Summer Vibe Check

How’s everyone’s summer going? (Or winter, for our Southern Hemisphere friends…)

Just back from my first full week in LA in many years, and what struck me most were the robots everywhere, which we just don’t see in New York. The delivery cart robots, powered down on random street corners, waiting for an assignment, or scooting timidly down sidewalks, halting constantly to avoid people and bus shelters; the ubiquitous white Waymo Jaguars, sometimes lined up five in a row like NYC taxis; the rarer new blue minibuses (named, for some reason, the Ojai, after the last city on the planet whose residents I can imagine being excited to see one) that look like a Pixaresque take on a Johnny Cab.

When you add in the sights of Lime scooters and e-bikes, left tipped over or parked in disorderly rows on every block in West Hollywood and DTLA, signs for the Crypto.com Arena, and Kalshi.com video billboards on Sunset featuring Timothée Chalamet, and the sounds all night of growing packs of coyotes yipping and howling in the Hollywood Hills, the city feels even more postmodern and surreal and than it did before, but it’s also remarkable how banal all the new tech investment feels. We kept wondering if anyone really rides in a Waymo more than once out of curiosity (most of the ones we saw were empty, or stuck endlessly trying to make a left turn against more aggressive human drivers), or orders food from those cute but incredibly slow delivery robots—compare them to the breakneck, Snow Crash-style bike warriors of NYC, who would pick them up with one hand and toss them into heaping piles in the East River.

Dystopian’s not the right word—this isn’t Blade Runner—it’s all a more haphazard and ineffectual-feeling future. Mistopian?

I do love LA, love any chance to see friends and meet creators there, and was grateful to be missing the heat wave in NYC to be at the massive and surprisingly well-run Anime Expo, surrounded by many thousands of lovely, cosplaying fans who, along with World Cup fans, brought much-needed traffic to the many businesses of downtown LA and Little Tokyo for the week.1 With over 400,000 visitors over 4 days, Anime Expo was much bigger than previous years, and rivaling NYCC and San Diego Comic-Con in size. The vibe there was great, and it’s a very good year to be an anime fan.

Speaking of anime and the World Cup, a fun meme of the games so far has been the online “custody battle” over the virtual pop idol Hatsune Miku, where the country that wins each game gets temporary stewardship of the character, passing from Japan to Brazil, and now to Norway (Miku may be English by the time I post this2), and there’s now a map with 3,000 regional Miku variations online creators have made.

I had gone straight to LA after ten days in Tokyo, which I’ll probably write about later, and before that, the Media Universe Summit in Denver, and all that travel put me behind on creator news. Some of the biggest stories I’ve been catching up on:

Netflix keeps signing deals with top YouTube channels, the latest being the Stokes Twins, the #2 most followed after Mr. Beast with over 140M subscribers, and incredibly nice guys. The template so far has been licensing of the back catalog, same day release of new episodes as YouTube, and an original longform series. This follows recent deals with creators like Mark Rober, Miss Rachel, and the Sidemen, and a number of online publishers and video podcasts, and comes the same week as the Bloomberg report that viewers aren’t sticking with Netflix shows past the first season. What happens when your Netflix carousel is increasingly video podcasts and YouTube shows? We’re starting to find out.

YouTube and Netflix work differently enough that everyone I talk to says the deals feel additive to the creators’ businesses, and no one seems to worry that distributing longer-form episodes on both platforms hurts their traffic—just like putting vertical short form videos out on Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram doesn’t. There’s still plenty of untapped audience out there for even the biggest channels and shows.

The Stokes Twins’ and Miss Rachel’s agents, the CAA Creators team, got a big profile in the NY Times, highlighting their increased focus on creator talent. There are a lot of new faces at CAA lately, although well-known faces to us in the business, including Brent Weinstein, Greg Goodfried, and Kendall Rhodes, all of whom were part of building the creator business at UTA, none more than Brent, who started and ran that team for many years. Greg Goodfried was also a creator of the seminal breakout scripted project of the YouTube era, Lonelygirl15.

Kareem Rahma’s Subway Takes scored a primetime Emmy nomination this past week, after some serious FYC campaigning by YouTube for several creator-owned series, and will compete in the short form category against nominees like The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert. Some others on the Emmy ballot, like Dropout and Michelle Khare, were just as worthy of a nod, and I’m sure we’ll see them get one in coming years.3

Meanwhile, the share of attention of traditional TV keeps shrinking, according to a new study by ESHAP. The study, across eight countries (US, UK, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy) indicates that YouTube has more attention among people 13 and over in the West than Disney, WBD, Paramount, NBCU, and FOX combined. But if you dig in a level deeper, and focus on 13-54 ages, it looks even wilder, with TikTok and Netflix not far behind, far ahead of legacy media, and for monthly time spent in the 13-24 age group, TikTok, with its focus almost completely on vertical, short form video, is in the #1 spot. The whole report is worth a read.

Rest in peace, Bonnie Tyler, forever an icon to us 1980s kids. One of my favorite creators, vocal expert Elizabeth Zharoff, did an episode last year on Tyler’s performance of Total Eclipse of the Heart and it’s a great way to revisit one of the most over the top videos of all time. In reading up on Bonnie Tyler, I learned that the song was written originally for a Nosferatu musical, which makes the lyrics, and the video, take on a new meaning.

Some other stories of note:

• The ICYMI podcast covered the trend of OG creators inevitably retiring, with some of them hitting over 20 years online (via Casey Lewis / After School)

• Recess Therapy’s Julian Shapiro-Barnum’s late night talk show, Outside Tonight, launched—and it’s a lot of fun, even when torrential rains in NYC forced them inside for episode three.

• Taylor Lorenz went deep on smart glasses potentially putting surveillance everywhere. I can’t get onboard with the AI glasses—I don’t think it’s so inconvenient to hold a device in your hands to look up something or record a video (and make it clear to others around you that’s what you’re doing). Lately in my Brooklyn neighborhood, I’ve been struck by how little anyone under age 50 seems to be using their phones at all—I almost never see kids especially looking at their screens while they walk, or pulling their phones out for videos and selfies—they all seem present, talking with friends, looking around. There’s been a vibe shift, and it’s hard to imagine it going the other direction.

• Speaking of vibe shifts, The Economist did a cover story about the growing backlash to AI, which may not be rational or consistent but is powerful nonetheless (via The Honest Broker), and Dazed has a good piece about streaming fatigue leading people back to “intentional listening”—think albums, physical media, and radio stations. (also via After School)

• NYMag has a longread about what makes great bagels so rare, and what there is to lose when a $300m company like PopUp Bagels tries to make better bagels available to people everywhere.

Video of the week: Neighborhood of Make-Believe

Thanks for reading — enjoy the work of artist Alexander Raynoso (with the sound on 🔉), who makes his animations with only a green screen, Adobe Premiere, and Photoshop — apparently no AI. I’ve watched this so many times in the past 24 hours. (via longtime pal Zadi Diaz)