Twitch is expanding its monetization and moderation tools, and creators see the move as an attempt to regain ground lost to competitors such as Kick and YouTube.

In an open letter penned by Twitch CEO Dan Clancy on Feb. 27, the company revealed a slew of updates for 2025, including the opening up of monetization features such as subscriptions and Bits (a virtual currency that users can purchase from Twitch and donate to creators) to streamers of all sizes, as well as the expansion of the platform’s moderation functions.

Previously, Twitch creators could only enable subscriptions and Bits by joining the platform’s affiliate program, whose guidelines require users to stream for at least eight hours on seven different days and average at least three viewers per stream to qualify. Now, users will be able to turn on subscriptions and Bits from the moment they create their Twitch account, although other monetization features, such as Twitch’s advertising revenue share, remain available only to Twitch partners or affiliates.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Two years after YouTube launched the YouTube Shorts revenue share program in February 2023, creators are finding that their payouts for short-form content are still dwarfed by the ad revenue they can glean from long-form videos.

Six creators who have traditionally focused on long-form content told Digiday that their RPMs (revenue earned per 1,000 views) for YouTube Shorts were consistently beneath $0.20, compared to average RPMs of between $3 and $6 for their long-form content. It’s worth noting that long-form YouTube videos can carry multiple ads, which would help to boost a video’s RPM, whereas YouTube Shorts revenue is shared among creators based on viewership.

“This month, I had an idea for a long-form video, worked on it all night, and after being live for one week, it had made more money than an entire months’ worth of shorts,” said the “Magic: The Gathering” video creator Maldhound, who asked to keep his real name private to protect his personal information. He told Digiday that his average RPM for 20-to-30-minute long-form videos was roughly $5.50, compared to an average RPM of $0.18 for Shorts.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Content creators’ side businesses are feeling the heat of the Trump tariffs.

Many creators bolster their advertising and brand partnership income by selling goods and products that are relevant to their niche or audience. These businesses often rely on foreign materials or manufacturing to stay afloat — and thus the Donald Trump administration’s tariffs, which impose an additional 10 percent duty on Chinese imports, have led to an increase in creators’ business costs.

Last month, video creator Matt Steffanina pushed back the launch of his apparel brand MadChill due to uncertainty over the future of TikTok Shop. Following the institution of Trump’s tariffs, Steffanina had to delay the launch further in order to find a new — and more expensive — manufacturer that operated entirely outside of China. 

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

As the release of “Grand Theft Auto VI” grows closer, brands’ interest in the game is increasing, even if the specifics of its marketing opportunities remain unclear.

In recent years, video games such as “Roblox” and “Fortnite” have evolved into creator platforms — and, accordingly, have welcomed brands and advertisers to play inside them. “Grand Theft Auto” has remained intentionally devoid of real-life brands since its release in 1997. But Digiday recently reported that “GTA” developer Rockstar Games is pursuing a user-generated content approach for the upcoming release of “GTA 6” later this year, which has renewed marketers’ interest in the series.

Related Insights

The Creator Economy

Rockstar Games talks with top metaverse creators, with an eye on making ‘Grand Theft Auto’ the next creator platform Read More

With “GTA 6” on the horizon, brands’ inquiries about the game have steadily increased, according to five agency executives who spoke to Digiday for this article. (Rockstar Games representatives did not respond to requests for comment.)

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Rockstar Games is gearing up to make “Grand Theft Auto VI” the next big metaverse platform.

When Rockstar releases “GTA 6” later this year, it won’t just be the biggest video game launch of the decade — the launch will represent “GTA’s” attempt to transform from a popular game series into a bona fide creator platform.

Rockstar Games has been in discussions with top Roblox and Fortnite creators, as well as dedicated “GTA” content creators, about the potential to create custom experiences inside the upcoming game, according to three industry insiders with knowledge of these meetings, who requested anonymity in order to protect business relationships. These experiences would allow creators to modify the game’s environment and assets to bring their own intellectual property — and potentially their brand sponsors — into “GTA’s” virtual sandbox.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Rooster Teeth is officially free from its corporate overlords. Now owned by one of its original founders, the fan-favorite production company appears to be emulating the same independent approach that has paid off for some of Hollywood’s other creator-owned media operations.

Founded by a collective of content creators in 2003, Rooster Teeth spent years being shuttled around between different holding companies, from Fullscreen to Otter Media to WarnerMedia. The company suffered under corporate ownership, shuttering in March 2024 amid reports of a toxic work culture and a decade of unprofitability, as well as a failed rebrand in 2023.

On Feb. 5, Rooster Teeth founder Michael “Burnie” Burns announced that his company Box Canyon Productions had acquired the Rooster Teeth brand and many of the studio’s assets. Now, Rooster Teeth’s millions of fans are waiting to see whether Burns will be able to bring the company back to profitability using a lower-to-the-ground approach.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

As U.S. creators looked to diversify their online presences following the Jan. 19 TikTok outage, creators in the United Kingdom increased their posting activity in a bid to fill the potential void.

In the week following the United States’ Jan. 19 TikTok outage — the seven days between Jan. 19 and Jan. 25 — video creators in the U.K. posted 15 percent more content than they did during the seven days leading up to the ban, according to figures shared with Digiday by influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy. This data was the result of a report created by the agency on Jan. 31, which analyzed the activity of over 10,000 creators across the U.S. and U.K. following the outage.

Billion Dollar Boy’s report also found that TikTok creators in the U.S. had decreased their posting activity by 3 percent in the week after Jan. 19, creating a potential content void that some U.K. creators rushed to fill. During the same period, U.S. creators’ posting activity increased by 16 percent on Instagram Reels and by 14 percent on YouTube Shorts.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

As Roblox continues to grow, in-game item designers and world builders are cashing in — and forming a new class of content creator in the process.

During Roblox’s fourth financial quarter of 2024, which encompassed the period between Oct. 31, 2024, and Jan. 5, 2025, creators on the platform made more money than ever before. In Q4, Roblox creators cashed in on the sales of in-game items to the tune of $280 million, a 27 percent increase year over year, said CEO Dave Baszucki during Roblox’s quarterly earnings call yesterday. Roblox itself takes a 30 percent cut of all in-game item sales, sharing the remaining revenue with a pool of roughly 20,000 creators, according to numbers published by Roblox.

The increase in Roblox creators’ revenue over the past quarter was a direct result of the company’s overall business growth, with Roblox reporting a 32 percent year-over-year increase in revenue to a total of $988 million, as well as a 21 percent increase in bookings, from $1.129 billion to $1.362 billion. In spite of the company meeting its own revenue and bookings estimates for the quarter, Roblox’s stock price crashed following the Feb. 6 earnings call, reflecting how the company’s numbers fell short of observers’ and investors’ expectations. Roblox’s average daily active user count fell by 7% in Q4 2024 compared to Q3 2024 to 85.3 million people.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

After promising growth in 2024 and early 2025, LinkedIn is doubling down on video with new tools and metrics.

As of yesterday, creators on LinkedIn are able to track the average watch time of their videos. LinkedIn rolled out the new video metric amid a range of new features — such as improved video search functionality and the introduction of full-screen vertical video on LinkedIn’s desktop version — intended to further improve video creators’ experience on the platform.

To learn more about LinkedIn’s decision to make average video watch times available to creators on the platform, Digiday spoke to LinkedIn vp of product Gyanda Sachdeva. Here are some of the key takeaways.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

LinkedIn’s ongoing efforts to woo video creators paid off in the past few months, according to new figures shared by the company.

Short-form video is the fastest-growing content category on LinkedIn. As of this week, total video viewership on the platform has increased by 36 percent year-over-year for the period between Oct. 30, 2024, and Jan. 29, 2025, according to statistics shared by a LinkedIn representative, who said that video creation is growing at twice the rate of other post formats on the platform. (LinkedIn owner Microsoft runs its fiscal calendar between July 1 and June 30 and considers the period between Oct. 30, 2024, and Jan. 29, 2025 to be its fiscal second quarter of 2025.)

LinkedIn’s publisher program, which includes over 500 publishers and journalists, is also intended to amplify video content on the platform. Through the program, LinkedIn provides audience demographic data to news publishers, shares monthly newsletters with information about new tools, and operates workshops to educate members about the platform’s features. Weekly video creation from program members has grown by 67 percent year-over-year, per the company rep.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

As content creators continue to accrue fame and influence, marketers have learned that they are not beholden to traditional brand safety considerations.

In the current landscape of online content creation, AMP is one of the hottest names in the game. The creator collective, whose name stands for Any Means Possible, includes popular influencers Kai Cenat, Davis “ImDavisss” Dodds, Duke Dennis, Din “Agent 00” Muktar, Roberto “Fanum” Gonzalez and Christopher “Chrisnxtdoor” Dimbo. Thanks to Cenat’s meteoric rise on Twitch and a slew of celebrity guest appearances last year, AMP’s following across platforms has ballooned into the tens of millions, empowering the collective and its members to sign sponsorship deals with brands such as PrizePicks and Bang Energy.

“They’re such a good partner, because they give us so much creative control on what we have going on,” said Dodds, speaking about the Bang Energy sponsorship. “They honestly just want to know the general idea, and if they align with it — which they pretty much always do — then they’re here to support, which is awesome because it really gives us an opportunity to not be held back in any way.”

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

When TikTok went down over the weekend, so did its sister app CapCut — revealing how content creators across platforms have become reliant on ByteDance’s software to edit their videos. Following CapCut’s return, creators are divided on whether to continue using the app or explore alternatives before it potentially goes away for good.

Pro wrestling YouTuber and Twitch streamer MinniePortable believes CapCut is one of the best available video editing options for content creators, paying $9.99 per month to use the premium version of the app to edit videos for YouTube and Instagram. When it went down over the weekend, she experimented with alternatives, but found that none of them worked as well for her.

“I was looking for something similar, and people on Twitter were recommending several other ones. One was Filmora, which was a good piece of editing software,” said MinniePortable, who asked to keep her real name private. “But then, when I tried to export it, it said ‘export with watermark or pay the annual $50 a year to export it.’ I’m not doing the $50 a year with no watermark, so I just stopped trying to edit, and was hoping for CapCut to come back.”

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

In spite of the weekend’s momentary TikTok shutdown, sales on TikTok Shop didn’t miss a beat.

The hours-long TikTok shutdown on Jan. 18 and 19 did not have a negative impact on the platform’s sales over the weekend. In fact, TikTok Shop sales spiked in the days immediately preceding the ban, as well as on the day that the ban was lifted.

On Jan. 19, the day the outage was lifted, total sales volume on TikTok Shop amounted to $32,064,590, according to data shared by the e-commerce data platform Charm.io — an over $500,000 jump from the total sales figure of $31,429,366 on Jan. 18, and a nearly $5 million week-over-week increase from the total sales of $27,536,680 on Jan. 12. The post-outage spike in sales was on track with a general increase in TikTok Shop activity that began in the lead-up to the potential ban.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

As virtual-world platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite attract the lion’s share of both users and advertising dollars, the Korean-owned app Zepeto has quietly staked its own claim to a corner of the metaverse.

The metaverse might be a few hype cycles past — but gaming platforms have continued to expand the capabilities of their immersive, three-dimensional worlds, with the “big three” of Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft dominating much of the conversation. 

Nipping at the heels of the major players is the Seoul-based Zepeto. The app, which describes itself as an “immersive avatar-based social universe,” has a total user base of over 400 million registered accounts and a monthly active user count of 20 million. Last week, Zepeto partnered with Walmart to launch the platform’s first-ever e-commerce experience for physical goods. 

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

As Discord’s budding romance with brands and advertisers continues, the platform has hired its first-ever chief business officer to scale up its sales and partnership business.

Jules Shumaker, Discord’s new CBO, comes to the company with over two decades of gaming advertising experience. Most recently, she served as CRO of Unity between 2021 and 2024; prior to Unity, she worked as a vp of advertising for the game publisher Zynga. Her first day as Discord’s CBO was Jan. 6.

Shumaker’s entrance comes at an opportune time for Discord. Having established itself as the gaming community’s dominant text and voice chat platform, the company hired a team of experienced platform and gaming executives to launch its first ad product, Play Quests, in March 2024. In October of last year, Discord launched its second ad product, Video Quests. Both are rewarded ad formats — ads that give users an in-app reward in exchange for their engagement and attention — that prompt Discord users to play a certain game or engage in other activities to receive on-platform digital prizes such as profile-picture overlays.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

The impending U.S. TikTok ban could threaten some creators’ ability to grow their audiences across all platforms — not just the embattled Chinese-owned short-form video app.

As the United States marches toward a TikTok ban on Jan. 19, livestreaming creators in particular are lamenting the potential death of the platform’s so-called “clipping culture,” which they believe had an uplifting effect on their followings on both TikTok and other platforms.

“TikTok is pretty commonly used now for Twitch growth,” said Gappy, a Twitch streamer who asked to keep his real name private. “When we think of the new age of Twitch streamers — Kai Cenat, CaseOh, Jynxzi — they all got their virality through TikTok.”

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

As of today, Jan. 15, Walmart has doubled down on its push into the metaverse by launching Zepeto’s first-ever e-commerce experience for physical goods.

Zepeto is a digital avatar creation platform that allows its user base — which skews female and is roughly 70 percent Gen-Z, per Walmart and Zepeto — to create and share virtual experiences using digital representations of themselves. Now, Zepeto app users viewing virtual Walmart clothing items can use the app to log into their Walmart accounts and order physical versions of those items to be shipped directly to their doorsteps. Additionally, purchases of select physical garments in brick-and-mortar Walmart stores will also come with free downloads of their virtual equivalents on Zepeto.

The launch is Walmart’s third metaverse e-commerce experience, evidence that the retailer is playing the long game in its approach to virtual worlds. In April 2024, Walmart partnered with Roblox to open that platform’s first e-commerce experience for physical goods; in May 2024, Walmart opened its own virtual world platform featuring e-commerce opportunities, Walmart Realm.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

Over the past two weeks, a growing cohort of digital creators has spoken out against the Honey browser extension for swapping creators’ affiliate marketing links with its own. Beyond their stolen affiliate revenue, however, creators are criticizing — and suing — Honey because they believe it has hurt their ability to sign future brand partnerships.

The controversy kicked off on Dec. 21, 2024, when the YouTuber MegaLag released a video essay claiming how Honey, a PayPal-owned browser extension, makes money by replacing creators’ affiliate marketing links with its own, thus gleaning a share of affiliate revenue that would otherwise go to the creators themselves. A Honey representative did not respond to a request for comment.

Since December, the Honey scandal has become something of a cause célèbre within the YouTube community, in part due to the fact that prominent creators such as James “MrBeast” Donaldson and Marques “MKBHD” Brownlee had previously promoted the service in sponsored videos. On Jan. 2, legal YouTubers such as Devin “LegalEagle” Stone initiated a class-action lawsuit against the company.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

After spending much of 2024 recovering from a down period, esports industry executives are stepping on the gas in anticipation of a growth year in 2025.

In 2023, advertisers and investors alike jumped ship from competitive gaming, leading to the so-called esports winter, a period in which esports organizations consolidated or pivoted to new business models in order to stay afloat. Over the past 12 months, however, the industry has recovered, in part thanks to brands coming back into the space, as well as the updated revenue share programs created by the publishers of popular esports games.

Emboldened by the success of new major esports events such as the Esports World Cup — and by an influx of investment by the Saudi Arabian government — esports industry leaders are projecting confidence going into 2025. Here’s a look into the best-case scenario for competitive gaming in the new year.

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.

As a potential U.S. TikTok ban grows near, creators are adjusting their approach to partnership contracts to avoid being left holding the bag if — or when — the platform goes down.

Although the United States’ impending TikTok ban is not slated to take effect until Jan. 19, it’s already threatening some creators’ brand partnership business. As the deadline approaches, TikTok has become an increasingly risky prospect for advertisers, some of which have said they have slowed their spending on TikTok content accordingly.

“We have refused to sign any new clients on TikTok at all — and that’s been a little concerning, from a business perspective,” said Nicole Rechtszaid, the head of creator partnerships and social strategy for the creative agency Ghost Agency, who told Digiday that her company’s pre-existing TikTok campaigns will continue to run until they are unable to deliver on them. “We’re trying to figure out where else brands can still participate, and it’s been very uncertain terrain for us. As we’ve been navigating it, we do not want to encourage any brands to start that activation there.”

Continue reading this article on digiday.com. Sign up for Digiday newsletters to get the latest on media, marketing and the future of TV.