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Documents obtained by Business Insider reveal the terms that contestants of MrBeast's competition show, "Beast Games," were asked to agree to during a preliminary round.
The terms prohibit contestants from disclosing information about the show, which debuts Thursday on Amazon Prime Video. Contestants who break the agreement prior to the last episode airing must pay the producer and network $500,000 for each breach. After the last episode airs, each breach would cost contestants $100,000, the documents said.
The documents also ask contestants to agree that their portrayal in the program may be "disparaging, defamatory, embarrassing, or of an otherwise unfavorable nature," and may expose them to "public ridicule, humiliation, or condemnation."
Daniel J. Ain, an entertainment attorney at RPJ Law, said the terms are largely standard for a competition show, but some β like the threat of a $500,000 charge for each breach β are particularly expansive.
"The producers use every available tool to give them ultimate flexibility to make the show and protect themselves from liability," Ain told BI, calling the documents a "contestant agreement on steroids."
"Beast Games" is a 10-episode physical competition show in which contestants compete for a $5 million prize. YouTube's top star β whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson β is the host.
The show has attracted some controversy ahead of its release. A New York Times report in August cited "over a dozen" participants who said they didn't receive enough food or medical care during the preliminary round of competition in Las Vegas.
The documents obtained by Business Insider relate to the Las Vegas taping, where over 2,000 contestants participated in physical challenges designed to see who would make the show's official production round in Toronto.
The documents include information about the show, a contestant questionnaire form, and an outline of the show's official rules and protocols. By signing the form, contestants gave full consent to the use of hidden cameras and recording devices, gave producers full discretion to edit footage, and agreed to participate for no money. Potential prizes were the only form of compensation.
A person close to the production characterized the Las Vegas production as a "promo shoot" for the show and said Amazon wasn't involved. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from BI.
Read 24 pages of the documents below:
Note: BI omitted some pages from the document that included the contestant's personal information and a few pages with minimal or repeated information.
YouTube on Monday announced it will give creators more choice over how third parties can use their content to train their AI models. Starting today, creators and rights holders will be able to flag for YouTube if theyβre permitting specific third-party AI companies to train models on the creatorβs content. From a new setting within [β¦]
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YouTube is experimenting with a new way to engage fans by giving creators the ability to post voice notes and reply to comments on their videos, the company announced on Monday. The ability to post voice notes is limited to certain creators in the U.S. for the time being. YouTube says theyβll only be able [β¦]
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Snapchat is introducing a revamped, unified monetization program for creators. The new program will reward creators for content posted to Stories and Spotlight, its TikTok copycat. Previously, Snapchat monetized these two formats through separate programs. Under the new program, creators will earn revenue from ads displayed within eligible Stories and Spotlight posts. βWith Spotlight viewership [β¦]
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Joseph Arujo
TikTok creators and their teams are starting to take the threat of a ban in the US more seriously β and some wish they had begun preparing earlier.
TikTok could be yanked from US app stores as early as January 19 unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, divests. TikTok is challenging the law in court but was just handed another legal defeat this month.
While a ban might annoy many of TikTok's 170 million US users, it would be far more impactful for those creators who use it to make money through brand deals, its Creator Rewards Program, or other methods.
"Looking back, I wish I had encouraged my talent to focus on YouTube Shorts about a year ago β but no time like the present," said Estella Struck, founder of Viviene New York, referring to YouTube's short-form video product. Viviene New York is a marketing agency that works with brands and several TikTok-native creators.
"We're already preparing to diversify by focusing heavily on Instagram, YouTube, and even LinkedIn for short-form video content," Struck added.
Other creator-economy insiders expressed similar sentiments to BI about diversification. They generally felt that they could continue to build up audiences on other platforms or income through other gigs.
"The creator economy would take a blow, but it wouldn't be fatal," said Jasmine Enberg, VP and principal analyst at EMARKETER. "While over half of US companies use TikTok to work with creators and influencers, TikTok accounts for 17.2% of total spending."
Some parts of the creator economy could be hit harder than others, however.
Barbara Jones, CEO of Outshine Talent, said a ban "would be crushing for the e-commerce side," like those creators and brands earning money through TikTok Shop.
"Live e-commerce is really just getting started in the US, and TikTok Shop is leading the way," Jones said. "So, I think that side would be devastated. I think for content creators that make short-form content, they will be less affected."
Sam Saideman
Jones said she's gotten "a lot of calls of concerns and worry" about a potential TikTok ban.
Many creators and managers are putting together post-TikTok plans, even if they think there's a chance it could stick around.
"We are acting as if it may actually be gone in January despite, in my opinion, not thinking it will actually be gone," Sam Saideman, CEO of talent firm Innovo, told BI. "Best case, it doesn't go away."
Some ways of preparing are easier than others, Saideman said.
"Low-hanging fruit is to migrate fans to other social platforms," Saideman said. "Harder sells are to migrate those audiences to a place that is not reliant on algorithms such as SMS lists, email lists, or exclusive membership groups."
TikToker Joseph Arujo, who has over 830,000 followers, said he believes that even if TikTok is banned, it'll be short-lived, and ByteDance would be forced to sell.
"I think it's scary now that there is this deadline," Arujo said. "But I'm weighing out my options and going to other platforms."
Arujo isn't the only creator thinking about making changes. Justine, a content creator who has almost 260,000 followers on TikTok, said she isn't too worried about the potential ban but is thinking about "shifting a lot of focus" to Instagram and YouTube.
"I think regardless of what job you have, what role you have, having more streams of income, especially in this economy, is almost essential," said Justine, who asked her last name not be used for privacy reasons.
Creator Lauren Schiller, cofounder of the clothing company OGBFF, said that in the short term, she would post to Instagram reels, and then look to make longer-format videos for YouTube and post on her brand's blog.
A TikTok ban wouldn't impact all creators equally, Enberg said.
"A ban would be detrimental to up-and-coming creators and small businesses that rely solely or primarily on the app," Enberg said. "Big brands and established creators would also be disrupted, but can better withstand the upheaval as they're more likely to have diversified their channels and have large, engaged audiences on other platforms."
Megan, who asked her last name not be used for privacy reasons, is a stay-at-home mom who uses TikTok Shop as a side hustle to earn extra income through affiliate commissions.
"It's good to save, to take the trips, to buy Christmas gifts, to live a little more not so paycheck to paycheck," she said, adding that she earned nearly $8,000 in TikTok commissions one month.
She said she planned to allocate time to her other side hustles to make money if TikTok is banned.
Courtesy OGBFF/@chloegolan
"If there's a shift, I believe Instagram will likely take center stage, especially with its direct product-linking capabilities," Struck said.
Enberg said she thought Instagram and YouTube would be the biggest beneficiaries as they both have short-form video products that are natural fits for TikTokers.
"But even if a platform can replicate the technology, they can't force a change in culture," she said. "The type of viral, FOMO and trend-driven behavior doesn't exist on reels, even as the platform has tweaked its algorithm to better serve relevant content, including from smaller creators, to users."
Nya-Gabriella Parchment, cohead of brand partnerships at influencer firm Digital Brand Architects, said a lot of brands are betting on Instagram reels.
"It's easier to convert on Instagram, with ways to link out, so usually brands still use Instagram as their bedrock," Parchment said.
Parchment said creators are also interested in Snapchat again.
Arujo is one of them.
"Ever since the first threat of a TikTok ban, I decided I'm not going to rely on just this," Arujo said.
"Snapchat has been my No. 1," he said.
EMARKETER is owned by Business Insider's partner company Axel Springer.
Captions
Money is still flowing in the creator economy, even as the investor hype cycle has died down.
In 2024, 17 creator startups raised at least $10 million in new funding, totaling over $900 million. A large amount of that investment went toward creator companies whose work overlaps with trendy categories, such as artificial intelligence or social shopping. But tried-and-true business models like influencer marketing and newsletter subscriptions also scored new rounds.
"For the second year in a row, the trends kind of stayed the same. AI, community, and revenue diversification for all creators," said Ollie Forsyth, a former senior manager at the investment firm Antler who now writes the newsletter New Economies.
Startups that offer automated dubbing, AI editing, or generative AI features β such as Captions, ElevenLabs, and OpusClip β all raised hefty rounds this year. Social-commerce startups like ShopMy and Levanta captivated venture firms, alongside newsletter companies like Beehiiv, Workweek, and Substack.
A few startups β Agentio, Beehiiv, and Captions β that raised capital in 2023, when creator-economy investments were at a low ebb, also raised again in 2024. Meanwhile, some venture firms have consistently tapped into the creator space, such as AlleyCorp, Inspired Capital, and Volition Capital.
Investor interest in the creator economy surged when social-media consumption spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, but then fell off dramatically. It's now steady, Forsyth said.
"We're no longer in the hype cycle," he said. "Maybe it has lost its trendiness a tiny bit, but it's stabilizing, which is needed."
Business Insider worked with data providers PitchBook and Crunchbase to sort through fundraising data in order to highlight big creator startup rounds from 2024. We focused on companies whose products significantly impact the businesses of creators and their partners.
Here are 17 of those companies, listed in alphabetical order:
YouTube announced on Tuesday that its auto-dubbing feature, which allows creators to generate translated audio tracks for their videos, is now rolling out to hundreds of thousands more channels.Β YouTube first introduced its AI-powered auto-dubbing tool at Vidcon last year, which was only being tested with a limited group of creators. This tool could help [β¦]
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Marques Brownlee
On Monday, OpenAI released its Sora video generator to the public.
CEO Sam Altman showed off Sora's capabilities as part of "Shipmas," OpenAI's term for the 12 days of product launches and demos it's doing ahead of the holidays. The AI tool still has some quirks, but it can make videos of up to 20 seconds from a few words of instruction.
During the launch, Altman pitched Sora as an assistant for creators and said that helping them was important to OpenAI.
"There's a new kind of co-creative dynamic that we're seeing emerge between early testers that we think points to something interesting about AI creative tools and how people will use them," he said.
One such early tester was Marques Brownlee, whose tech reviews have garnered roughly 20 million subscribers on YouTube. One could say this is the kind of creator that OpenAI envisions "empowering," to borrow execs' term from the livestream.
But in his Sora review, posted on Monday, Brownlee didn't sugarcoat his skepticism, especially about how the model was trained. Were his own videos used without his knowledge?
This is a mystery, and a controversial one. OpenAI hasn't said much about how Sora is trained, though experts believe the startup downloaded vast quantities of YouTube videos as part of the model's training data. There's no legal precedent for this practice, but Brownlee said that to him, the lack of transparency was sketchy.
"We don't know if it's too late to opt out," Brownlee said.
In an email, an OpenAI spokesperson said Sora was trained using proprietary stock footage and videos available in the public domain, without commenting on Business Insider's specific questions.
In a blog post about some of Sora's technical development, OpenAI said the model was partly trained on "publicly available data, mostly collected from industry-standard machine learning datasets and web crawls."
Brownlee threw dozens of prompts at Sora, asking it to generate videos of pretty much anything he could think of, including a tech reviewer talking about a smartphone while sitting at a desk in front of two displays.
Sora's rendering was believable, down to the reviewer's gestures. But Brownlee noticed something curious: Sora added a small fake plant in the video that eerily matched Brownlee's own fake plant.
Marques Brownlee
The YouTuber showed all manner of "horrifying and inspiring" results from Sora, but this one seemed to stick with him. The plant looks generic, to be sure, but for Brownlee it's a reminder of the unknown behind these tools. The models don't create anything fundamentally novel; they're predicting frame after frame based on patterns they recognize from source material.
"Are my videos in that source material? Is this exact plant part of the source material? Is it just a coincidence?" Brownlee said. "I don't know." BI asked OpenAI about these specific questions, but the startup didn't address them.
Marques Brownlee
Brownlee discussed Sora's guardrails at some length. One feature, for example, can make videos from images that people upload, but it's pretty picky about weeding out copyrighted content.
A few commenters on Brownlee's video said they found it ironic that Sora was careful to steer clear of intellectual property β except for that of the people whose work was used to produce it.
"Somehow their rights dont matter one bit," one commenter said, "but uploading a Mickeymouse? You crook!"
In an email to BI, Brownlee said he was looking forward to seeing the conversation evolve.
Overall, the YouTuber gave Sora a mixed review.
Outside of its inspiring features β it could help creatives find fresh starting points β Brownlee said he feared that Sora was a lot for humanity to digest right now.
Brownlee said the model did a good job of refusing to depict dangerous acts or use images of people without their consent. And though it's easy to crop out, it adds a watermark to the content it makes.
Sora's relative weaknesses might provide another layer of protection from misuse. In Brownlee's testing, the system struggled with object permanence and physics. Objects would pass through each other or disappear. Things might seem too slow, then suddenly too fast. Until the tech improves, at least, this could help people spot the difference between, for example, real and fake security footage.
But Brownlee said the videos would only get better.
"The craziest part of all of this is the fact that this tool, Sora, is going to be available to the public," he said, adding, "To millions of people. All at once."
He added, "It's still an extremely powerful tool that directly moves us further into the era of not being able to believe anything you see online."
Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images for GLSEN
YouTube star Connor Franta is suing his business partners, alleging in a lawsuit that they embezzled more than $1 million from the company they cofounded in 2015.
In the suit, filed in California Superior Court this week, Franta β a 32-year-old YouTuber with 4.8 million subscribers β is suing his cofounders in Heard Well, a music label that works with influencers. He also names the company's business manager β who is the father of one of the cofounders β as a defendant, accusing him of turning a blind eye to the alleged theft.
The business partners and manager all denied the allegations in statements to Business Insider.
The suit alleges Heard Well cofounder Jeremy Wineberg used an American Express Black Card obtained in the company's name for personal expenses, including international travel, concert tickets, tattoos, groceries, and plastic surgery. The suit says Wineberg "systematically looted the company of essentially every penny," using Heard Well funds to pay the Amex balances.
Another cofounder, Franta's former CAA agent Andrew Graham, also "converted thousands of Heard Well dollars" for personal use, the suit alleges. The suit says Graham was not "the principal bad actor."
CAA is a leading Hollywood talent agency with a digital arm that represents influencers on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. The agency works with creators to monetize their followings through brand partnerships, consumer products, and other business ventures. CAA is not named as a defendant in the suit.
Wineberg, and to a lesser extent Graham, used the company's earnings as "a de facto personal piggy bank," the suit alleges.
Meanwhile, Franta, in the lawsuit, said Lindsay Wineberg & Associates β Heard Well's business manager and accountant, led by Jeremy Wineberg's father β acted negligently by turning the other cheek, "and in doing so negligently facilitated the draining of over $1 million of company monies into the personal pockets of Wineberg (and Graham)."
Bryan Sullivan, a lawyer for Jeremy Wineberg and Lindsay Wineberg & Associates, said the allegations aren't true.
"The lawsuit filed by Connor Franta is without merit," Sullivan told Business Insider in a statement. Sullivan said his clients never "engaged in any misconduct."
"We intend to pursue all of our rights and expect to be vindicated in Court," Sullivan said.
John Shenk, a lawyer for Graham, told BI in a statement that his client "denies the allegations of the complaint and looks forward to defending this case in court."
Graham told BI that he no longer represents Franta, nor does CAA.
Franta has been on YouTube for more than a decade and is also the author of the memoir "A Work in Progress." He cofounded Heard Well in 2015, with each of the cofounders contributing $2,000 to capitalize the startup, according to an operating agreement that was filed as part of the lawsuit.
Heard Well published dozens of albums, but Franta "hardly saw a dime of profit directed his way throughout the company's nearly 10-year lifespan," the suit says.
This spring, the suit says, Franta learned Heard Well had fallen behind on royalty payments after a YouTube video accused the company of scamming.
Heard Well's Instagram account was active as of Thursday, though Franta said in the suit that he's been blocked from the company's social media accounts.
"Acting with integrity and respect in all my professional endeavors β especially with fellow creators β has always been a top priority for me," Franta told BI in a statement.
He said that while the matter had only recently come to his attention, he'd taken action this week "to protect the company and to facilitate its pursuit of all necessary and appropriate legal remedies."
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
Social media star Brittany Broski says she has always leaned into building her community over worrying about her follower count.
"What do numbers really determine when you can buy followers, when you can buy a check mark now?" Broski told Business Insider.
"I think the real power comes from community, the people that you can bring together."
Broski, whose real name is Brittany Tomlinson, rose to fame in 2019 following a mega-viral moment in which she tasted kombucha for the first time.
She now has 7.5 million TikTok followers and over 2 million subscribers on YouTube.
Broski, 27, now also has two podcasts: Royal Court, where she interviews celebrities in a free-flowing format, and The Broski Report, where she muses on whatever she is thinking about that week.
She thinks that influencers who are authentic and build loyal communities online will have more staying power, even if that means those communities are niche.
There's some debate over whether brands still prefer to work with micro-influencers after engagement became the pinnacle in the past few years.
Some surveys and experts think things are going backward, and superstars are being favored once more, leading smaller creators to feel pushed out.
Others, however, see creators with small but mighty audiences thriving again in the near future.
Ultimately, algorithms change, and what is popular today may not be tomorrow.
Broski's advice for creators is to lean into what makes them different.
Broski felt she had been "pigeonholed as a meme" at the start of her internet career as the "kombucha girl," and she wanted to distance herself from this as soon as possible.
Instead, she strived to "build out an identifiable brand."
Community, both on and offline, has always been important to Broski. She told BI that's one reason she partnered with White Claw this holiday season in a campaign that focuses on making quality time with friends and family.
On Broski's shows, she also strives to "share a human moment with people" rather than repeat the same questions celebs receive at press junkets.
"More than anything, people just want to be heard and seen and felt like they're known," she said.
In Royal Court, Broski often asks her guests, including Saoirse Ronan and Daisy Edgar-Jones, to "prove their worth to earn a spot on Lady Broski's coveted small council" and has them dress up in medieval costumes.
"I really like leaning into this sort of silly nature of, I'm going to make you wear a cape and a hat, and you're going to like it," she said. "You get to see that person's personality more than just, let's talk about your work."
Todd Westphal / White Claw
Broski thinks what is going to last is "authenticity and reliability."
"Those two words are so overused and so bastardized, but it doesn't take away from the core meaning," she said.
Her advice to creators is that people want to watch someone they relate to, Broski said β someone who makes them think, "She's just like me."
"That's all people want," she said. "So don't overthink it."
The audience also just wants the people they watch to be themselves.
"That seems so clichΓ©, but what else can you do?" Broski said. "If you try to be anyone else, you're doomed to fail."
