Good morning. The internet’s new favorite creator? Two-month-old pygmy hippo Moo Deng. TikTok videos of her wobbling around her enclosure in a Thailand zoo have already inspired new makeup tips from cosmetic brands, and the zoo moved to trademark her image—proving that creators can come in all shapes and sizes.

— Hannah Doyle & Nate Graber-Lipperman

Platform Roundup: AI on Shorts, Writers Become Streamers

In the spirit of back-to-school season, platforms are busy rolling out new features to equip creators for the coming fiscal year.

This week, YouTube hosted its annual Made On YouTube event, Snap held its Partner Summit, and Substack announced a slate of new creator tools. Here’s what you need to know →

YouTube is bringing Veo, Google’s generative AI video model, to Shorts and launching a discovery tool for up-and-coming creators on the YouTube app. 

• Using Veo within YouTube’s Dream Screen feature, creators will be able to make more generative AI video backgrounds, as well as six-second video clips from text prompts. These videos will be watermarked using SynthID (Google’s AI-generated content tag) so viewers know they’re AI.

• Creators with 500 to 500,000 subscribers can also grow their reach with YouTube’s “hype” feature. Viewers can “hype” a creator’s video, and it will appear on a leaderboard under the “Explore” section of the YouTube app.

Snap is going down to the studs, introducing a more “simple” interface and integrating Stories in its Chat section. For example, users can message with a friend and watch a video from another Snap creator while they wait for a reply.

Substack is now letting creators livestream in its app.

• When creators go live, subscribers will be notified via the Substack app and email. Once live videos are over, recordings will be saved to creators’ drafts for use in future posts.

• “If you can compel someone to read long-form written content, you can likely form stronger relationships with live,” streaming creator Zach Bussey said on X. “But live streaming is a different beast than written content.”
  

Five ‘Beast Games’ Contestants Sue MrBeast and Amazon

Five unnamed Beast Games contestants filed a lawsuit against MrBeast and Amazon on Monday, claiming they experienced “chronic mistreatment” and sexual harassment while filming the reality competition show.

Context: In March, MrBeast and Amazon Prime Video announced Beast Games, with 2,000 contestants competing for $5 million (the largest cash prize in game show history).

• The show began filming in Las Vegas in July. 1,000 contestants were soon eliminated, with the Vegas portion of the show set to appear as a video on MrBeast’s YouTube channel.

• Reports of participants receiving inadequate food, sleep, and feminine hygiene products (along with several hospitalizations due to injuries on set) began surfacing in August.

FYI: MrBeast hasn’t publicly responded to the lawsuit yet. A spokesperson told The New York Times in August that the Vegas shoot “was unfortunately complicated by the CrowdStrike incident, extreme weather, and other unexpected logistical and communications issues.”

Looking ahead: Beast Games continued filming in Toronto in August, though the show’s release date is still TBD.

In the meantime, YouTube creator Rosanna Pansino posted about the lawsuit on X yesterday, claiming that she’d “talked to 100 other contestants from the Vegas shoot that are looking into doing something similar.”

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French Creator Film Breaks Box Office Record

Kaizen, a two-and-a-half-hour documentary about French gaming creator Inès “Inoxtag” Benazzouz’s attempt to climb Mount Everest, debuted in over 500 theaters across France and French-speaking territories for one day last weekend.

The response? Kaizen sold 350,000 tickets, shattering the previous single-day French alternative programming sales record of 92,000 tickets, according to Variety.

Worth noting: Benazzouz worked with independent film group MK2 (which has released movies such as the Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall) to distribute Kaizen in theaters. The next day, he uploaded it for free on his YouTube channel, where the film has been viewed over 27 million times in just one week.

🔥 Press Worthy

• IShowSpeed celebrates 1 million concurrent viewers in Indonesia.

• Creators like Hank Green and Bella Poarch are partnering with Linktree and Vote.org to encourage voter registration.

• Twitch launches a game world inside Fortnite.

• TikTok is the fastest growing social platform for news, according to new findings from Pew Research.

• The FTC releases a four-year long study on platform user surveillance. 

📚️ Thank You For Pressing Publish

The content we’re looking forward to reading, watching, and listening to this weekend.

• Read: What happens when your coworkers figure out you’re a part-time creator? The Wall Street Journal investigates. 

• Watch: What’s worse for you than Twinkies? Hard drugs, as it turns out. Short form creator Idgaf Foods shows an appreciation for his sober lifestyle through processed foods and running. 

• Listen: Colin and Samir sat down with Cleo Abram to talk about her rise on YouTube and how she finds ideas for her videos.