, but on the other why couldn't you make it less frustrating to listen to

The rehabilitation theme is another thing that is present thematically but was not discussed on screen enough imo. One thing my mind kept returning to re: Contrition's Figure was the question of forgiveness for serious crime, personal boundaries and principles, and the policy of not disclosing the inmates' crimes. I imagine a survivor of rape or abuse wouldn't want to share space with someone who did the same kind of crime that hurt them. Even if they wouldn't be made to interact, of course, but what if that person believes those kind of people don't deserve rehabilitation at all? What if they reject that system on principle? You often encounter seemingly serious statements like “abusers/rapists/nazis should die”, especially lately. I've heard that about “fascists” (which is a separate issue) in this very campaign. Where do people with these opinions go in a utopia? Do they not exist? Do people who commit horrific crimes not exist either? Because I was listening to that arc and thinking “What if one of those undisclosed crimes was csa or serial murder or something like that? Would I be expected to shake hands and play chess with that criminal? How could I rehabilitate, heal, re-socialize, learn to trust in a space where anyone I meet could be Shrodinger's rapist?” And that leads to the bigger question of what a utopia is. Is it a better society – or better human nature? If latter (and Austin said so) – then to what extent? Because the theoretical people who are so much more advanced than us that they are, en masse, incapable of extreme cruelty, must also differ from our generation with their entire psychology. And a psychology so different would be unimaginable, unplayable, and would not provide necessary dramatic conflict or antagonistic characters. Which is why most alien characters in most stories, including this one, are just humans in silly costumes or prosthetics.

Oh dear god, that must be the heaviest personal story yet… But I understand better what Declan's Corrective was about.

Oh I've been definitely thinking about static utopias vs utopias of process while listening! When I wrote at some point that they made me stop and consider what a utopia is, it was one of the things I meant.

Yeah, sure, in our world the Splice would be terrible because of the existing power dynamics. But that's a Counter/weight story! Twilight Mirage and the Divine Fleet have been about the technologies and ideas that could have been, or were, used to terrible ends, but miraculously, we got to see them used in good faith with genuinely good intentions and good results. Divines have been all kinds of threats over the ages, and yet the Fleet managed to build a community around them that was a small paradise for 30,000 years. So why do the NEH and the Splice not get the same benefit of the doubt? Why is narrative not treating them with the same respect? Why are they always a threat? Why isn't there a major, likeable NPC whose life was enriched by the Splice to the extent that it is central to their identity, who could be our advocate for that point of view? Why are some powerful and potentially infinitely dangerous things, like Divines or religion itself, shown as more valid than others? And don't tell me that our player characters are from the Fleet – none of them are Qui Err either, and yet by the end it is a respected, lovingly portrayed player faction.

Oh, and also, speaking of the Splice's dangers, and what would have made it dangerous in the real world – one of the things that bothered me about it was that these dangers weren't actually described and addressed in the show properly! Probably at least in part because this techology is so magical it's hard to codify how it works. If it gives an indefinite amount of time, how do you sync up all these infinite amounts of timelines? Whenever anyone logs in to visit Tender, how do they know if it's been a day for her, like in the real world, or a hundred years? (Oh and by the way, I waited in vain for the explanation for these strange duplicities and possible time anomalies; what was going on with Ache and Acre?) If opposing the Splice and the NEH were about solving specific problems with the Splice, I would be all for that!

But yeah, I really do appreciate “processes that self-regulate and address their own issues”, how the story and specifically the finale were about the work of building a better world. I like the finale especially because it shows the social processes more clearly; TM's lack of a faction game and its focus on “bigger picture” was palpable, so I was happy to see again that aspect of the show I think is really good and unique. At first I thought it was anticlimactic that the main threats of the finale were solved so easily, early, and pretty much single-handedly. And, indeed, in a tv show that would have looked pretty strange (and require some rewriting, because with how it went down, Signet should have been the sole protagonist from the start lol). But on the other hand, it gave a lot of space and focus to what the whole story has been about: building a better society and future. Not just saving it from an external threat and drawing the curtain on that – but making sure the world we won is the one we want to live in. Preserve the environment! Decolonize the land! Shut off the tyrannical prophecy machine! And that's a good thing, and from my perspective very characteristic of this show. Before it, I didn't even know there were games about building and preserving communities and addressing civil issues! For years I thought “Well, stories of adventure are fun, but they don't address the real issues”, but turns out, there are people and systems that at least try to combine both. And that's a thought I can find comfort in, even if the specific choices of this campaign make me frustrated sometimes.

“I also tried to move away from violence this season and ended up making an arms manufacturer”

Somehow the end of the post-mortem feels sadder and more final than the end of the show proper

[livinginlandmarketing]

There’s a certain kind of guest coveted by many of Southern California’s casinos, one who gets special access to the gaming floor, first dibs at a new restaurant or complimentary spa treatments and hotel stays.

But these perks aren’t being showered on just high rollers anymore; they’re increasingly being provided to social media influencers, whose currency is measured in views and followers rather than credit lines or stacks of cash.

As the role of social media continues to increase in society, casinos have increasingly embraced influencers — people who promote products or experiences for their niche but relatively large audiences on social media — hoping that their posts and videos will translate to more visitors walking through the casino doors.

Casinos such as San Manuel Casino near Highland, Morongo Casino, Resort & Spa near Cabazon and Harrah’s Resort Southern California in Northern San Diego County have brought influencers in for visits to expand their marketing reach, sometimes sharing new amenities or promotions at the properties and other times capitalizing on an idea from the influencer.

This shouldn’t be a surprise: Influencers have come into their own as marketing forces in the last few years in a range of industries, and so it’s unsurprising that casinos would want in on the action.

It’s a marked change from the early 2000s when people were often bothered by the idea that a blogger was being paid or doing product placement in their writing, said Heather Honea, chair of the marketing department at the Fowler College of Business at San Diego State University. However, with today’s social media influencers, people accept that the job is basically product placement — as long as the products endorsed fit the influencer’s brand.

According to guidelines issued by the Federal Trade Commission, influencers have to disclose when they’ve been paid or received something of significant value in exchange for their endorsement. However, if they receive a product for free with the expectation that they’ll promote or discuss the product, they don’t have to disclose that.

Sign up for our Casino Insider newsletter and get the week’s best bets for food, entertainment and fun at Southern California’s casinos. Subscribe here.

To  attract influencers, casinos might promise lavish experiences or grant the influencer early access to a new amenity.

At Harrah’s Resort Southern California, time is spent getting to know influencers and what it is they’re looking to promote before they’re brought on the property so that a specialized itinerary can be put together to capitalize on the partnership, said Amber Lussier, Harrah’s director of resort marketing.

At Harrah’s, part of the marketing is telling the story of its own city, “Funner,” which has included honorary celebrity mayors such as David Hasselhoff and Rob Riggle. The swearing-in of the new mayor of Funner is one of the biggest influencer events at the resort.

“We really roll out the red the carpet and we customize everything that we do for them so when they show up, they’re going to walk out to a cabana that’s fully decked out with maybe a foot bath and their favorite beer in a bucket of ice and some balloons and decorations,” Lussier said.

San Manuel Casino has worked with influencers for almost five years, said General Manager Peter Arceo, and they have become an important part of the casino’s marketing strategy, particularly when the complex opens a new venue or amenity.

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Fitting the brand 

Some casinos are more selective in their approach to influencers.

Morongo Casino, Resort & Spa only does two or three engagements with influencers a year, according to Executive Director of Marketing Simon Farmer.

He said that the casino looks at a variety of factors beyond how many followers an influencer may have. Casino officials will consider the influencer’s content, how they represent themselves, what demographics they’re speaking to and where their audience is located. He said that if an influencer does not draw in an audience that’s traditionally apt to gamble or visit a casino, or if that audience is in a different geographic area, then they may not be the best choice to work with.

“It’s not simply reach or exposure for the sake of exposure that we’re looking for; we’re looking for effective exposure,” Farmer said.

Honea said that having a small audience isn’t necessarily a bad thing either.

“It can be really valuable to get a little more niche where they have a really committed set of loyal followers,” she said.

Michael Felci, public relations manager for Fantasy Springs Resort Casino in Indio, said Fantasy Springs doesn’t currently work with influencers. He said getting people in to play on the gaming floor is the most important thing and that Fantasy Springs’ research indicated there wasn’t enough of a crossover between their gaming customer base and social influencers.

“We haven’t seen enough data on that to make it a relevant thing for us at this point,” he said.

Casinos get influencer-friendly 

Brian Christopher is a well-known YouTube influencer whose channel, Brian Christopher Slots, has amassed an audience of nearly 300,000 loyal fans.

He frequently visits casino floors in Southern California and elsewhere in the country to film videos of himself checking out the newest and most popular slot games. His channel and videos have grown more sophisticated over time, and now he also livestreams from gaming floors.

“We’re always trying to go the next step and see what else we can do that’s new and different and exciting,” he said.

Brian Christopher has his own channel on You Tube, Brian Christopher Slots, with nearly 300,000 subscribers and more than 180 million views. He plays slot machines all over Southern California. Pictured is Christopher doing one of his live shows at Agua Caliente Resort Casino Spa Rancho Mirage on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2020. (Photo by Terry Pierson, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Filming slots may not seem that groundbreaking when everyone has a video camera on their phone, but what Christopher is doing was — and still is — taboo. Many casinos still shy away from filming on the gaming floor, but some are warming up to it.

Arceo said Christopher was the first influencer San Manuel worked with after loosening the policy on taking photos and videos of slot play nearly 5 years ago.

Since that time, because of Christopher’s popularity, and San Manuel’s easy-going policy, the casino has seen more influencers putting together similar content — and they seem to be getting results.

“When we see people coming in within a day or two, or sometimes hours after a broadcast, then we know it works because it’s stimulated someone to get out of their house or wherever they’re at, walk in the door and search for the game that they just saw someone playing online,” he said.

The impact of the pandemic 

Some casinos have even utilized influencers to help with their communication during the coronavirus pandemic.

When San Manuel reopened after a months-long closure on June 15, they invited Christopher and several other influencers to spread the word about the reopening and the casino’s safety precautions.

“We just said, ‘Look, when you come here, feel free to tell your followers what the difference is’,” Arceo said.

In his video, Christopher shared details about San Manuel doing two temperature checks and said he thought it was smart that staff had been professionally trained to ask COVID screening questions. Another YouTuber was quick to point out the thermal cameras and plexiglass. 

And having someone else share that made all the difference, Arceo said.

“We can say it all day long, but I think when people see real people talking about it then it’s received better that way,” he said.

Lussier said she saw the number of influencers visiting Harrah’s decrease after it reopened from its coronavirus closure in May, which she attributed that to people being cautious about traveling and staying in hotels.

“We’ve seen a steady increase throughout the year, and now I feel like we’re cranking,” Lussier said. ” We’re almost back to where we were pre-COVID.”

Arceo anticipates that social media influencing will continue to rise in prominence and more people will adopt it as part of their strategy.

“I think most people don’t understand it,” he said. “They shy away from it because they don’t understand how it works, but I think just like anything else, once people get the hang of it and see how successful others have been with it, I think they’ll follow suit.”

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-on November 05, 2020 at 12:39AM by Alex Groves

[merilly-chan]

I hope we’ll get some clarification soon on the D23 Kingdom Hearts Theater Fan Event Thing being held on February 10th.

First of all, there’s no guarantee Kingdom Hearts 3 will make an appearance or in what shape or form since there has been no confirmation whatsoever as far as I know that it will be part of this, unlike last D23 in Anaheim.

Of course the odds are in our favor due to a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the game being scheduled to come out this year and being in dire need of some more promotion, Nomura saying they were going to take a short break and it has been half a year then, all Disney worlds confirmed to be revealed before the release, and the most important factor: the event is ~1 hour and 20 minutes long. While such a long event certainly can be filled with past titles and the future of KHUX in a jiffy, I doubt they would make it this exclusive just so people can experience games anew they’ve likely played a thousand times already. Another spectacular announcement concerning a whole new title likely won’t make it anyway since this is THE year of KH3.

So, chances are fairly good there’ll be at least some news regarding KH3. If it’s a trailer, who knows, but at least some form of interview, screenshots, music, etc. would be plausible.

Which brings me to the main point. I’d like to know if there will be a livestream of the event and, consequently, whether they will once more do this exclusive information type again which put everyone in a rage two years ago. Square/Disney should make it exceptionally clear this time whether everyone who is not attending the event, which has a limited quantity of tickets which can only be gotten via some sort of raffle, will see something of the event in the form of a video posted on YouTube, a livestream, etc. closely after or during the event itself. And not two months later. It does not matter to me if attendees will receive a special piece of information, maybe after a stream has ended, the only thing I do not want is the disaster from D23 Japan 2016 repeating itself where the trailer was only posted roughly two months later.

That’s why I’d like to see some form of official statement regarding this. Whether people’s expectations of what is being shown are betrayed is our own fault in the end but especially last time, there was this whole hype being built up that D23 was the place to be for new information and then there was nothing for those who couldn’t attend.

Personally, I’d like to keep my expectations low so I won’t be disappointed. But considering this is the scheduled release year of Kingdom Hearts 3, keeping too much information concealed and only made available to a small crowd of lucky people does not seem like a smart idea. What happened in 2016 was unfortunate but bearable, considering the game was still nowhere near completion and any type of information was not really promotion but an update on the status at best.

Yet, this is not the case anymore. Quite frankly, KH3 needs the publicity, the marketing and the promotion now and this would be a terrible time to unravel a trailer to only a small audience and then make it available to the world two months later. This year should have an adequate amount of information which should be well proportioned and preferably not set a variety of fans into a fit of rage because of major exclusive content.

Two trailers within barely one month may seem great at first glance but it is not so terrific anymore when there’s nothing the next six to ten months. I’d personally prefer smaller tidbits over the year with sufficient gaps, which D23 would provide.

Let’s say KH3 arrives in Q4, then D23 Japan, E3 and TGS would be great events to do more marketing, with other events being possible but having less of a history with KH. The events are wide enough apart not to be overwhelmed left and right and sufficiently large to appeal to people. Especially E3 since the world’s eyes are on that event more than Japan based conventions.

Either way, it’s hard to tell if there’s going to be a livestream or at least information posted directly after the event. While SE certainly is no stranger to livestreaming, D23 Japan has more of a reputation for only disclosing little of what was shown to the public in regards to KH3, even going so far as to put an embargo on attendees for awhile to just speak about it. I hope, however slim that hope is, they will handle it similarly to D23 2017 in Anaheim or at least like the Orchestra trailer, but an announcement would be appreciated, especially for those in different time zones. No one wants to get up at 5 in the morning if they are usually asleep at that time and then see or hear nothing outside of tweets or forum posts presented by attendees. (Which are always appreciated as well but simply cannot compare to the actual experience.)

In the end, it would just be nice to get some sort of confirmation whether the rest of us can expect something during or shortly after the event. If not for the sake of being well-informed, then to prevent another outrage. I know there was never a confirmation that the showcasing of this event will be, if only partly, made public. Or whether there’ll be any KH3 at all since an interview said they didn’t know yet when there’ll be more. But with the release coming closer and closer, I can also understand expectations and hopes building up when being teased this much through articles/interviews. It doesn’t take much to confirm or deny that there’ll be information made available. It’ll prevent another outcry of those fans who are becoming easily furious and negativity spreading. Even bad press is good press may not apply to video games.

While Disney makes the ultimate decison and while I also implore people to remain calm if the worst case scenario takes place, what’s the point in keeping such things a secret, especially when people know how the fanbase will react? They’re certainly not oblivious to this and while the fanbase may be disappointed if they deny us access to what is shown, at least we have a clear answer beforehand and no needless hype being crushed and the internet being overwhelmed by salty fans.

All I wish for is some clarity on the matter. No hints at what could possibly be shown, just a tweet saying the event will be streamed for example or the content will remain exclusive.

[rickhorrow]

10 To Watch : 12219

10 To Watch FOR THE WEEK OF JANUARY 21 : Mayor’s Edition

More brands are "tangling with political and social issues in their advertising campaigns.” However, most Americans “would rather they don't try the same thing during the Super Bowl," according to the Wall Street Journal. Viewers are "likely to get what they want." The WSJ poll shows two-thirds of consumers "call the Super Bowl an inappropriate place for advertisers to make political statements." Baby boomers in the poll "disapproved of political Super Bowl advertisements more, at 77%, than younger cohorts such as millennials (55%) and Generation Z (43%)." Only 35% of Generation Z respondents "called political Super Bowl ads 'very' or 'somewhat' appropriate." The Super Bowl has "featured political ads before, most notably" in Super Bowl LI, which "took place soon after President Trump's inauguration." A year later, Super Bowl LII was "less overtly political, but still included” a Coca-Cola ad promoting unity, a T-Mobile USA Inc. diversity theme, and a Dodge Ram Trucks spot using audio of a Martin Luther King Jr. speech in an ad that promoted public service. Marketers have not "shown any inclination to charge into hard-core politics or social controversies" during Super Bowl LIII. However, with the country as divided as it is, themes imploring diversity, unity, and inclusion will no doubt make their way into the February 3 broadcast.

In its eighth consecutive installment, The POWER 100, Horrow Sports Ventures’ proprietary annual ranking of the most powerful athletes in sports, uses a complex statistical model to accurately compare performance and influence through on-field (50%) and off-field (50%) attributes. Athletes are then ranked based on POWER to find the TOP 100. Among interesting results: Serena Williams is not ranked for the first time ever. Her performance slowed after taking some time to start a family, and some controversial moments may have hurt her brand. Expect a strong bounce back once she’s back on schedule. Tom Brady (14), in the cusp of playing in yet another Super Bowl, has hit his highest ranking in recent memory, a nearly 54 place increase since last year. And the stellar play of NBA’er Giannis Antetokounmpo continued on the court and has paid dividends off the court as well, as he placed 8th. Top endorsement earners were Roger Federer (12) taking home $58 million in off court sponsorships and LeBron James (10) with $56 million. The highest place rookie from any sport is quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who finished 20th in the rankings and came within minutes of reaching the Super Bowl on Sunday.

Golf also got some encouraging news this week from the market research firm NPD Group, which reported that the golf market “has not only recuperated but experienced a significant uptick in sales” in the past 12 months, resulting in an 8% year-over-year increase up to $2.6 billion. “The macro environment for golf has been in a turbulent state, fueled by Golfsmith’s bankruptcy, major brands cutting back on their golf business, and courses closing. But today, we’re starting to see normalization in the market as those deep holes are now being filled,” said Matt Powell, vice president and senior industry advisor of the NPD Group. The industry saw increases across every product category. Clubs, which make up 50% of the category, grew by 7%, while equipment accessories such as balls (6% increase), gloves (7% increase), accessories (21% increase), and training aids (13%) also made positive strides in 2018. Callaway, Titleist, and Wilson were the fastest-growing brands among the top-10, joining TaylorMade and PING as the other two members of the top-5. With Baby Boomers retiring every day, great opportunity exists to introduce thousands of new retirees to golf. Combine that with a good economy, Tiger’s resurgence, and thrilling up and comers in the game and you have the makings of a stable industry.

It’s official: Austin will be the 27th MLS franchise. Last week, MLS Commissioner Don Garber recognized Austin FC as the league's 27th team, with the expansion franchise "set to begin play" in the spring of 2021 at a privately-financed, 20,000-seat stadium at McKalla Place in North Austin,  according to the Austin American-Statesman. While the team will be majority owned by Austin FC Chair and CEO Anthony Precourt, he also "plans to announce local investors soon." Austin FC is the first pro franchise for the Texas capital in any of the Big Five major American sports leagues. Team officials "hope to break ground at the stadium site by September and are finalizing plans that would allow construction to begin on a training facility at a yet-to-be-named private site." Last year, Precourt made his intentions known to purchase the Columbus Crew with a clause that would eventually let him move to Austin. But that deal was basically scuttled by passionate Crew fans. Precourt’s biggest challenge in Austin: competing with rabid University of Texas fans, especially now that UT’s football team is once again on the rise.

The University of Texas athletic department had more than $219 million in "annual operating revenue and total operating expenses" of just over $206.5 million during FY 2018, according to USA Today. This is the second consecutive year in which UT has had more than $200 million in both "operating revenues and expenses," as UT was at nearly $215 million in revenue and $207 million in expenses for FY 2017. Comparatively, the University of Michigan reported spending $175.4 million in 2017, and the University of Alabama's "total athletics revenue" for FY 2018 was $177.5 million -- up from FY 2017's $174.3 million that was "then a school record," according to the Birmingham News. Texas A&M also reported more than $200 million in revenue in 2017, but that amount was boosted by almost $93 million in "contributions received and spent by the department during that year, as the school continued a facilities-spending boom." UT attributed this impressive revenue to the school's football program at $144.5 million, a total that was "more than the total athletics operating revenue reported" for FY 2017 by all but 12 NCAA D-I public schools.

New Jersey’s total 2018 sports betting handle reached $1.24 billion at casinos, racetracks, or through online or mobile betting platforms. However, the numbers "flattened out during December after a record-setting November in sports books around the state and online," according to the Asbury Park Press. The "total handle in the state fell" from $330.7 million in November to $319.2 million in December, a 3.5% decline. Gross revenues also "fell" from $21.2 million to $20.8 million. The Press of Atlantic City notes the opening of two "new casino properties, the introduction of legalized sports betting and the continuous growth of internet wagering all contributed to a total gaming revenue increase of nearly" 8% in New Jersey from 2017-2018. In December, the gaming industry generated $247.4 million in revenue, a nearly 20% increase from the same month in 2017. In December alone, more than $319 million was "bet on sports" in the state. The end of year downtick means there is even more scrutiny on producing big numbers off Super Bowl LIII next month.

CBS Sports HQ plans to livestream 30 hours of content for Super Bowl week.CBS Sports’ free sports streaming network will air more than 30 hours of live, original programming during the week of Super Bowl LIII, including daily shows from Radio Row starting January 28, on-site daily reports, ten hours of original pregame coverage on game day, post-game analysis, and highlights. According to Marketing Dive, programming will include "Off The Bench with Kanell and Bell," Pick 6 Rundown, Reiter's Block and CBS Sports HQ Extravaganza which is a Super Bowl pregame show featuring a competition between CBS Sports Digital crew and a mix of current and former NFL players every hour before kickoff. This year's Super Bowl will be streamed across more platforms than ever before including online, through the CBS app for connected TV devices, tablets, and mobile phones, and via the CBS All Access subscription service. This highlights the shift from TV networks investing more in their digital offerings to give fans more control of what and how they watch

Barstool Sports has rolled out a premium “Gold” Memberships that has racked up 10,000 paying subscribers in just three days. Out of the 10,000 + subscribers, the sports and pop culture blog claims that 81% signed up for the $100 annual subscription. According to Digiday, Barstool Gold is a tiered membership product that offers everything from exclusive content and merchandise, early access to events and office tours, and meet-ups with Barstool personalities. The lower tier costs roughly $1 per week and higher membership tier costs roughly $2 per week and comes with a few extra perks for diehard fans. The launch of Barstool Gold comes at a time when the company has grown to more than 130 employees. Today, commerce accounts for half of Barstool’s revenue, roughly 35%-40% coming from advertising, and the rest draws from emerging business areas including the Rough N’ Rowdy pay-per-views and other live events, as well as a growing licensing business based on Barstool-owned intellectual property. Although controversial, Barstool Gold is a way to insulate the publisher from external sports media giants who find the content too reckless and provide a platform for Barstool to make itself into a major player in the sports entertainment industry

Esports speedrun marathon Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) 2019 raised over $2.39 million for charity. AGDQ is one of two speedrun marathons hosted by GamesDoneQuick every year that bring in thousands of viewers to watch all types of speedruns in the name of charity. This year the speedrun, which is completing part or all of a video as fast as possible, raised funds for the Prevent Cancer Foundation and more than 46,000 donations. To date, Awesome Games Done Quick and its companion event, Summer Games Done Quick, have raised more than $19 million for their respective charities while peak viewership of their most recent event reached 219,240 concurrent streams on Twitch. The next event by GDQ will be the Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ) which runs June 23-30 in Bloomington, Minnesota. After the 131 games were speedrun, it is safe to say that both the viewership and donations from the world of esports continue to grow and GamesDoneQuick is at the forefront of the esport charity sector

Detroit Lions owner Martha Ford joins forces with her team’s players to pledge $600,000 to community efforts. According to the Detroit Free Press, Ford and Lions’ players pledged a combined $600,000 to help launch the new "Detroit Lions Inspire Change" initiative around the city. The money will help fund three causes chosen by players in a process that was set in motion after eight Lions players took a knee during the singing of the national anthem in a 2017 game against the Falcons. A'Shawn Robinson, Jalen Reeves-Maybin, and Steve Longa are the three players who remain with the team after protesting social injustices. Their donations will help fund scholarships for three groups including families who've lost service members through the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS); a youth development arm of the Detroit Police Department called the Detroit Youth Violence Prevention Initiative (DYVPI); and students at Detroit Lions Academy. Additionally the funds will be used to provide clean drinking water in Detroit public schools, help the CATCH charity for children, and aid Mariners Inn for homeless men. Under "Detroit Lions Inspire Change," players will be able to directly take action for social justice initiatives. 

[ladystylestores]

In Post-COVID-19 China, Virtual Beauty Is Bigger Than Ever – WWD

https://ift.tt/2ITXrdc

SHANGHAI — The foot traffic at Parkson was middling at best. Although the well-known department store on Huaihai Road no longer had that eerie ghost town feeling that had settled upon the entire city in February when COVID-19 was at its peak in China, it could not exactly be described as lively either.

So when I paused in front of the Shiseido counter, I had the full attention of beauty adviser Mei, who had on an orange peachy lip shade and upwardly brushed brows. With the high summer heat, she suggested I look into some brightening products for my freckles and consider the Synchro Skin foundation to beat the humidity and what seemed like the constant downpour during Shanghai’s plum rain season.

Nothing out of the usual for a beauty shopping trip, but after I agreed on the right shade of Synchro Skin and purchased it with a scan of my Alipay QR code, she also asked to add me into a WeChat group. The group had 170 other people who had also purchased a product from the Japanese brand, and over the next few days, instead of what usually would have been a one-off interaction, Mei’s cheerful and cute messages continued to appear on my phone, interspersed among my other group chats with friends sharing memes or making plans to meet up for dinner.

In Mei’s group, first, there was a special birthday promotion for people born in July, then I saw a post featuring an up-and-coming Chinese model wearing a Shiseido lipstick at an event. Later, I saw that the concession was trying to clear a bunch of products that were going to expire in a year, as opposed to three years. Incense, my favorite shade of Shiseido gel lipstick which usually retails for 240 renminbi, was on sale for unbelievable 36 renminbi. I bought it and three others from the clearance. Mei also cross-promoted her account on TikTok, where she posted beauty look inspiration.

Even as general retail hemorrhaged under COVID-19, beauty has been remarkably resilient, buoyed by digital tools and ways of online selling. Beauty, for a confluence of factors, seems to be the perfect category to thrive in the current environment.

A July report from Ruder Finn and Consumer Search Group found that average beauty spending in the next 12 months in China is estimated to slightly increase to 11,355 renminbi per person–of which 44.3 percent of which on makeup products, 38 percent on skin care and 17.7 percent on fragrances. Lip products are projected to grow 21 percent in sales volume in the next year.

Traditionally, cosmetics has been one of the last hold outs to full online commerce, namely due to the nature of the product. Compared to accessories and apparel, slight shifts in undertone of a makeup product could mean the difference between a shopper loving and hating an item, and in skincare, texture and consistency are also paramount. So online beauty sales tended to be repeat purchases or the result of first the consumer browsing in an off-line store, but not so any longer in China.

For example, in March at the height of COVID-19, Pinduoduo saw sales of beauty products increase 163 percent compared with the same period last year, of which eye shadow gained 244 percent and lipsticks gained 274 percent. On TikTok, beauty video content has increased by 228 percent year-over-year in 2019, faster than the average TikTok growth of 192 percent.

Just how are brands achieving this pivot to online?

Jenny Chen, cofounder of the agency Walk the Chat, said the overall direction brands has not shifted so much, rather that the pace of change has accelerated. “COVID-19 just reinforced their strategy of focusing digitally,” Chen said. 

“What changed is distribution: department store associates are moving online and becoming online livestreaming sellers. This is a big shift, but is something they have to adapt to because they are getting no traffic off-line. At least in China, the beauty brands who are fast-growing have always placed digital marketing as a top priority — brands like Home Facial Pro and Perfect Diary, some of which rank ahead of the largest international brands like L’Oréal Paris.”

“They have to be the next Austin [Li],” said Wen Zhang, founder of digital agency The Breakfast Press, referring to arguably China’s biggest livestreamer whose name is synonymous with lipstick. “That’s not the beauty adviser in the past. They have to learn how to do livestreams, too, and stand at the counter. What it does is it turns them into KOCs [key opinion consumers].”

Li, in fact, started out his career as a beauty counter consultant for L’Oréal in Nanchang, a second-tier city in China before making it big online.

Chen added that this requires a different kind of sales training. “When you do livestreaming you have to engage the users to like you, to click on the star button or the heart button so that the algorithm picks up that something is trending. They have to learn new techniques of selling. It’s very hard to predict who is going to be popular, it’s all algorithm based. The point is to make many staff try and maybe one of them could get a large following.”

Meanwhile, business accounts on WeChat Work, like the one Mei used to add me to her group, originally developed as an office communication tool similar to Slack, and have evolved to greatly expanded capabilities to manage CRM.

Xiaolei Gu, the director of innovation at FaberNovel, said that using these digital tools the consumer can be analyzed and targeted in a much more nuanced and efficient way than before. 

“They note down my name, location, maybe that I’m tall, have long hair, with sensitive skin. It’s all very targeted,” Gu said. “Even if my friend and I walk into the same store at the same time, if we are served by two beauty advisers, we might be in two different groups. There’s a whole infrastructure at the backend to monitor the group activity.

“Also in China, e-commerce is so pervasive,” Gu continued. “In the West, you don’t have a way you can close the transaction loop. Here, you can close the whole transaction loop from WeChat directly by going to a mini program. That really is creating business value.”

In particular, livestream uniquely fills what had been the last remaining gap to purchase beauty. For instance, if a livestream is promoting an eye shadow shade, it will broadcast under a variety of light settings to help shoppers decide. Audiences can interact with the KOL hosting the broadcast to ask them how the product will fare when exposed to sweat or humidity or to any unique concerns.

Price point also plays a huge factor in its popularity, as even luxury beauty stays within a relatively affordable range — domestic brands products often cost less than 100 rmb, making it an easy impulsive buy. Combined with generous return policies and free shipping, complimentary or very cheap samples to purchase, and a favorite influencers’s recommendation, the consumer is game.

“How can something that is so off-line truly just move online?” Zhang said. “My perspective is one of the biggest reasons China can is not just because they have digital platforms but culturally, they can accept it, too.”

Jerry Liu, the head of China Internet at UBS, attributes this digital aptitude to the unique evolution of the consumer in China, which is vastly differed to the western consumer journey.

“The off-line infrastructure was not as developed to begin with so consumers and merchants have needed the online platforms more,” Liu said. “Secondarily, the domestic brands were not as well developed, so it was a learning process [to use the Internet in order to reach brands] and they grew up with Taobao. China did not have these giant malls like in the U.S. in the prior decades [first]. China leapfrogged and went from not having great off-line to having great online.”

The bank predicts that Chinese e-commerce GMV will reach 7.8 trillion renminbi in 2022, representing 33.2 percent online penetration versus 28.1 percent previously, a trend accelerated by COVID-19. Livestreaming is expected to see a 71 percent CAGR until 2022, and 41.5 percent CAGR for social e-commerce, reaching 12.2 percent and 21 percent of total e-commerce GMV in 2022.

Beauty also, as it turns out, has a natural entertainment potential to it. Yvonne Ching, founder of the makeup brand Heir and an influencer who recently hosted livestreams for Burberry and Louis Vuitton, said working with cosmetics is a much easier project compared to apparel. “With a single makeup palette, you can quite easily create an hour’s worth of content and do tutorials,” she said. “If you are wearing a dress or talking about a bag, however, it’s much harder to interact with the product for that amount of time.”

Among the major livestreaming platforms, Taobao Live is the market leader, followed by Kuaishou and TikTok. Meanwhile, WeChat is improving features for retailers and brands, and Little Red Book, or Xiaohongshu, just announced at the start of this month that it would reduce its platform commission from around 20 percent to as low as 5 percent, in order to be more competitive for merchants. In the past, users tended to rely on Xiaohongshu pre-purchase but would often leave the ecosystem and then transact on Tmall or WeChat mini programs.

Walk the Chat’s Chen enumerated the different platforms. “Bilibili is very different it’s more of a video platform where you can watch a 20-minute video to learn about a certain style of makeup,” she said. “There’s a community where you can discuss how to use each in the comments section. For TikTok, beauty it’s easier for the average user to get into it because it’s very short and it makes cosmetics look easy versus if you are, say, a professional beauty artist. They are on Bilibili, which allows them to get into more in depth and have discussions.” 

Zhang agreed, noting that different platforms appeal to distinct demographics and geographical regions. “With COVID-19, beauty KOLs have moved seriously to TikTok because it’s just really relatable. People want to relate to the KOL and feel like this is somebody that could be that be my friend,” Zhang said. “It’s different to WeChat and Xiaohongshu, which are not that city defined. You have all walks of people, the dialects, the way they talk, what they eat, it’s more personal but it also means for luxury brands on TikTok, it’s going to be difficult. It’s a big gap actually.”

“Bilibili is a little bit like YouTube — you have a lot of vloggers, a lot of young people and students so brands like Brandy Melville or H&M who want to reach to students at university,” Zhang continued. “It’s the young crowd, people who like anime, people who cosplay.”

While Chinese consumers have been free to venture out to shops for months now with COVID-19 under control, these new online behaviors are sticky and the demand for livestreaming seems here to stay, Liu of UBS believes.

“It could be a good way to introduce new products [for luxury brands] because the livestream and KOLs can educate consumers,” he said. “Will brands want to move product that way more and more for everything they have? Probably not. But for some products and new launches, it might work.”

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[recentanimenews]

Anime Conventions You Can Attend Online in 2020

Photo by Kevin Matyi

With SARS-CoV-2 continuing to shut down events and businesses, and the potential of a second wave coming later in the year, anime conventions have needed to adapt and consider the safety of bringing large groups of people close together.

As a result, many conventions have shut down for the year, promising to return next time, some have been postponed to see if the COVID-19 situation changes, and others have moved to virtual conventions to adapt to the current environment. For example, our own Crunchyroll Expo is now a virtual convention scheduled for September 4-6.

  With all of the confusion and rapid changes though, it’s difficult to know what conventions are still going to happen at all in 2020. To help out, here’s a list of every anime convention still happening this year, including when it’s occurring and a link to its website for more information. Check back for updates as situations change.

Photo by Kevin Matyi

Without further adieu, here are the remaining conventions still scheduled to happen in some form during 2020:

    Anime Expo Lite

“Anime Expo is the largest anime con around, with over 100,000 fans in attendance. Grab your friends, craft your cosplay, and get ready to experience anime like never before.” When/Where: July 3-4; Virtual Website

  Aniplex Fest Online

“The festival will feature a diverse array of online content including talk shows with the staff and cast from popular anime, special appearances and past live shows from music artists, and behind-the-scenes stories from the anime industry!” When/Where: July 4-5; Virtual Website

OokiiSoraCon

“OokiiSoraCon was formed in 2017 with the mission to develop an ever growing gaming, anime, entertainment and culture driven convention that is affordable and accessible to Montana and the Northwest.” When/Where: July 11; Virtual mini-convention Website

  Okashicon

“Okashicon At Home will be a community-driven, virtual two-day event on July 18-19, 2020. Leading up to July 18th, however, we’ll be hosting a number of contests and providing quality content to bring you together with the community you know and love.” When/Where: July 18-19; Virtual Website

KuroNeko Con 

“Get ready for the premier anime convention in Spokane, Washington! Three exciting days of Japanese culture and pop culture at the Spokane Convention Center!” When/Where: July 19; Virtual Website

  AnimeIowa

“AnimeIowa is the largest anime convention in Iowa and still growing, hosting well over 3000 attendees each year.” When/Where: July 31-Aug. 1; Virtual Website

  PopCult Anime Con

“We want to make PCAC feel like a summer vacation compared to more crowded and heavily scheduled cons. A place with all the same great programming, such as the Masquerade, AMV contest, game shows and exhibitors’ room; as well as less common and more relaxing activities like evening dances, blanket fort building workshops, intimate guest opportunities or taking a dip in one of the Sheraton Framingham’s two beautiful pools!” When/Where: Aug. 15-16; Virtual Website

  Otakuthon

“Otakuthon est le plus grand festival bilingue au Canada célébrant la culture pop japonaise! | Otakuthon is Canada's largest bilingual festival celebrating Japanese pop culture!” When/Where: August; Virtual Website

  Crunchyroll Expo

"We are excited to announce Virtual Crunchyroll Expo, a digital event that celebrates the best and brightest in anime. Join us September 4 - 6 as we come together with our passionate community for amazing guest panels, interactive events, special announcements and more." When/Where: Sept. 4-6; Virtual Website

  Photo by Kevin Matyi

  A few conventions are still going the conventional, in-person route (for now). Think carefully about the risks of attending and please wear a mask if you do.

  Ani-Me Con

“Ani-me Con is the largest anime convention in the central valley!” When/Where: July 11-12; Fresno, CA Website

Delta H Con

“Delta H Con is the budding flower of hobby Gaming enthusiasts and Anime aficionados in the southern United States.” When/Where: July 17-19; Houston, TX Website

  Feria Mundo Anime

“Feria Mundo Anime, the convention of anime, comics, video games and entertainment in the Dominican Republic and one of the largest in Latin America.” When/Where: July 25-26; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic Website

  Anime-zing!

“This Iowa anime convention includes dozens of anime screenings, a plethora of discussions, autograph signings, a dealers hall, and group meetups for fandoms including several anime, BJDs, Homestuck, Lolita fashion, MLP, science-fiction, and video games. We're not just about anime - we are everything Otaku.” When/Where: July 31-Aug. 1; Davenport, IA Website

Anime Sekai

“Anime Sekai is a 3-day convention that celebrates Japanese culture, geek culture, anime & manga, cosplay, tabletop & video gaming, comics, TV shows, movies, and much, much more!” When/Where: July 31-Aug. 2; Abilene, TX Website

Anime: Roseville

“Roseville’s anime convention.” When/Where: Aug.2; Roseville, CA Website

Anime Houston

“Join your fellow anime fans in talking about your favorite anime and cosplays. Come together and learn about anime, video games, and more.” When/Where: Aug. 7-9; Houston, TX Website

Kawaii Kon

“Kawaii Kon is a 3-day convention that celebrates Japanese anime (cartoons), manga (comics), and all facets of Japanese culture.” When/Where: Aug. 7-9; Honolulu, HI Website

SaikouCon

“SaikouCon, which means ‘best convention’, is the annual anime convention of Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains with several side events in the Lehigh Valley, boasting a dedicated staff of longtime Japanese anime and manga fans.” When/Where: Aug. 7-9; White Haven, PA Website

Kin-Yoobi Con

“It's Kin-Yoobi Con's thirteenth year hosting a cosplay gathering & contest, video gaming & tournaments, panel discussions & workshops, dealers hall & artists alley, live music performances, and free food!” When/Where: Aug. 9; Union City, CA Website

Star Con Leon

“Donde la estrella eres tu!” When/Where: Aug. 14-16; Gto, MX Website

Ani-Medford

“SOUTHERN OREGON's ONLY anime convention.” When/Where: Aug. 15; Medford, OR Website

  Superstar Anime

“SUPERSTAR ANIME is a new annual 2-day convention held in Virginia Beach, VA or fans of Japanese Animation, Entertainment, and Culture.” When/Where: Aug. 15-16; Virginia Beach, VA Website

Anime Matsuri

“Anime Matsuri is the spectacular annual anime and Japanese pop culture convention hosted in Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center. Join attendees from over 30 different countries in a celebration of anime, music, art and cosplay, with hundreds of hours of programing and exciting Guests, Celebrities and Industry Experts.” When/Where: Aug. 20-23; Houston, TX Website

Liberty City Anime Con

“The best three-day anime convention in New York City.” When/Where: Aug. 21-23; New York City, NY Website

Tiger Con

“Welcome to Tiger Con III. The third year of Valdosta’s anime, gaming, cosplay and comic convention.” When/Where: Aug. 22-23; Valdosta, GA Website

Anime Magic

“We're a convention by fans, for fans with a focus on FUN. This isn't your typical cookie-cutter convention! We have all the normal fanfare you've come to expect from other conventions, while pushing the boundaries even further.” When/Wherel: Aug. 28-30; Schaumburg, IL Website

MizuCon

“MizuCon is an annual convention that celebrates Anime and Japanese culture.” When/Where: August (and ongoing livestream events); Miami, FL Website

Colossalcon

“Colossalcon is a Japanese animation convention held in Northern Ohio during the beginning of June each year, and prides itself with being the region’s kick-off to the start of summer vacation.” When/Where: Sept. 2-6; Sandusky, OH Website

Meta Con Minneapolis

“MetaCon is a massive entertainment expo filled with exhibitors, guest stars, interactive events, costuming, exhibitors, artists, entertainers, and beyond. We bring together thousands of geeks for a three-day celebration of geek culture and nerd life.” When/Where: Sept. 4-6; Minneapolis, MN Website

Nan Desu Kan

“For us, the love of anime and Japanese culture isn’t just a marketing tool or a nifty side feature on our schedule; It’s our purpose for existing and a mandate of our Nonprofit Charter. We bring people together to further the knowledge of Japanese Art, animation and culture, and welcome people from all over the region under our roof.” When/Where: Sept. 4-6; Aurora, CO Website

SacAnime

“SacAnime is the show where ‘Fans Come to Play’. Our philosophy has always been to provide fun, safe, family friendly environment, with top shelf entertainment at a reasonable price.” When/Where: Sept. 4-6; Sacramento, CA Website

San Japan

“San Japan is the Largest Anime & Gaming Convention in the South Texas Region.” When/Where: Sept. 4-6; San Antonio, TX Website

Saboten Con

“Saboten Con is the largest anime convention in Arizona with attendance reaching 13,298 (unique) / 37,983 (turnstile) for the 2018 event.” When/Where: Sept. 4-7; Phoenix, AZ Website

Animex

“ES EL EVENTO DE CÓMICS, ANIME Y ENTRETENIMIENTO MÁS ANTIGUO DEL NORTE DEL PAÍS. BIENVENIDO A #ANIMEX” When/Where: Sept. 5-6; Monterrey, MX Website

RTX Austin

“RTX is the world’s greatest celebration of gaming, animation, comedy, and internet culture.” When/Where: Sept. 5-7; Austin, TX Website

CampAnime 

“A summer-camp and anime convention hybrid that is perfect for all ages, families, geeks, & otakus of every kind. With activities like boating, archery, and rock-climbing, & panels for every fandom and interest, there's something for everyone at CampAnime.” When/Where: Sept. 11-13; Woodstock Valley, CT Website

Star Con Lagos de Moreno

“Donde la estrella eres tu.” When/Where: Sept. 12-13; Jal, MX Website

Anime USA

“At its heart, Anime USA seeks to discuss and promote anime; other associated arts such as storytelling, costuming, and voice acting; and Japanese culture at large.” When/Where: Sept. 18-20; Washington, D.C. Website

Colossalcon East

“We offer the most fun you will ever have at an anime, gaming, and Japanese culture convention.” When/Where: Sept. 18-20; Pocono Mountains, PA Website

Crystal Millenium Convention

“The Crystal Millennium Convention, also known as Crystal Con, is an anime themed event held in Vancouver, Canada dedicated to the magical girl genre, specifically the groundbreaking 1992 Japanese animated series Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon.” When/Where: Sept. 18-20; British Columbia, CA Website

Ramencon

“Ramencon was built by anime fans for anime fans. We get a lot of our ideas from the fans. We want you to feel that this is your convention.” When/Where: Sept. 25-27; South Bend, IN Website

Senshi Con

“Senshi Con is an annual convention that caters to enthusiasts of Asian culture, animation, graphic novels, and gaming held in Anchorage, AK.” When/Where: Sept. 25-27; Anchorage, AK Website

KimiKon

“We aim to service and celebrate our local talents as well as showcasing international ones, by creating an outlet of expression for them through the next big convention in Toronto, KimiKon!” When/Where: Sept. 26-27; Ontario, CA Website

Queen City AniFest

“Queen City AniFest is a single-day convention held to celebrate anime, games, all things nerdy in Regina and the surrounding area.” When/Where: Oct. 3; Saskatchewan, CA Website

Super Dimension Convention

“Originally known as ‘MacrossWorld Convention’, Super Dimension Convention (SDCon) is the largest gathering of Macross fans in North America!” When/Where: Oct. 3; Torrance, CA Website

Pop Culture Convention

“Pop Culture Con is a convention that brings together the talents and passion of local fans and businesses; created to be a safe place where people can come and geek out either as an attendee, guest, or volunteer. A convention that local fans can call their own.” When/Where: Oct. 9-10; Provo, UT Website

Tsubasacon

“Tsubasacon is West Virginia’s first Anime, Gaming and Cosplay convention.” When/Where: Oct. 8-10; Charleston, WV Website

Bakuretsu Con

“Bakuretsu Con is Vermont's premiere anime convention! Our family-friendly event draws approximately 600 attendees, and is sponsored by The Anime Society of Vermont, a public, non-profit organization whose primary mission is to promote cultural awareness and diversity through the celebration of anime and manga.” When/Where: Oct. 16-17; Colchester, VT  Website

Animatic Con

“Animatic Con started in March of 2015 with the idea of delivering to the fandoms across the U.S. a convention that was fun, and had a higher purpose. After much consideration and discussion, we decided that we wanted to help raise funds for Autism, and with that we wanted to create a convention that welcomed people with limitations, and accommodate to their needs.” When/Where: Oct. 16-18; Cincinnati, OH Website

Anime Banzai

“Presented by UAP, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, this three-day weekend is filled with anime, manga, gaming, Asian culture, guests, panels, games, contests, kids’ events, viewing rooms, an Artist’s Alley, an Exhibitor’s Hall, silent auctions for various charities, two dances, and so much more.” When/Where: Oct. 16-18; Layton, UT Website

Anime Fusion

“Anime Fusion is truly a convention for all ages, with many family-friendly activities along with 18+ restricted programming for the older crowd. With our family discount options, it’s the perfect place for parents and children to share their love of anime and games. Our nightlife features dances and room parties, and the daytime hours are filled with panels and activities.” When/Where: Oct. 16-18; Plymouth, MN Website

AnimeCon Arkansas 

“Join us for a magical celebration of fandoms, geeky stuff, animation, art, music, and everything else beautiful!” When/Where: Oct. 16-18; Little Rock, AK Website

Another Anime Convention

“Another Anime Convention is a run by people who love Japanese culture especially Japanese animation. It is a place for fans to gather in New Hampshire for a three day convention to enjoy events, special guest's and other media that celebrate aspects of Japanese culture.” When/Where: Oct. 16-18; Westford, MN Website

YumeconUSA

“YumeCon staff aspires to create a more intimate con experience than what you might find at a large scale convention. Enjoy cosplay, gaming, panels, and a maid cafe in a friendly environment.” When/Where: Oct. 17; Palo Alto, CA Website

Kantaicon

“Kantaicon is an anime event that will be held on Oct 24th, 2020 at the AAF Tank Museum. Vendors and Artists will be selling their wares and cosplay is encouraged!” When/Where: Oct. 24; Danville, VA Website

Anime Weekend Atlanta

“AWA has been recognized as one of the most popular Japanese Animation conventions in the United States, and one of the top ten attended anime conventions in North America. In 2016, over 28,000 people attended the event.” When/Where: Oct. 29 - Nov. 1; Atlanta, GA Website

Youmacon

“Youmacon is a celebration of Japanese animation, videogames, popular culture and costuming, and its influence on our own culture over the past few decades.” When/Where: Oct. 29 - Nov. 1; Detroit, MI Website

Banzaicon

“While Banzaicon is a Japanese anime convention, we offer a wide variety of programming options by diverse members of the community throughout the course of the weekend which include our costume contest, dances, events and discussions featuring anime industry guests, game shows, and a wealth of educational seminars and workshops about not only anime, but manga, video games and aspects of Japanese culture as well.” When/Where: Oct. 30 - Nov. 1; Columbia, SC Website

DerpyCon

“DerpyCon is New Jersey’s Anime, Gaming, Sci-Fi, and Comic Convention, bringing every nerdy genre under one roof.” When/Where: Oct. 30 - Nov. 1; New Brunswick, NJ Website

Lumi-Con

“LUMI-CON is a Florida Halloween Convention based off Animation, Video Games, Cosplay and Interactive events!!” When/Where: Oct. 30 - Nov. 1; Tampa, FL Website

Oni-Con

“Oni-Con offers many things to do such as: anime viewing rooms, a manga lounge, table top and card gaming, an arcade, concerts, contests, dances, demonstrations, a masquerade and various panels.” When/Where: Oct. 30 - Nov. 1; Galveston, TX Website

Anime Festival Orlando

“Anime Festival Orlando has earned the title of “Florida’s Favorite Anime Convention” as well as being voted one of the “Top 10 Things To Do In Orlando” by DK Publishing’s Travel Guide.” When/Where: Nov. 6-8; Orlando, FL Website

Anime Nebraskon

“Anime NebrasKon is Nebraska's longest running Anime Convention! Our mission is to connect all people and community through Japanese animation and pop culture with education and activity.” When/Where: Nov. 6-8; Omaha, NE Website

NekoCon

“NekoCon is Virginia's oldest and longest running anime convention. Spanning nearly two decades, NekoCon is dedicated to bringing you the finest in entertainment from the world of anime, educating it's attendees on Japanese culture, and expanding horizons with new and innovative programming.” When/Where: Nov. 6-8; Hampton, VA Website

Anime Iwai

“With a decade on convention experience behind us, we have both learned a lot about how to run a convention and seen the changes that have taken place within the con community over the years. We are proud to have contributed this labor of love to a community and a culture that has provided us entertainment, insight, and so much more.” When/Where: Nov. 13-15; Fort Lauderdale, FL Website

SNAFU Con

“Sierra Nevada Anime Fans Unite Convention (SNAFU Con) is a collaborative effort of local anime, game, comic-book, and science-fiction fans. Our goal is to provide a convention that will benefit both the producers within the local area and community at large. The primary goal is to connect local fans to each other as well as producers and retailers, allowing them to interact with their customers in a fun and relaxed setting.” When/Where: Nov. 13-15; Reno, NV Website

J-1 Con

“Are you a fan of animation, cosplay, gaming (tabletop, card and console), artists, vendors, panels, and live music? You’ve come to the right convention! You can enjoy all of that here, for a GREAT PRICE!” When/Where: Nov. 14-15; Atlantic City, NJ Website

Con-Nichiwa

“Con-Nichiwa is the largest anime convention in Tucson Arizona with attendance reaching over 2,000 yearly.” When/Where: Nov. 20-22; Tucson, AZ Website

Sin City Anime

“Our mission is to create and orchestrate an anime convention focused on three values. Entertainment, Inclusion, and Guest Hospitality.” When/Where: Nov. 20-22; Las Vegas, NV  Website

Pacific Media Expo

“Pacific Media Expo is a new generation of convention for a new generation of fans! PMX brings the cutting edge of Asian entertainment to America, whether it is the newest anime from Japan, the hottest bands from the Pacific Rim, the latest street fashion from Harajuku, or the most disturbing horror films from Asia.” When/Where: Nov. 21-22; Pasadena, CA Website

Anime Pasadena

“Now in our 3rd year, we are creating an awesome 2 day event with a focus on Anime, Cosplay and Nerd Culture in Pasadena, California.” When/Where: Nov. 28-29; Pasadena, CA Website

Holiday Matsuri

“Holiday Matsuri is a multi-genre convention that brings the members of our community together during the holidays to have fun and give back!” When/Where: Dec. 18-20; Orlando, FL Website

  Know of a convention we missed? Tells us about it in the comments!

    Kevin Matyi is a freelance features writer for Crunchyroll. He's been watching anime for as long as he can remember, and his favorite shows tend to be shonen and other action series.

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[businessfrontrunners]

Navy Veteran, Mompreneur, and Social Media Expert Trish Leto Reveals Secret Weapon for Maximizing Audience Engagement in 5 Minutes or Less

https://authoritypresswire.com/?p=26819 According to social media statistics reported by Hootsuite, Facebook Live videos get six times more interactions than regular video content, and 1 out of 4 Facebook users have watched a live stream video in the last month. That means a staggering 580 million Facebook users a month are watching live video.One expert believes that represents a significant untapped marketing opportunity.“If you're feeling kind of self-conscious or worried when you're using live video to promote your business, just remember that there are on 12-year-old girls on YouTube making thousands of dollars a week curling their hair with a flat iron,” says Trish Leto, a live stream expert who teaches business owners and entrepreneurs how to use live video to generate revenue.  Leto, a Navy veteran and mother of two with over 18 years of mortgage experience, stumbled upon the secret of “selling without selling” from her father. “I watched my father do sales, and he never just sold; he would tell people a joke,” Leto recalls. “My father taught me to make the relationship before you make the sale.”“Later, when I went online, I noticed that expert marketers like Gary Vaynerchuk, Grant Cardone, or Amy Porterfield build relationships by telling stories,” Leto says. She learned to implement relationship-building and storytelling into her own business by reaching out to over 100 industry experts and interviewing them on Facebook live. “I got addicted to it.”But according to Leto, most business owners make their social media and content marketing too complicated and boring. “Watching other people, I saw that they would do live video for half an hour or more. There would be no structure. There would be barely any audience engagement. There would be no real topic. They would forget to tell us who they were and there would be no calls to action,” Leto says. “And I'm thinking, what are you doing? What a colossal waste of time!”Believing there must be a better way, Leto developed her “5 Minute Lives™” strategy to simplify live video sharing and focus on creating great value that people can digest in five minutes or less. “The fact of the matter is, I really don't have more than five minutes of time to do a live video,” Leto says. “And quite frankly, people aren't watching more than five minutes’ worth of video anyway.”Leo has helped startups, nonprofits, and six-, seven-, and eight-figure companies to implement her 5 Minute Lives™ strategy. “If they can take this simple process and apply it to their business, it will exponentially help them increase revenue for less time in their day,” Leto promises. “It is a truly actionable, simple process.”“Trish Leto is a genius marketer, intuitive instructor, life saver, and business saver,” according to client Daniel Rhames. “We have implemented Trish’s teachings and have already seen positive results!”Leto’s signature speech, “How to Monetize Live Video Content,” has been highly recommended by audiences across the United States. “This is not another monotonous speech about concept,” Leto says. “It is a highly-interactive, hands-on presentation that will help attendees walk away with a clear understanding of how to transform their business by leveraging video content on multiple social media platforms.”Trish Leto is a keynote speaker, social media strategist, and founder of 5 Minute Lives™ Academy, teaching simple yet effective strategies for increasing revenue with just five minutes of livestream video. A U.S. Navy veteran, Leto is a sought-after speaker who appeared at Vaynermedia’s Agent2021. She provides coaching, consulting, and training to several corporate and small business clients.For booking information, or to learn more about 5 Minute Lives™ Academy and other training programs from Trish Leto, visit www.TrishLeto.com.

[www-youtube]

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Creator Blog

Mid-year Update on Our Five Creator Priorities for 2018

Friday, July 20, 2018

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> Dear YouTube Creators, <div style="text-align: left;"> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;">It’s hard to believe we’re already halfway through 2018. With 1.9 billion logged-in users coming to YouTube each month, our community continues to grow. More and more creators are building their businesses and discovering that they can shape the global conversation with just a phone and an internet connection. While mobile is one of the most popular ways fans enjoy content, more and more people are using their living room screens to watch their favorite creators. On average, users now watch over<span style="font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <span style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">180 million hours of YouTube on TV screens <span style="font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">every day.<span style="font-family: "arial"; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <span style="font-family: "arial"; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> 

While the future is full of opportunity, it is not without challenges. One of the ways we make YouTube better is through testing and iterations, but we understand that sudden changes related to experiments are difficult to manage. So, in order to minimize the disruption for you, we will make our best effort to communicate with you as these tests approach and we’ll use your feedback to make the features better in the long run.  And now, here is an update on my five key priorities for 2018:

1. Transparency and Communication

We continue to prioritize communicating more with creators. We made a conscious effort to respond on social media, and we answered 600% more tweets through our official handles (@TeamYouTube, @YTCreators and @YouTube) in 2018 than in 2017 and grew our reach by 30% in the past few months. We’ve also built a new feature than enables us to deliver relevant information in YouTube Studio, formerly Creator Studio.  In February, we began testing a new dashboard with a small group of creators, and we recently rolled out it out to all creators on the platform. The dashboard, which launched for all English channels and will soon be available in an additional 76 languages in the next two weeks, now gives you platform updates and news along with performance about your latest videos in one easy-to-find place. Last year, I started my own channel with the goal of communicating more with creators and saw first-hand some of the challenges and opportunities of sharing my voice through video. Today, I’m posting a new video, along with this blog, updating you on the five key annual priorities. Additionally, Creator Insider, an unofficial channel started by YouTube employees, continues to offer weekly updates, responds to concerns, such as notifications, and provides a more behind-the-scenes look at some of our product launches. And most recently, we combined our Creator Academy and YouTube Creators channels, so that you can find both inspiration and education in one place: YouTube Creators.

2. Supporting your success

This year at VidCon we shared some exciting new products designed to grow and strengthen our communities and give you more ways to earn revenue in addition to ads, including:

Channel Memberships - Viewers pay a monthly recurring fee of $4.99 to get unique badges, new emojis, Members-only posts in the Community tab, and access to unique custom perks offered by creators, such as exclusive livestreams, extra videos, or shout-outs. We worked with a small group of creators to develop this service and are expanding it to eligible channels with more than 100,000 subscribers and even more creators in the coming months.

Merch - We’ve joined forces with Teespring so creators can choose from over 20 merchandise items to customize and sell via a shelf on their channel. This is available to all eligible U.S.-based channels with over 10,000 subscribers, with expanded merchandising partners and availability for creators coming soon.

Famebit - Acquired by Google in 2016, FameBit has been helping brands tap into YouTube's audience by using creator's authentic voices to develop unique branded content at scale. Over half of channels that used Famebit in the first three months of 2018 doubled their YouTube revenue. In the coming months, we’ll be launching a feature that will allow users to easily shop for products, apps or tickets directly from the creator watch page.

In addition to new products, we continue to invest in YouTube Originals as another way to help creators earn more revenue. Well over two-thirds of our Originals star YouTubers both in front of and behind the camera, and since we launched Originals three years ago, we’ve seen their success have a ripple effect on creators. Some creators have seen as much as a 20 percent increase in channel viewership after their Original has launched. Finally, one of my biggest priorities is to show advertisers the incredible opportunities on YouTube to tap into engaged communities and extend their reach.  We’ve been working hard on brand safety and meeting with the biggest brands in the world to share your incredible stories and the progress we’re making together. The results have been positive, and I continue to make this a priority.

3. Giving people more ways to engage

One of the greatest strengths of the platform is enabling two-way conversations between creators and fans and fans to fans. We’ve been working hard to build out the different ways to enable interactions on YouTube and seeing results. Our overall interactions, such as likes, comments and chats, grew by more than 60% year over year.  Our Community Tab continues to be a one-stop shop for growing and engaging with fans. Visible across the platform, these posts let you move beyond just video to build even deeper connections with fans through GIFs, pics, polls, and text. Every day, over sixty million users click into or engage with Community posts. Livestreaming continues to be an area of growth for creators, with watchtime of livestreams increasing by 10X over the last three years. At VidCon, we launched Premieres to help creators take advantage of the popularity of live tools, such as Super Chat and scheduling, by allowing them to debut pre-recorded videos as a live moment on YouTube. We’re also seeing more creators use Stories, a simple way of posting videos without editing or post-production, to engage with their fans as well. We have some key improvements coming soon and later this year, we will expand stories to all eligible creators with more than ten thousand subscribers.

4. Tightening and enforcing our policies

Earlier this year, we released the first YouTube Community Guidelines Enforcement Report and we’ll be updating this regularly with new data. We just released the newest update in late June, which you can read here. We also announced our new Copyright Match tool, which uses the matching power of Content ID to help creators find copies of your content when it’s been uploaded by other channels. This will be offered to all creators, including those who are not part of a multi-channel network (MCN). We’ve been testing this tool with a thousand creators over the last year to tailor it to your specific needs and is a great complement to the range of copyright tools we provide.

5. Learning and education

Education is one of the greatest benefits of YouTube. Everyday, people watch learning-related content over a billion times and they’re using it to develop new skills and encourage their passions. I’m proud to announce a new initiative, YouTube Learning, through which we’re providing grants and promotion to support education focused creator content, expert organizations and learners. We're also expanding our learning content team efforts and have a newly dedicated product and engineering team working on building out features for learning on YouTube. Our hope is to support those who use YouTube to share their knowledge with the world and the millions of users who come to our platform to learn.

Looking forward

As our devices have become an increasingly important part of our lives, we want to support digital wellbeing. When we rolled out the YouTube Kids app, we included a timer that parents could use to limit the time their children spent in the app. We have since realized that a timer could also be helpful for adults. So, within the broader YouTube app, we’ve launched a feature that sends users a reminder to take a break. We’ve also added an option for users to get a single digest notification once per day from YouTube rather than at the moment notifications, and we enabled users to configure their notifications so that they happen within specific timeframes. As we head into the second half of the year, I look forward to continuing to work with you to create communities and engage with people using video. You are building the next generation of media companies, and I’m humbled by the amazing work you do every day. Susan Wojcicki CEO of YouTube

Dear YouTube Creators,

It’s hard to believe we’re already halfway through 2018. With 1.9 billion logged-in users coming to YouTube each month, our community continues to grow. More and more creators are building their businesses and discovering that they can shape the global conversation with just a phone and an internet connection. While mobile is one of the most popular ways fans enjoy content, more and more people are using their living room screens to watch their favorite creators. On average, users now watch over 180 million hours of YouTube on TV screens every day.  

While the future is full of opportunity, it is not without challenges. One of the ways we make YouTube better is through testing and iterations, but we understand that sudden changes related to experiments are difficult to manage. So, in order to minimize the disruption for you, we will make our best effort to communicate with you as these tests approach and we’ll use your feedback to make the features better in the long run.  And now, here is an update on my five key priorities for 2018:

1. Transparency and Communication

We continue to prioritize communicating more with creators. We made a conscious effort to respond on social media, and we answered 600% more tweets through our official handles (@TeamYouTube, @YTCreators and @YouTube) in 2018 than in 2017 and grew our reach by 30% in the past few months. We’ve also built a new feature than enables us to deliver relevant information in YouTube Studio, formerly Creator Studio.  In February, we began testing a new dashboard with a small group of creators, and we recently rolled out it out to all creators on the platform. The dashboard, which launched for all English channels and will soon be available in an additional 76 languages in the next two weeks, now gives you platform updates and news along with performance about your latest videos in one easy-to-find place. Last year, I started my own channel with the goal of communicating more with creators and saw first-hand some of the challenges and opportunities of sharing my voice through video. Today, I’m posting a new video, along with this blog, updating you on the five key annual priorities. Additionally, Creator Insider, an unofficial channel started by YouTube employees, continues to offer weekly updates, responds to concerns, such as notifications, and provides a more behind-the-scenes look at some of our product launches. And most recently, we combined our Creator Academy and YouTube Creators channels, so that you can find both inspiration and education in one place: YouTube Creators.

2. Supporting your success

This year at VidCon we shared some exciting new products designed to grow and strengthen our communities and give you more ways to earn revenue in addition to ads, including:

Channel Memberships - Viewers pay a monthly recurring fee of $4.99 to get unique badges, new emojis, Members-only posts in the Community tab, and access to unique custom perks offered by creators, such as exclusive livestreams, extra videos, or shout-outs. We worked with a small group of creators to develop this service and are expanding it to eligible channels with more than 100,000 subscribers and even more creators in the coming months.

Merch - We’ve joined forces with Teespring so creators can choose from over 20 merchandise items to customize and sell via a shelf on their channel. This is available to all eligible U.S.-based channels with over 10,000 subscribers, with expanded merchandising partners and availability for creators coming soon.

Famebit - Acquired by Google in 2016, FameBit has been helping brands tap into YouTube's audience by using creator's authentic voices to develop unique branded content at scale. Over half of channels that used Famebit in the first three months of 2018 doubled their YouTube revenue. In the coming months, we’ll be launching a feature that will allow users to easily shop for products, apps or tickets directly from the creator watch page.

In addition to new products, we continue to invest in YouTube Originals as another way to help creators earn more revenue. Well over two-thirds of our Originals star YouTubers both in front of and behind the camera, and since we launched Originals three years ago, we’ve seen their success have a ripple effect on creators. Some creators have seen as much as a 20 percent increase in channel viewership after their Original has launched. Finally, one of my biggest priorities is to show advertisers the incredible opportunities on YouTube to tap into engaged communities and extend their reach.  We’ve been working hard on brand safety and meeting with the biggest brands in the world to share your incredible stories and the progress we’re making together. The results have been positive, and I continue to make this a priority.

3. Giving people more ways to engage

One of the greatest strengths of the platform is enabling two-way conversations between creators and fans and fans to fans. We’ve been working hard to build out the different ways to enable interactions on YouTube and seeing results. Our overall interactions, such as likes, comments and chats, grew by more than 60% year over year.  Our Community Tab continues to be a one-stop shop for growing and engaging with fans. Visible across the platform, these posts let you move beyond just video to build even deeper connections with fans through GIFs, pics, polls, and text. Every day, over sixty million users click into or engage with Community posts. Livestreaming continues to be an area of growth for creators, with watchtime of livestreams increasing by 10X over the last three years. At VidCon, we launched Premieres to help creators take advantage of the popularity of live tools, such as Super Chat and scheduling, by allowing them to debut pre-recorded videos as a live moment on YouTube. We’re also seeing more creators use Stories, a simple way of posting videos without editing or post-production, to engage with their fans as well. We have some key improvements coming soon and later this year, we will expand stories to all eligible creators with more than ten thousand subscribers.

4. Tightening and enforcing our policies

Earlier this year, we released the first YouTube Community Guidelines Enforcement Report and we’ll be updating this regularly with new data. We just released the newest update in late June, which you can read here. We also announced our new Copyright Match tool, which uses the matching power of Content ID to help creators find copies of your content when it’s been uploaded by other channels. This will be offered to all creators, including those who are not part of a multi-channel network (MCN). We’ve been testing this tool with a thousand creators over the last year to tailor it to your specific needs and is a great complement to the range of copyright tools we provide.

5. Learning and education

Education is one of the greatest benefits of YouTube. Everyday, people watch learning-related content over a billion times and they’re using it to develop new skills and encourage their passions. I’m proud to announce a new initiative, YouTube Learning, through which we’re providing grants and promotion to support education focused creator content, expert organizations and learners. We're also expanding our learning content team efforts and have a newly dedicated product and engineering team working on building out features for learning on YouTube. Our hope is to support those who use YouTube to share their knowledge with the world and the millions of users who come to our platform to learn.

Looking forward

As our devices have become an increasingly important part of our lives, we want to support digital wellbeing. When we rolled out the YouTube Kids app, we included a timer that parents could use to limit the time their children spent in the app. We have since realized that a timer could also be helpful for adults. So, within the broader YouTube app, we’ve launched a feature that sends users a reminder to take a break. We’ve also added an option for users to get a single digest notification once per day from YouTube rather than at the moment notifications, and we enabled users to configure their notifications so that they happen within specific timeframes. As we head into the second half of the year, I look forward to continuing to work with you to create communities and engage with people using video. You are building the next generation of media companies, and I’m humbled by the amazing work you do every day. Susan Wojcicki CEO of YouTube



Google

Helping creators protect their content

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> We know how frustrating it is when your content is uploaded to other channels without your permission and how time consuming it can be to manually search for these re-uploads. We currently provide a <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/topic/2676339?&ref_topic=6151248" target="_blank">number of ways for copyright owners to protect their work, but we’ve heard from creators that we should do more and we agree. Today we are excited to announce the new Copyright Match tool, which is designed to find re-uploads of your content on other channels. Here’s how it works: after you upload a video, YouTube will scan other videos uploaded to YouTube to see if any of them are the same or very similar. When there is a match, it will appear in the “matches” tab in the tool and you can decide what to do next. We’ve been testing this tool with creators for nearly a year to make it safe and effective for the whole community. Thank you for all the feedback you provided. It helped us build a product that will help a lot of creators. <span id="docs-internal-guid-875f4902-4352-fc70-f55a-441ef74513d0"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img height="345" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Od7z-s1FRWkaQkotDBwAiCJEACUcLe5A-MQsoPUsUYLkjkcOIXZoRfaAzGRFIinS-NumkBAF0Sc7BH6Zgu8tVR2AxVKiJaRHr6qBOec_2UYt462jpKes24Z7iwKgp7le4LjeRWLG" style="border: none; transform: rotate(0rad);" width="624" /> Here’s what you need to know: <ul style="text-align: left;"> <li>It's important that you’re the first person to upload your video to YouTube. The time of upload is how we determine who should be shown matches. <li>This tool is intended to find full re-uploads. If you find a clip of your content that you’d like removed, you can always report it via the copyright <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807622" target="_blank">webform. <li>Once the tool has found a match, you can choose either to do nothing, to get in touch with the other creator, or request that YouTube remove the video. When you request removal you can do so with or without a 7-day delay to allow the uploader to correct the issue themselves. Takedown requests will be reviewed to make sure they comply with YouTube’s <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/topic/2676339?&ref_topic=6151248" target="_blank">copyright policies. <li>Before taking action, we ask that you carefully evaluate each match to confirm that you own the rights to the matched content and ensure that you believe it infringes on your copyright. You should not file a copyright takedown request for content that you do not own exclusively, such as public domain content. You should also consider whether the matched content could be considered <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6396261" target="_blank">fair use or could be subject to some other exceptions to copyright and hence not require permission for reuse. <li>You might be wondering: Isn’t this <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797370" target="_blank">Content ID? No. The Copyright Match Tool does use similar matching technology used by Content ID, but the Copyright Match Tool is a unique tool designed especially for YouTube creators who have problems with unauthorized re-uploads. Next week, we’ll start rolling this tool out to creators with more than 100k subscribers. As this is a powerful feature, we will monitor usage closely and will continue to expand over the coming months with the long-term goal of making it available to every creator in the YouTube Partner program. Thank you for helping to keep YouTube a platform which inspires vibrant creativity and respects and protects creative rights. Learn more about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/copyright/#learn-about-copyright" target="_blank">Copyright on YouTube. <i>Posted by Fabio Magagna, Product Manager for the Copyright Match Tool

We know how frustrating it is when your content is uploaded to other channels without your permission and how time consuming it can be to manually search for these re-uploads. We currently provide a number of ways for copyright owners to protect their work, but we’ve heard from creators that we should do more and we agree. Today we are excited to announce the new Copyright Match tool, which is designed to find re-uploads of your content on other channels. Here’s how it works: after you upload a video, YouTube will scan other videos uploaded to YouTube to see if any of them are the same or very similar. When there is a match, it will appear in the “matches” tab in the tool and you can decide what to do next. We’ve been testing this tool with creators for nearly a year to make it safe and effective for the whole community. Thank you for all the feedback you provided. It helped us build a product that will help a lot of creators. Here’s what you need to know:

It's important that you’re the first person to upload your video to YouTube. The time of upload is how we determine who should be shown matches.

This tool is intended to find full re-uploads. If you find a clip of your content that you’d like removed, you can always report it via the copyright webform.

Once the tool has found a match, you can choose either to do nothing, to get in touch with the other creator, or request that YouTube remove the video. When you request removal you can do so with or without a 7-day delay to allow the uploader to correct the issue themselves. Takedown requests will be reviewed to make sure they comply with YouTube’s copyright policies.

Before taking action, we ask that you carefully evaluate each match to confirm that you own the rights to the matched content and ensure that you believe it infringes on your copyright. You should not file a copyright takedown request for content that you do not own exclusively, such as public domain content. You should also consider whether the matched content could be considered fair use or could be subject to some other exceptions to copyright and hence not require permission for reuse.

You might be wondering: Isn’t this Content ID? No. The Copyright Match Tool does use similar matching technology used by Content ID, but the Copyright Match Tool is a unique tool designed especially for YouTube creators who have problems with unauthorized re-uploads.

Next week, we’ll start rolling this tool out to creators with more than 100k subscribers. As this is a powerful feature, we will monitor usage closely and will continue to expand over the coming months with the long-term goal of making it available to every creator in the YouTube Partner program. Thank you for helping to keep YouTube a platform which inspires vibrant creativity and respects and protects creative rights. Learn more about Copyright on YouTube. Posted by Fabio Magagna, Product Manager for the Copyright Match Tool



Google

VidCon 2018: Helping creators earn more money and build stronger communities

Thursday, June 21, 2018

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <i>Cross-posted from the <a href="https://youtube.googleblog.com/2018/06/vidcon-2018-helping-creators-earn-more.html" target="_blank">Official YouTube Blog I just stepped off the stage at VidCon, a conference created from scratch by Hank and John Green in 2010 that brings together fans, creators, and industry leaders to celebrate the power of online video. I talked about how over the last 13 years, YouTube has grown from an ambitious idea into a worldwide movement built on free expression and the power of openness. With more than 1.9 billion logged-in users who come to YouTube every month and localized versions stretching across 90 countries and 80 languages, we’re opening up the world to anyone with a cell phone and an internet connection. YouTube is a vibrant community where everyone has a voice. Every day, creators use their voice to entertain, spur action and bring about positive change. That’s why over the last year we’ve doubled down on building the products and tools that the creator community needs. Not only to thrive on YouTube, but to continue to develop the video platform of the future. <b> <h3 style="text-align: left;"> <b>The next big steps for creator monetization <b> YouTube lets creators connect with their community and gives them the opportunity to earn money while doing what they love. Thanks to advertisers, creators around the world have been able to build businesses, creating an entirely new global economy that’s seen incredible growth. The number of creators earning five figures a year is up by 35 percent and the number of creators earning six figures is up by 45 percent. As in previous years, the vast majority of the revenue is coming from our advertising partners. We’ll continue investing here, but we also want to think beyond ads. Creators should have as many ways and opportunities to make money as possible. We’ve been working on new tools that not only help creators better engage with their fans, they also enable them to make money while doing it. This is an idea that really began last year with <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7277005" target="_blank">Super Chat, a product that allows fans to purchase messages that stand out within a live chat. We’ve seen tremendous success with Super Chat and have since expanded to <a href="https://artists.youtube.com/blog?id=575c165c90b14528882950d6c1960dd3" target="_blank">Ticketing, <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6083754#teespring" target="_blank">Merchandise, <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6304294?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop" target="_blank">Channel Memberships and more. We’re also bringing creators and brands together to form unique marketing partnerships via <a href="https://famebit.com/" target="_blank">FameBit. <b>Channel Memberships <b> With Channel Memberships, viewers pay a monthly recurring fee of <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7491256" target="_blank">$4.99 to get unique badges, new emoji, Members-only posts in the Community tab, and access to unique custom perks offered by creators, such as exclusive livestreams, extra videos, or shout-outs. Channel Memberships have already been available for a select group of creators on YouTube as Sponsorships. We’ve seen a lot of creators find success with this new business model. So, we’ll soon be expanding this to <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7636690" target="_blank">eligible channels with more than 100,000 subscribers on YouTube under the new name Channel Memberships. We hope to bring it to even more creators in the coming months. Creators who have already been experimenting with this feature on YouTube have seen encouraging results. Since launching in January, comedy creator <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/mikefalzone" target="_blank">Mike Falzone more than tripled his YouTube revenue. And traveling duo <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/simonandmartina" target="_blank">Simon and Martina have built a closer-knit community and revamped a miniseries exclusively for their members, in more than 30 countries from Finland to the Philippines. <span id="docs-internal-guid-01509fc0-23de-8d9c-ba75-51f5d89d605a"> <div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-idqzzzwXIkY/WywsTxoO0HI/AAAAAAAACGg/mIiBeJNmqkAXXC-oSRQzTLRspimueav1gCLcBGAs/s1600/premieres1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="660" data-original-width="800" height="528" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-idqzzzwXIkY/WywsTxoO0HI/AAAAAAAACGg/mIiBeJNmqkAXXC-oSRQzTLRspimueav1gCLcBGAs/s640/premieres1.png" width="640" />

Merchandise Merchandise has been a part of many creators’ businesses for a long time. We want to make it easier for more creators to sell merch directly from their channel. So we’ve built a product that allows them to do just that. From shirts with a logo to phone cases with a creator’s face, we’ve joined forces with Teespring so creators can choose from over 20 merchandise items to customize and sell via a shelf on their channel. This will be available to all eligible U.S.-based channels with over 10,000 subscribers starting today, and we plan to bring even more merchandising partners and creators in soon. Just take a look at Joshua Slice’s merchandise shelf. The creator of Lucas the Spider recently turned his hero character into a plushie selling over 60,000 furry friends and generating over $1 million in profit in just 18 days, according to Teespring.

Introducing Premieres

The engagement between fans and creators is at the heart of YouTube. We’re working on new ways to help creators strengthen those unique bonds. Livestreams have brought the YouTube community together during the biggest music, science, and gaming events. We’ve also built a Community Tab that allows creators to move beyond just video to build even deeper connections with fans through GIFs, pics, polls, and text. And we’ve started experimenting with our take on Stories, but designed specifically for YouTube creators—coming to all eligible creators with more than 10,000 subscribers later this year. Today, we’re introducing a new way for creators to upload content to YouTube called Premieres. With Premieres, creators will be able to debut pre-recorded videos as a live moment. When creators choose to release a Premiere, we’ll automatically create a public landing page to build anticipation and hype up new content. When all fans show up to watch the premiere, they’ll be able to chat with each other (and with the creator!) in real time via live chat. It’s as if a creator’s entire community is in one theater together watching their latest upload.

Premieres also unlocks new revenue streams. For the first time, creators can use Super Chat on traditional YouTube uploads and take advantage of Channel Memberships perks that were previously only available on Live videos. Premieres are starting to roll out to creators today and will be available broadly soon. If you want to experience one for yourself, check out some upcoming premieres from creators such as Leroy Sanchez, JacksFilms, Jackson Bird, and Ari Fitz, with more Premieres coming from Corridor Digital and Inanna Sarkis soon. YouTube creators are the heartbeat of our platform. That’s why we’re committed to building products that empower and support the creator community. We hope these tools help creators build a stronger community and earn more money while doing it, because when they succeed, the entire YouTube community thrives. Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer, recently watched "Lucas the Spider - Plush Introduction"

Cross-posted from the Official YouTube Blog I just stepped off the stage at VidCon, a conference created from scratch by Hank and John Green in 2010 that brings together fans, creators, and industry leaders to celebrate the power of online video. I talked about how over the last 13 years, YouTube has grown from an ambitious idea into a worldwide movement built on free expression and the power of openness. With more than 1.9 billion logged-in users who come to YouTube every month and localized versions stretching across 90 countries and 80 languages, we’re opening up the world to anyone with a cell phone and an internet connection. YouTube is a vibrant community where everyone has a voice. Every day, creators use their voice to entertain, spur action and bring about positive change. That’s why over the last year we’ve doubled down on building the products and tools that the creator community needs. Not only to thrive on YouTube, but to continue to develop the video platform of the future.

The next big steps for creator monetization

YouTube lets creators connect with their community and gives them the opportunity to earn money while doing what they love. Thanks to advertisers, creators around the world have been able to build businesses, creating an entirely new global economy that’s seen incredible growth. The number of creators earning five figures a year is up by 35 percent and the number of creators earning six figures is up by 45 percent. As in previous years, the vast majority of the revenue is coming from our advertising partners. We’ll continue investing here, but we also want to think beyond ads. Creators should have as many ways and opportunities to make money as possible. We’ve been working on new tools that not only help creators better engage with their fans, they also enable them to make money while doing it. This is an idea that really began last year with Super Chat, a product that allows fans to purchase messages that stand out within a live chat. We’ve seen tremendous success with Super Chat and have since expanded to Ticketing, Merchandise, Channel Memberships and more. We’re also bringing creators and brands together to form unique marketing partnerships via FameBit. Channel Memberships With Channel Memberships, viewers pay a monthly recurring fee of $4.99 to get unique badges, new emoji, Members-only posts in the Community tab, and access to unique custom perks offered by creators, such as exclusive livestreams, extra videos, or shout-outs. Channel Memberships have already been available for a select group of creators on YouTube as Sponsorships. We’ve seen a lot of creators find success with this new business model. So, we’ll soon be expanding this to eligible channels with more than 100,000 subscribers on YouTube under the new name Channel Memberships. We hope to bring it to even more creators in the coming months. Creators who have already been experimenting with this feature on YouTube have seen encouraging results. Since launching in January, comedy creator Mike Falzone more than tripled his YouTube revenue. And traveling duo Simon and Martina have built a closer-knit community and revamped a miniseries exclusively for their members, in more than 30 countries from Finland to the Philippines.

Merchandise Merchandise has been a part of many creators’ businesses for a long time. We want to make it easier for more creators to sell merch directly from their channel. So we’ve built a product that allows them to do just that. From shirts with a logo to phone cases with a creator’s face, we’ve joined forces with Teespring so creators can choose from over 20 merchandise items to customize and sell via a shelf on their channel. This will be available to all eligible U.S.-based channels with over 10,000 subscribers starting today, and we plan to bring even more merchandising partners and creators in soon. Just take a look at Joshua Slice’s merchandise shelf. The creator of Lucas the Spider recently turned his hero character into a plushie selling over 60,000 furry friends and generating over $1 million in profit in just 18 days, according to Teespring.

Introducing Premieres

The engagement between fans and creators is at the heart of YouTube. We’re working on new ways to help creators strengthen those unique bonds. Livestreams have brought the YouTube community together during the biggest music, science, and gaming events. We’ve also built a Community Tab that allows creators to move beyond just video to build even deeper connections with fans through GIFs, pics, polls, and text. And we’ve started experimenting with our take on Stories, but designed specifically for YouTube creators—coming to all eligible creators with more than 10,000 subscribers later this year. Today, we’re introducing a new way for creators to upload content to YouTube called Premieres. With Premieres, creators will be able to debut pre-recorded videos as a live moment. When creators choose to release a Premiere, we’ll automatically create a public landing page to build anticipation and hype up new content. When all fans show up to watch the premiere, they’ll be able to chat with each other (and with the creator!) in real time via live chat. It’s as if a creator’s entire community is in one theater together watching their latest upload.

Premieres also unlocks new revenue streams. For the first time, creators can use Super Chat on traditional YouTube uploads and take advantage of Channel Memberships perks that were previously only available on Live videos. Premieres are starting to roll out to creators today and will be available broadly soon. If you want to experience one for yourself, check out some upcoming premieres from creators such as Leroy Sanchez, JacksFilms, Jackson Bird, and Ari Fitz, with more Premieres coming from Corridor Digital and Inanna Sarkis soon. YouTube creators are the heartbeat of our platform. That’s why we’re committed to building products that empower and support the creator community. We hope these tools help creators build a stronger community and earn more money while doing it, because when they succeed, the entire YouTube community thrives. Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer, recently watched "Lucas the Spider - Plush Introduction"



Google

An Update on Our 2018 Priorities

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> Dear YouTube Creators, At the beginning of the year, I wrote a letter to you outlining five key priorities for YouTube in 2018. Among those priorities was to communicate more frequently with all of you, and in that spirit, I plan to share updates with the creator community every quarter. As you can imagine, the last two weeks have been incredibly difficult for the people who work at YouTube, myself included. As challenging as the experience has been for our YouTube family, the outpouring of support and kindness from creators has bolstered our spirits and reminded us why this work is so important. We know the last year has not been easy for many of you. But we’re committed to listening and using your feedback to help YouTube thrive. Our community continues to grow at a healthy, responsible rate. Over the last year, channels earning five figures annually grew more than 35 percent, while channels earning six figures annually grew more than 40 percent. While we’re proud of this progress, I know we have more work to do. <b>1. Transparency and Communication At the beginning of the year, we committed to communicate more with all of you through social media. This year, we increased our replies 600 percent and improved our reply rate by 75 percent to tweets addressed across our official handles: @TeamYouTube, @YTCreators, and @YouTube. We've also more than doubled the number of creators receiving personalized update emails. We’re communicating in unofficial ways too, like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGg-UqjRgzhYDPJMr-9HXCg" target="_blank">Creator Insider, an employee-run channel that offers behind-the-scenes information about things we are working on. The YouTube leadership team has also made it a priority to connect with YouTube audiences across the globe. At SXSW, Lyor Cohen, Global Head of Music, delivered a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcucwGNqL3g" target="_blank">speech about his life serving artists and the role YouTube plays for them today and in the future. Robert Kyncl, our Chief Business Officer, sat down with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycuMyyqBWQY&feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">Casey Neistat and later took questions from YouTube Creator <a href="https://youtu.be/7IRmgFbCXe0" target="_blank">Noor Stars. This is just the beginning. <b>2. Supporting your success When it comes to creators, supporting your growth and success is incredibly important to me and my entire team. In February, we made the tough decision to set a new eligibility criteria to monetize on YouTube. While we know some creators found this change frustrating, it strengthened advertiser confidence, making monetization and the broader community on YouTube stronger for creators building their business on the platform. For those who have not yet met the new threshold, keep creating and building your audience. We have resources to help you learn and grow. We’ve also heard from you that delays in the application process are frustrating. We are working to make this faster. We know that it’s frustrating when the <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7561938" target="_blank">monetization icon changes back-and-forth between green and yellow. In February, we released an update to our systems to improve overall accuracy and significantly decrease icon flip-flopping by 90 percent. Hopefully, many of you have already noticed this. On our side, we’re seeing that the volume of monetization appeals is down 50 percent as a result. Many of you have said you’re willing to provide more feedback on what’s in your video if it meant you didn’t have to worry about false-positives in our monetization system. This month, we’re launching a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2fdB8TNGmI" target="_blank">pilot with a small set of creators to test a new video upload flow that will ask creators to provide specific information about what’s in their video as it relates to our advertiser-friendly guidelines. In an ideal world, we’ll eventually get to a state where creators across the platform are able to accurately represent what’s in their videos so that their insights, combined with those of our algorithmic classifiers and human reviewers, will make the monetization process much smoother with fewer false positive demonetizations. Creators have also told us they want more alternatives to make money beyond ads. We recently <a href="https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2017/09/a-new-way-to-earn-money-with-youtube.html" target="_blank">began testing sponsorships with a limited set of creators. This lets fans set up recurring sponsorships that can help fund their favorite creators. Many sponsored creators saw substantial increases in their overall YouTube revenue, so we plan to expand this to many more creators in the coming months. <b>3. Giving people more ways to engage We know that engaging with your fans is important, so we’re working on new tools to encourage the conversation. <ol> <li>We expanded Community to many more creators, and we’ve been fine tuning how and to whom posts are distributed across your Home and Subscribers feed. We’ve greatly improved ranking and targeting to make sure we are showing the right posts to the right users at the right time. <li>We updated <a href="https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2018/02/updates-to-youtube-live-streaming.html" target="_blank">live streaming features to make it easier to go live and interact with your fans. We added live chat replays, automatic captions and location tags, and we expanded Super Chats to include an <a href="https://youtube.googleblog.com/2018/02/updates-to-youtube-live-streaming.html" target="_blank">IFTTT (If This, Then That) function. <li>We also launched <a href="https://youtube.googleblog.com/2018/02/bringing-power-of-youtube-to-more.html" target="_blank">YouTube Go in over 140 countries. This is a version of the YouTube app built for the next billion users and designed for people in places with poor Internet connectivity or expensive cellular data. <b>4. Tightening and enforcing our policies One of the biggest challenges we face is balancing the freedom of expression with our responsibility as a community. We value the incredible diversity of voices on our platform and want to focus our policy changes on where we believe there can be real harm. In February, we announced <a href="https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2018/02/preventing-harm-to-broader-youtube.html" target="_blank">new steps, beyond our existing strikes system, that we may take in the rare event that one creator’s actions risk harming the entire community. Our goal is to strengthen the community, and we hope to rarely use these new steps. We’ve heard great creator feedback on how we can address abuse on the platform, especially when it comes to comments and spam. Through new comment <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/111870?hl=en" target="_blank">moderation tools, we’ve given creators the power to review comments before they’re public. We’ve seen more than a 75 percent drop in comment flags on the channels that have enabled it, and we’re soon planning to expand this to 10 languages. We’ve done the same for live chat, allowing creators to hold inappropriate live chat messages for review in all languages. <b>5. Learning and education YouTube is an incredible force for good, particularly when it comes to education. This month, we saw the power of learning on YouTube through the hashtag #YouTubeTaughtMe. For instance, a dad in New York said he used YouTube to both bake a cake and study for his paramedic exams while a number of creators tweeted that YouTube helped them to feel more comfortable being their true selves. Finally, we’re working to make sure that our free educational resources, including the <a href="https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/welcome" target="_blank">Creator Academy, are focused on the topics of most interest to you. We launched a Creator Academy Master Class about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu8tgCb5jYM&list=PLpjK416fmKwQ_BhjfzuCdas9R_VcDA2JQ" target="_blank">creator burnout, and we're hosting a talk at <a href="http://vidcon.com/creator/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwqsHWBRDsARIsALPWMEP7oLNOoH_BUATsdxKuYwpA4nOJVVCjso2peYGx2BNciws7z0W_HRYaArE8EALw_wcB" target="_blank">VidCon on ways creators can maintain well-being. We’re also working on other courses for early summer to encourage wellness. <b>Looking forward Every day I am inspired by the power of the YouTube community--and your support over the last two weeks has reinforced that. Our entire team is committed to your success and your input informs every step we take. Please continue to let us know what we can do better. Susan Wojcicki

Dear YouTube Creators, At the beginning of the year, I wrote a letter to you outlining five key priorities for YouTube in 2018. Among those priorities was to communicate more frequently with all of you, and in that spirit, I plan to share updates with the creator community every quarter. As you can imagine, the last two weeks have been incredibly difficult for the people who work at YouTube, myself included. As challenging as the experience has been for our YouTube family, the outpouring of support and kindness from creators has bolstered our spirits and reminded us why this work is so important. We know the last year has not been easy for many of you. But we’re committed to listening and using your feedback to help YouTube thrive. Our community continues to grow at a healthy, responsible rate. Over the last year, channels earning five figures annually grew more than 35 percent, while channels earning six figures annually grew more than 40 percent. While we’re proud of this progress, I know we have more work to do. 1. Transparency and Communication At the beginning of the year, we committed to communicate more with all of you through social media. This year, we increased our replies 600 percent and improved our reply rate by 75 percent to tweets addressed across our official handles: @TeamYouTube, @YTCreators, and @YouTube. We've also more than doubled the number of creators receiving personalized update emails. We’re communicating in unofficial ways too, like Creator Insider, an employee-run channel that offers behind-the-scenes information about things we are working on. The YouTube leadership team has also made it a priority to connect with YouTube audiences across the globe. At SXSW, Lyor Cohen, Global Head of Music, delivered a speech about his life serving artists and the role YouTube plays for them today and in the future. Robert Kyncl, our Chief Business Officer, sat down with Casey Neistat and later took questions from YouTube Creator Noor Stars. This is just the beginning. 2. Supporting your success When it comes to creators, supporting your growth and success is incredibly important to me and my entire team. In February, we made the tough decision to set a new eligibility criteria to monetize on YouTube. While we know some creators found this change frustrating, it strengthened advertiser confidence, making monetization and the broader community on YouTube stronger for creators building their business on the platform. For those who have not yet met the new threshold, keep creating and building your audience. We have resources to help you learn and grow. We’ve also heard from you that delays in the application process are frustrating. We are working to make this faster. We know that it’s frustrating when the monetization icon changes back-and-forth between green and yellow. In February, we released an update to our systems to improve overall accuracy and significantly decrease icon flip-flopping by 90 percent. Hopefully, many of you have already noticed this. On our side, we’re seeing that the volume of monetization appeals is down 50 percent as a result. Many of you have said you’re willing to provide more feedback on what’s in your video if it meant you didn’t have to worry about false-positives in our monetization system. This month, we’re launching a pilot with a small set of creators to test a new video upload flow that will ask creators to provide specific information about what’s in their video as it relates to our advertiser-friendly guidelines. In an ideal world, we’ll eventually get to a state where creators across the platform are able to accurately represent what’s in their videos so that their insights, combined with those of our algorithmic classifiers and human reviewers, will make the monetization process much smoother with fewer false positive demonetizations. Creators have also told us they want more alternatives to make money beyond ads. We recently began testing sponsorships with a limited set of creators. This lets fans set up recurring sponsorships that can help fund their favorite creators. Many sponsored creators saw substantial increases in their overall YouTube revenue, so we plan to expand this to many more creators in the coming months. 3. Giving people more ways to engage We know that engaging with your fans is important, so we’re working on new tools to encourage the conversation.

We expanded Community to many more creators, and we’ve been fine tuning how and to whom posts are distributed across your Home and Subscribers feed. We’ve greatly improved ranking and targeting to make sure we are showing the right posts to the right users at the right time.

We updated live streaming features to make it easier to go live and interact with your fans. We added live chat replays, automatic captions and location tags, and we expanded Super Chats to include an IFTTT (If This, Then That) function.

We also launched YouTube Go in over 140 countries. This is a version of the YouTube app built for the next billion users and designed for people in places with poor Internet connectivity or expensive cellular data.

4. Tightening and enforcing our policies One of the biggest challenges we face is balancing the freedom of expression with our responsibility as a community. We value the incredible diversity of voices on our platform and want to focus our policy changes on where we believe there can be real harm. In February, we announced new steps, beyond our existing strikes system, that we may take in the rare event that one creator’s actions risk harming the entire community. Our goal is to strengthen the community, and we hope to rarely use these new steps. We’ve heard great creator feedback on how we can address abuse on the platform, especially when it comes to comments and spam. Through new comment moderation tools, we’ve given creators the power to review comments before they’re public. We’ve seen more than a 75 percent drop in comment flags on the channels that have enabled it, and we’re soon planning to expand this to 10 languages. We’ve done the same for live chat, allowing creators to hold inappropriate live chat messages for review in all languages. 5. Learning and education YouTube is an incredible force for good, particularly when it comes to education. This month, we saw the power of learning on YouTube through the hashtag #YouTubeTaughtMe. For instance, a dad in New York said he used YouTube to both bake a cake and study for his paramedic exams while a number of creators tweeted that YouTube helped them to feel more comfortable being their true selves. Finally, we’re working to make sure that our free educational resources, including the Creator Academy, are focused on the topics of most interest to you. We launched a Creator Academy Master Class about creator burnout, and we're hosting a talk at VidCon on ways creators can maintain well-being. We’re also working on other courses for early summer to encourage wellness. Looking forward Every day I am inspired by the power of the YouTube community--and your support over the last two weeks has reinforced that. Our entire team is committed to your success and your input informs every step we take. Please continue to let us know what we can do better. Susan Wojcicki



Google

YouTube Space Dubai: A new home for creators in the Middle East and North Africa

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Creators are the heartbeat of YouTube. They make it the platform where more than one billion people around the world come to laugh, learn, and think. Over the past few years we watched as Arabic content on YouTube evolved to span hundreds of channels followed by millions of people. This transformation was spearheaded by a diverse and growing community made up of creators from almost every corner in the Middle East and North Africa region. Today, I am proud to announce that this community now has a new home in the YouTube Space at Dubai Studio City, a facility dedicated to them and all their production needs. <div style="text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody> <tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img height="367" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Ur8W3ft8Dns5SLNsdY5ZlDDFgEdHSbraKFAf2pvEIAukhmdit8PdqiJ6UECHF1SZ49JMnRnrGqOH7RaKGVrUkExtPiMEHSudyuh4X_qr8h7ESCi-6mKlSBnB4aQgEhrXaJcByB92" style="border: none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; transform: rotate(0rad);" width="550" /> <tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/Lowinazal" target="_blank">Lowi Sahi, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgtQ-oP9ulDNf2Ja0-fNB7w" target="_blank">Maha Jaafar, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChOPyo-uWLVi5uO53mSBX-w" target="_blank">Noor Naem, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/omarfaroo8" target="_blank">Omar Farouq during a panel moderated by Head of YouTube Partnerships in MENA Diana Baddar

One of the things we’re proudest of at YouTube is that this is a platform where experiments are born. Some fail to take off, and some move on to position themselves to be part of popular culture such Saudi wives making hilarious sketches about everyday life or powerful social experiments that tell important stories. This appetite to experiment with new formats of storytelling and narratives is something we want to support, and the Space is our way of celebrating this creativity. The Spaces program is designed to have something to offer all creators. Channels just starting out on YouTube with more than 1,000 subscribers will be welcome to sit in on workshops and events we will be holding at the Space. Creators that passed the 10,000 subscriber mark will be able to book the Space’s studios and production equipment.

The common area at YouTube Space Dubai

YouTube Space Dubai is the 10th Space in the world after London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York, Mumbai, Toronto, Paris, Berlin, and Sao Paulo. Since the first Space opened in 2012, we’ve had more than 400,000 people visit us to attend events, workshops, or to make their videos. The Space comes at an important time for the Arab world as it experiences an increase in the number of channels uploading from MENA countries by 160% in the past three years. Today, there are over 30,000 channels with more than 10,000 subscribers. Another big indicator of how far we’ve come is the fact that there are now more than 200 channels in MENA that crossed the million subscriber mark, with 1 in every 4 creator channel being female-led. Five years ago, MENA had less than five million-subscriber channels, and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. Over the next couple of months, slots will be limited while we work with creators to study the needs of the local community to best provide the programmes and tools and ensure we provide the best support we can to our visitors. Creators will be able to book their production slots by early June. To all the creators out there, start thinking of what your next video is going to be about. You might just shoot it at the YouTube Space at Dubai Studio City where we look forward to welcoming you and your ideas. Posted by Dana Baddar, YouTube Space Dubai Manager.

Creators are the heartbeat of YouTube. They make it the platform where more than one billion people around the world come to laugh, learn, and think. Over the past few years we watched as Arabic content on YouTube evolved to span hundreds of channels followed by millions of people. This transformation was spearheaded by a diverse and growing community made up of creators from almost every corner in the Middle East and North Africa region. Today, I am proud to announce that this community now has a new home in the YouTube Space at Dubai Studio City, a facility dedicated to them and all their production needs.

Lowi Sahi, Maha Jaafar, Noor Naem, and Omar Farouq during a panel moderated by Head of YouTube Partnerships in MENA Diana Baddar

One of the things we’re proudest of at YouTube is that this is a platform where experiments are born. Some fail to take off, and some move on to position themselves to be part of popular culture such Saudi wives making hilarious sketches about everyday life or powerful social experiments that tell important stories. This appetite to experiment with new formats of storytelling and narratives is something we want to support, and the Space is our way of celebrating this creativity. The Spaces program is designed to have something to offer all creators. Channels just starting out on YouTube with more than 1,000 subscribers will be welcome to sit in on workshops and events we will be holding at the Space. Creators that passed the 10,000 subscriber mark will be able to book the Space’s studios and production equipment.

The common area at YouTube Space Dubai

YouTube Space Dubai is the 10th Space in the world after London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York, Mumbai, Toronto, Paris, Berlin, and Sao Paulo. Since the first Space opened in 2012, we’ve had more than 400,000 people visit us to attend events, workshops, or to make their videos. The Space comes at an important time for the Arab world as it experiences an increase in the number of channels uploading from MENA countries by 160% in the past three years. Today, there are over 30,000 channels with more than 10,000 subscribers. Another big indicator of how far we’ve come is the fact that there are now more than 200 channels in MENA that crossed the million subscriber mark, with 1 in every 4 creator channel being female-led. Five years ago, MENA had less than five million-subscriber channels, and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. Over the next couple of months, slots will be limited while we work with creators to study the needs of the local community to best provide the programmes and tools and ensure we provide the best support we can to our visitors. Creators will be able to book their production slots by early June. To all the creators out there, start thinking of what your next video is going to be about. You might just shoot it at the YouTube Space at Dubai Studio City where we look forward to welcoming you and your ideas. Posted by Dana Baddar, YouTube Space Dubai Manager.



Google

Making It Easier to Go Live

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> Today we're making it easier to go live and interact with your community from your computer and phone. First, if you’ve ever tried to set up a live stream from your computer using an <a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2907883?hl=en" target="_blank">encoder, you know there can be a few steps involved. Today, we’re making the process as easy as a couple of clicks. Just head over to <a href="https://youtube.com/webcam" target="_blank">youtube.com/webcam or click on “Go live” in the YouTube header to start your stream. You don’t need any additional streaming software or extra set up. Creators who tested early versions have been using it for live <a href="https://youtu.be/ICfpZcyIa7U?t=20s" target="_blank">beauty tutorials, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ0AQNesWD4" target="_blank">fan updates and <a href="https://youtu.be/aig4jSKN6Ic?t=32s" target="_blank">product reviews. This feature is available on Chrome today, and we’ll be expanding to more browsers soon. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img height="221" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/6iDiL5Svv3Ll4CH1vGQDPaDrrVqLGLMhuvEPxusJ8BjHCzyvG_stu-VGsLNYzUacGs-e2eS5oxt3pVu7WgbUZzSMsyVmn-kgcCuD6efg-esLJWFD5HsjleFEdA4R791FAGd6VPkj" style="border: none; transform: rotate(0rad);" width="390" />

We also want to make streaming from your phone just as easy too. In the coming months, you’ll be able to start a live stream directly from the camera app in select devices from Asus, LG, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung. Our goal is to bring this feature to even more device manufacturers throughout the year through the new YouTube Mobile Live deep link. So whether you want to hold a mini concert, teach snowboarding or celebrate a milestone with fans, these tools will make it easier to share and interact with your community live. Check out the YouTube Live channel to discover the latest streams and get inspired by other live creators. Vadim Lavrusik, Live Video Product Manager, recently watched "Jazz Piano Chords with Good Voice Leading."

Today we're making it easier to go live and interact with your community from your computer and phone. First, if you’ve ever tried to set up a live stream from your computer using an encoder, you know there can be a few steps involved. Today, we’re making the process as easy as a couple of clicks. Just head over to youtube.com/webcam or click on “Go live” in the YouTube header to start your stream. You don’t need any additional streaming software or extra set up. Creators who tested early versions have been using it for live beauty tutorials, fan updates and product reviews. This feature is available on Chrome today, and we’ll be expanding to more browsers soon.

We also want to make streaming from your phone just as easy too. In the coming months, you’ll be able to start a live stream directly from the camera app in select devices from Asus, LG, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung. Our goal is to bring this feature to even more device manufacturers throughout the year through the new YouTube Mobile Live deep link. So whether you want to hold a mini concert, teach snowboarding or celebrate a milestone with fans, these tools will make it easier to share and interact with your community live. Check out the YouTube Live channel to discover the latest streams and get inspired by other live creators. Vadim Lavrusik, Live Video Product Manager, recently watched "Jazz Piano Chords with Good Voice Leading."



Google

YouTube Studio: Better Insights, New Metrics & Faster Access to News

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> One of the most important tools for creators is the Creator Studio: the hub where you upload videos, manage your channel, and grow your community. In June of last year we announced a new beta version, renamed YouTube Studio. Hundreds of thousands of creators have been using the beta and providing invaluable feedback, which we've been implementing to make YouTube Studio a more efficient, empowering and enjoyable tool for you. Over the coming weeks, we’ll begin to make YouTube Studio the default experience for many creators (but will still give you the option to go back to Creator Studio Classic if you want to). YouTube Studio’s most anticipated features include three new metrics that will give you better understanding of how your videos perform, and an all new Dashboard that shows you personalized news and information for your channel. <b>New ways for creators to understand their reach on YouTube Moving forward, you’ll see three new metrics in YouTube Analytics – Impressions, Impressions click-through rate, and Unique Viewers – that give a deeper understanding of your reach on YouTube. These new metrics are rolling out to a small group of creators today and will be available to everyone in YouTube Studio within a few weeks. A couple of weeks after that they will be available in Creator Studio Classic. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img height="299" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/G-iWLl3WxqTdqC6VEU-keQ3bCrftkv2rbHpnZ3h2TwFxEsmHcT6mnqEdARZQgmWUMfPrfVluqChi6-jLrReY2oGuBzuDIZxNjsRz3JCJDBaiqYrGsewdWsPCo0rFDJEMvDSU066l" style="border: none; transform: rotate(0rad);" width="624" />

Impressions An Impression is counted when a viewer on YouTube sees one of your video thumbnails. Impressions tell you the potential reach of your content on YouTube, since each impression is an opportunity to earn a view.

It’s important to note that the impression metric only reflects impressions generated by your thumbnails on YouTube, including thumbnails on the homepage, subscription feed, search, and “up next” section. This help center article describes in detail what is and isn’t included in the impressions metric. Impressions click-through rate We’re also adding Impressions click-through rate, which shows you the percentage of your impressions on YouTube that turned into views. Different factors affect your click-through rate. For example, effective thumbnails and titles that attract your target audience may drive this rate up. This metric can help you make more informed decisions on how to optimize your titles and thumbnails, especially when you look at how this metric changes between past videos. For more best practices, we recommend you read this help center article. Unique viewers Unique viewers shows the estimated number of different people who watch your videos over a period of time. Whether they watch on desktop, mobile phone or watched more than one of your videos, that person will count as one unique viewer. You can use this data to compare your audience size to your subscriber base, and identify videos that helped reach a wider audience. This information can also help guide your content strategy, and showcase your true reach when discussing brand deals and sponsorships.

We encourage you to check out our Creator Insider Video, Creator Academy lesson and help center articles for additional tips on how to use these metrics. Introducing the YouTube Studio Dashboard You’ve asked us for a “one stop shop” for data, insights and news so you don't have to spend time searching for it. The new dashboard will now provide a snapshot of your latest upload, personalized recommendations, and instant access to news.

What you'll see:

Video Snapshot: You'll get a snapshot of how your newest video is performing compared to your previous uploads over the same time period. Previously, you had to pull this data from multiple sources and calculate it on your own.

Personalized Recommendations: Here we'll surface Creator Academy content based on the specific needs of your channel. In the future we’ll also help you understand why certain videos perform better than others so you can adapt your plans for future videos.

News: You shouldn’t have to search for the news; it should come to you. With this feature, you’ll get the latest updates from across YouTube so you can easily stay up to speed on everything that affects the creator community.

The Dashboard will roll out to all channels over the next couple of weeks and we’ll continue to add more content based on your feedback. We're dedicated to making YouTube one of the best places for creators and hope these new features help make that possible. Posted by Assaf Reifer, Product Manager for YouTube Analytics and Ezequiel Baril, Product Manager for YouTube Studio.

One of the most important tools for creators is the Creator Studio: the hub where you upload videos, manage your channel, and grow your community. In June of last year we announced a new beta version, renamed YouTube Studio. Hundreds of thousands of creators have been using the beta and providing invaluable feedback, which we've been implementing to make YouTube Studio a more efficient, empowering and enjoyable tool for you. Over the coming weeks, we’ll begin to make YouTube Studio the default experience for many creators (but will still give you the option to go back to Creator Studio Classic if you want to). YouTube Studio’s most anticipated features include three new metrics that will give you better understanding of how your videos perform, and an all new Dashboard that shows you personalized news and information for your channel. New ways for creators to understand their reach on YouTube Moving forward, you’ll see three new metrics in YouTube Analytics – Impressions, Impressions click-through rate, and Unique Viewers – that give a deeper understanding of your reach on YouTube. These new metrics are rolling out to a small group of creators today and will be available to everyone in YouTube Studio within a few weeks. A couple of weeks after that they will be available in Creator Studio Classic.

Impressions An Impression is counted when a viewer on YouTube sees one of your video thumbnails. Impressions tell you the potential reach of your content on YouTube, since each impression is an opportunity to earn a view.

It’s important to note that the impression metric only reflects impressions generated by your thumbnails on YouTube, including thumbnails on the homepage, subscription feed, search, and “up next” section. This help center article describes in detail what is and isn’t included in the impressions metric. Impressions click-through rate We’re also adding Impressions click-through rate, which shows you the percentage of your impressions on YouTube that turned into views. Different factors affect your click-through rate. For example, effective thumbnails and titles that attract your target audience may drive this rate up. This metric can help you make more informed decisions on how to optimize your titles and thumbnails, especially when you look at how this metric changes between past videos. For more best practices, we recommend you read this help center article. Unique viewers Unique viewers shows the estimated number of different people who watch your videos over a period of time. Whether they watch on desktop, mobile phone or watched more than one of your videos, that person will count as one unique viewer. You can use this data to compare your audience size to your subscriber base, and identify videos that helped reach a wider audience. This information can also help guide your content strategy, and showcase your true reach when discussing brand deals and sponsorships.

We encourage you to check out our Creator Insider Video, Creator Academy lesson and help center articles for additional tips on how to use these metrics. Introducing the YouTube Studio Dashboard You’ve asked us for a “one stop shop” for data, insights and news so you don't have to spend time searching for it. The new dashboard will now provide a snapshot of your latest upload, personalized recommendations, and instant access to news.

What you'll see:

Video Snapshot: You'll get a snapshot of how your newest video is performing compared to your previous uploads over the same time period. Previously, you had to pull this data from multiple sources and calculate it on your own.

Personalized Recommendations: Here we'll surface Creator Academy content based on the specific needs of your channel. In the future we’ll also help you understand why certain videos perform better than others so you can adapt your plans for future videos.

News: You shouldn’t have to search for the news; it should come to you. With this feature, you’ll get the latest updates from across YouTube so you can easily stay up to speed on everything that affects the creator community.

The Dashboard will roll out to all channels over the next couple of weeks and we’ll continue to add more content based on your feedback. We're dedicated to making YouTube one of the best places for creators and hope these new features help make that possible. Posted by Assaf Reifer, Product Manager for YouTube Analytics and Ezequiel Baril, Product Manager for YouTube Studio.



Google

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[unifiedsocialblog]

5 Big Marketing Stunts That Worked and What We Can Learn From Them

A big marketing stunt has the potential to either make or break your business.

While a misstep could wreck your brand’s reputation, a success could catapult your business into viral success. From brand awareness to driving sales, the right marketing stunt can help businesses of all sizes reach their goals.

Continue reading to discover:

How top brands have pulled off successful marketing stunts

Why being disruptive can be a good thing when it comes to your brand

Tips on embracing the bizarre in your campaigns

Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence.

IHOP

With one of the most talked about marketing stunts of 2018, IHOP showed they were more than just a pancake palace.

It all started on June 4th, 2018, when IHOP tweeted that they’d be flipping the ‘P’ around and changing their name to IHOb. They announced that everyone would have to wait to find out what the ‘b’ stood for—something that immediately got everyone guessing.

For 60 pancakin’ years, we’ve been IHOP. Now, we’re flippin’ our name to IHOb. Find out what it could b on 6.11.18. #IHOb pic.twitter.com/evSxKV3QmT

— IHOP (@IHOP) June 4, 2018

After days of speculation, IHOP(b?) announced that the ‘b’ stood for burgers. Thanks to this campaign, IHOP not only got people associating burgers with their name—seeing word of mouth rise from 19 to 30 percent—but saw their social media popularity skyrocket.

How can your brand follow IHOP’s path to success?

Do your research. You can’t just launch a potentially risky campaign out of nowhere. Before making their Twitter announcement, IHOP discovered that social media conversations about pancakes had declined, while the popularity of burgers was steadily increasing. Find out what your customers are talking about online and highlight ways your business can fulfill their needs.

Build suspense. IHOP’s first Twitter announcement asked their audience to stay tuned to find out what the mysterious ‘b’ stood for. This lent an air of speculation to the campaign and it became an engaging guessing game for the audience. Your brand can easily do this with a marketing campaign.

SodaStream

SodaStream’s CEO Daniel Birnbaum says “the company is always looking for disruptive ways to create moments of joy.” They definitely succeeded with their 2018 April Fool’s Day campaign.

This marketing stunt had Game of Thrones star Thor “The Mountain” Bjornsson and Shahs of Sunset star Reza Farahan introduce SodaStream’s (fake) new product, the SodaSoak—a sparkling water maker for the bathtub.

“The thing about SodaStream’s campaigns is that they address important themes in a lighthearted and funny way that keeps a finger on the pulse of pop culture,” Bjornsson explains. The approach paid off, with AdWeek reporting “this video reached many top April Fool’s lists and gained brand exposure worth many millions.”

What can your brand do to get on SodaStream’s level?

Delight and surprise your audience. By making their commercial in classic infomercial style, there might have been a moment where SodaStream’s audience questioned whether what they were seeing was real. It’s always fun to give your audience something they’re not expecting, so take any opportunity to surprise them with strategic whimsy.

Recognize key dates. SodaStream’s campaign was for April Fool’s Day, but there are key dates and celebrations happening almost every day of the year. When relevant, align your campaign to one of these dates and have fun with it.

Highlight your product. Even though the SodaSoak isn’t real, the parody still presented the key capabilities of SodaStream’s actual product. Even when watching a spoof, the audience was reminded that the SodaStream is able to carbonate plain tap water. In all the excitement of creating a fun campaign, don’t lose sight of what makes your product or service unique.

KFC

If any brand can prove that weird works, it’s KFC. Their marketing stunts have been wonderfully outlandish over the last few years, and it’s a formula that works for the brand.

One of their more out-there campaigns featured a four-hour Facebook Live stream of adoptable kittens climbing on a “fabric husk of a towering model of the brand’s mascot and founder Colonel Sanders.”

While you might have scoffed if an employee pitched an idea like this in a meeting, more than one-million viewers tuned in to KFC’s kitties.

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Colonel Sanders Cat Climber

If enough of you share, we might add more kittens.

Posted by Super Deluxe on Tuesday, July 17, 2018

How can you create a goldmine campaign like KFC?

Brand everything. Whether it’s an ad apologizing for a chicken shortage or a cat tower livestream, KFC knows that putting their brand first and foremost works. Awareness and recall are key to your business’ growth.Make sure you use any opportunity to bring your unique brand into all of your content and marketing assets.

Embrace the weird. While actually running a bizarre campaign like KFC’s might not be possible for all brands, every business can embrace a quirkier approach to campaigns. Add a dash of whimsy to your campaigns where relevant.If you can’t share silly content (say you’re a political organization or serious government branch), you can have fun in your brainstorms, strategy sessions, or at other states of campaign development. For example, ask everyone in your brainstorm to come up with the weirdest, most outlandish idea they can—there are no bad ideas. Sometimes the best “real” ideas can come out of a free-for-all. And the worst case scenario is that your team has a laugh.

Patagonia

While brands are usually advised to avoid politics, the response to Patagonia’s politically-inspired marketing stunt was so positive it crashed their site.

After the President of the United States signed two proclamations to greatly reduce protected land in the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah, Patagonia responded with images and messages reading ‘The President Stole Your Land’ on their website and social feed.

This is the largest elimination of protected land in American history. Take Action: https://t.co/biZPxo7PHh#BearsEars pic.twitter.com/OqW9FHPk3Q

— Patagonia (@patagonia) December 4, 2017

What can your brand do to reach Patagonia’s level of success?

Know your audience. Patagonia knows that their target customer has environmentally-friendly and eco-conscious values. The company donates a percentage of its revenue to environmental causes, uses recycled, “Fair Trade” certified in its clothing, and uses solar energy at its company headquarters. Figure out who your own brand’s target audience is, and align your actions to their values.

Provide a clear call-to-action. While it would have been easy for Patagonia to post their ad and call it a day, they provide a button encouraging their audience to ‘Take Action Now.’ This leads to a page where visitors can sign a petition and send a pre-written tweet defending public lands. When you are launching a social media campaign of any risk level, include a CTA so your audience knows exactly what you want from them. Check out this blog post from AdEspresso for 31 clever CTA ideas.

Burger King

When it comes to brands tackling important issues, Burger King might not be the first company you think of. However, the fast-food restaurant proved they’re more than capable of getting people’s attention with their Whopper Neutrality stunt.

The campaign had customers ordering Whopper burgers, but receiving them at different times based on how much they were willing to pay. As AdWeek explains, this “was a scathing parallel for how the end of net neutrality could create fast and slow lanes for internet access.” It became their most shared ad of all time with more than 4.5 million Youtube views alone.

What lessons from Burger King’s campaign can your brand put into action?

Combine education and humor. Net neutrality is a complicated issue, but Burger King was able to explain the effects in terms anyone can understand. By making the message accessible to all—as well as humorous—they are providing crucial education for their audience. Consider how your brand can educate your target customers in a relevant way, and centre a campaign around these lessons.

Appeal to your customers’ emotions. Any viewer of Burger King’s ad is sent on an emotional roller coaster. From feeling empathy towards the customers in the video and frustration on their behalf, to experiencing laughter, to fear when the reality of net neutrality being repealed sets in, the content evokes plenty of emotion. Emotions play a crucial role in our ability to recall information, so they’re a powerful part of many successful ad campaigns. Think about how you can stir up emotion in your audience, whether that’s through humor, love, happiness, or plain old FOMO. Our blog post, Social Media and Psychology: 4 Things Marketers Need to Know, shares more ideas for including emotion in your campaigns.

Any marketing stunt has the power to strengthen—or sink—your brand. As long as you follow the lead of the successful brands above and know what you’re doing, your risk can definitely pay off.

Use Hootsuite to easily promote your organic content (or boost it with advertising dollars). From a single dashboard you can schedule and publish posts, engage the audience, monitor conversations, measure performance, and much more. Try it for free today.

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[levysoft]

'Doomed to be a failure'

The idea for a make-your-own-music-video app was a desperate pivot away from an education app.

Zhu had been interested in education during his time as a project manager at enterprise software giant SAP, even earning the title of "education futurist." He thought massive online courses, also known as MOOCs, were great, but no one finished them.

In 2014, he believed he'd come up with a billion-dollar idea: short-form education videos.

Zhu and his cofounder and co-CEO Louis Yang raised $250,000 from venture capitalists and spent six months building an app called Cicada. The idea was that experts, whether for coffee or calculus, could create short three- to five-minute videos explaining a subject. But there's a reason you've never heard of it before.

"The day we released this application to the market we realized it was never going to take off," Zhu said. "It was doomed to be a failure."

His team had missed that the videos took too long to create. Lesson planners had a hard time condensing their expertise into three minutes. Content creation and consumption needed to be within minutes and seconds, not hours. It wasn't entertaining, and it didn't attract teens.

At that point, Zhu's team only had 8% of its money left, he says. Instead of giving it back to investors and walking away, they scrambled to come up with a new idea.

'We got lucky'

Open Musical.ly today and there's no trace of its failed-education-app roots.

The 15-second videos are long enough to draw a laugh and tell a story, but not too long that teens get bored and move onto the next one. It's a mix of teenage boys thumping their chests to a song, to gymnastics routines set to music, to acting out funny lyrics from songs.

Zhu first landed on the idea when he watched a group of boisterous young teens on the train in Mountain View, where Google is based. Half of the teens were listening to music while the other half took selfies or videos, covered them in stickers, and then shared the results with their friends.

That's when Zhu realized he could combine music, videos, and a social network to attract the early-teen demographic.

The team turned Zhu's new idea into an app in 30 days, and launched Musical.ly in July 2014. Immediately, they saw the numbers were great. Around 500 people were downloading it a day, but more importantly, they kept coming back.

"You can buy the users, but you can't buy the user retention," Zhu said.

For the next 10 months the app kept growing, but too slowly to save the company.

"We got nervous. What do we do? We didn’t have much cash left," Zhu said. "Sometimes quick failure, like that education app, is good because you can turn around other ideas quickly. But having this slow growth is bad, you don’t know if it will take off or not and you’ve invested a lot of time into it."

In April 2015, the company made a few small design tweaks to the app, including moving the logo in the videos. They had realized that when people shared the music videos, the logo was cropped out on Instagram and Twitter. The repositioned it so now it was easy to see what a Musical.ly video.

It exploded:

Two months later, on July 6, it hit the No. 1 app in the iTunes app store. Since then, the app has never fallen out of the top 40 apps in all of iTunes.

"Now that I look back, I think the initial slow growth was actually a good thing. We got lucky because we had time to build the product, to make it ready, to build every feature around community," Zhu said. "If the growth came too early, it would probably just stay as a fad."

'This could even be like the next MTV'

To Zhu, Musical.ly isn't just another lip-synching-video app that could go the way of Vine or Dubsmash. The team believes it's building the next social network to revolve around videos.

Instead of taking follows and followers, Musical.ly came up with BFFs, or "Best Fans Forever." Only BFFs of Musical.ly users (or "Musers") can do things like a duet.  In the Musical.ly world, that means two people record videos to the same song and the app automatically combines them.

It's done the same thing with a new Q&A feature where someone can ask a question of a Muser via video, and that person can respond in their own video. Musical.ly combines the two.

"Especially in the social-media area, it’s usually winner takes all. You have to come up with something radically new. You shouldn’t be a me-too product," Zhu said.

A lot of these ideas aren't just Zhu's genius ideas. Instead, they're outgrowths of how teens were already using the app. Musical.ly taps into their suggestions by having giant chat groups on Messenger and WhatsApp to test features with its users from the US, Brazil, or the Philippines every day.

Musical.ly is also one of the few apps to come out of China to become a smash hit in the US. Most of the company's engineers are based in Shanghai, with only a handful of business-development, marketing, and content-licensing specialists working out of a WeWork in San Francisco.

"It’s the first company to be headquartered in China, designed in China, but popular in the US," said Greylock investor Josh Elman. "Finally we’re seeing talented people who live in that ecosystem in that world and actually transcend it and build products in the US."

T0 date, the company has raised $16.4 million from investors like Greylock and GGV, but it's rumored to be raising another $100 million. Its investors are bullish, even though the company is not generating revenue yet.

"This could even be like the next MTV," Elman said. "I think this can be really important platform for an entire generation that can be entertained."

Always be scared

The Musical.ly team is now watching as a generation of Muser stars is emerging.

A set of 13-year-old identical twins in Germany, Lisa and Lena, now have more than 2.8 million followers on Musical.ly. They've launched their own clothing line, and are considered to be one of the fastest-rising Instagram accounts in all of Europe. (They already have 1.8 million followers on that social network.)

Baby Ariel, a 13-year-old who wasn't even on social media before, now is the most recognizable star from the app.

Lately, Musical.ly has also seen a rising tide of demand from the traditional music industry. It's been proactive about working within the music industry — an area where a lot of startups ignore the complicated rules about legally licensing music. The company has a number of deals in places with major players in the music industry, says its president of North America, Alex Hoffman, and a third-party provider supplies the music and tracks everything to make sure the company is following the rules, he said.

Its friendly stance to music already has some stars using Musical.ly to run their own campaigns. Musical.ly users made more than 164,000 lip-synching videos a day to Lukas Graham's new song. Selena Gomez is currently running a "Kill Em with Kindness campaign" to promote her new song. Musical.ly adds an iTunes link on the competition page so people know where to buy the song.

"We want to create more value to the music industry in the future," Hoffman said.

Still, Zhu doesn't see Musical.ly'se and staying power as a success just yet. Building a social network or the next generation of MTV is hard in an era when Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook still dominate. In June, it will attempt to challenge those companies again when it launches Live.Ly, a Periscope competitor that's all about livestreaming. If anything, Zhu says the company needs to keep pushing and iterating faster.

"I think we have these scary moments all the time because you’re never safe. Even if you have tens of millions of users, you have to keep them always engaged," Zhu said. "I think it’s better for us to be scared all the time rather than feel content that we built a successful product and now we can lay back."

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