Good morning. This wasn’t on our bingo card for 2025: Jake Shane is featured in an FKA Twigs music video for her new song featuring North West. Shane plays an assistant at Twigs’ record label, calling back to his early career in the music industry and the characters on TikTok that first catapulted him into the public eye. We are surprised and delighted.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Facebook’s Future for Creators

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on The Colin & Samir Show yesterday that creators “don’t think of Facebook as their primary home for content.” Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson joined the call to share how Facebook can change that. 

Here are some of the top creator takeaways from the group’s conversation:

• AI language dubbing. Donaldson said Facebook’s inability to dub videos in different languages is a big inhibitor for his audience. “Only 15-20% of the world consumes content in English, and if you’re not dubbing you can’t reach a majority of the world,” Donaldson said. He urged Zuckerberg to add a language dubbing feature (similar to YouTube’s) so creators can reach global audiences without compromising the quality of their content. Zuckerberg said that update could happen within a year.

• Original content opportunity. Zuckerberg said Facebook has 3 billion monthly active users (more than any other platform), but they are “somewhat underserved” without a large network of creators who see Facebook as their native platform. “I think that there is an opportunity—a very big one—for creators who want to [invest] in Facebook…and want to explore what is the native content that works well that is different from [other platforms],” Zuckerberg said. 

• Monetization. Donaldson said his short-form monetization is 2x higher than any other platform. Zuckerberg said that’s a “natural result” for creators, but admitted that better creator tools for long-form video are overdue.

Netflix Picks Up YouTube Dating Show

Lifestyle creator Arlette Amuli is headed to streaming to create a new version of her popular YouTube dating show, Pop The Balloon or Find Love.

Catch up: The series, which Amuli started hosting on her YouTube channel in 2023, has contestants hold balloons, signaling their interest in dates by keeping them in tact—and popping the balloon when it’s not a good fit. 

48 episodes in and over 100 million views later, the show has gained a large viewership on TikTok and was parodied on SNL.

The Netflix adaptation will look a little different—it’ll be a live show and Insecure actor Yvonne Orji will host. Amuli and her husband and business partner Bolia Matundu will be executive producers on the project, and contestants will include reality TV personalities like Johnny Bananas from The Challenge and Farrah Abraham from Teen Mom. The first episode airs on April 10.

Zoom out: The move is in line with two major recent Netflix strategies—partnering with creators (see: a recent deal with The Sidemen) and investing in live programming (see: new shows like Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney and WWE Raw).

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YouTube Shorts Views Are Changing

If you notice your Shorts viewership increase significantly next week, this is why: Starting Monday, YouTube will change the way it counts Shorts views to be more in line with Instagram Reels and TikTok.

How it works: YouTube will show the number of times a Short is played and replayed, instead of only counting after someone watches a Short for a specific amount of time.

YouTube will continue tracking the old Shorts metric under “engaged views” in its YouTube Analytics dashboard. The change won’t affect creators’ earnings and Partner Program eligibility, which will still be based on engaged views.

🔥 Press Worthy

• Beta Squad returns to YouTube after a nine-month hiatus.

• Spotify is rolling out its Partner Program to creators in France, Germany, Austria, and more countries.

• Creator marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy opens applications for its creator fund, granting 20 creator passes for Cannes Lions in June.

• MrBeast is writing a thriller novel with James Patterson.

• Nintendo streamed its annual keynote on Twitch and YouTube.

• Comedy creator Macy Gilliam is starting her own show for Morning Brew called Out There.

📚️ Thank You For Pressing Publish

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

• Read: For Paper Magazine, Ivan Guzman interviews TikTok boy band Laundry Day on newfound fame and hanging out with Justin Bieber. 

• Watch: In anticipation of Dreamworks’ live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon, digital art creator Maria Kallevik recreated her favorite scene from the original film.

• Listen: Bon Iver appears on the New York Times’s Popcast, discussing his new album “Sable, Fable” and his mental health journey.