Good morning. The FDA announced plans to phase out artificial food dyes, including Red 40, by 2026. Although we’ll miss our original recipe Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, we’re more concerned about whether challenge creator Killdozer will continue his food dye diet series.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

BTS Roundup: Creator Processes, Exposed

What does it take to make some of the most ambitious content on the internet today? Lucky for us, creators are lifting the curtain →

VFX creator Zach King just shared the aptly titled “How I Keep Making Viral Videos,” showing his entire production process from start to finish. One interesting note: King went deep on budget, sharing that one of his most-viewed videos with 2 billion views only cost $100 to make.

“One of the biggest problems I see filmmakers make in production is they think money is going to solve the problem that they sometimes should solve with a little bit more creativity,” he said.

Musician Dayglow revived his “How I Made” YouTube series—detailing his process for writing and producing songs—after a three-year hiatus. In the latest installment, Dayglow broke down layer-by-layer how he made “Change Song” for the soundtrack of A Minecraft Movie. 

MrBeast Cinematographer Jason Elliott rode dirt bikes with tech creator Gene “Potato Jet” Nagata while unpacking 1) how much equipment went into the making of Beast Games for Amazon Prime and 2) how the team maintained MrBeast’s channel voice on a TV show.

“We wanted to blend our style—a little bit of reality, a little bit of narrative cinematics, while also still having a bit of YouTube flavor,” Elliott said.

VFX commentary creators Corridor Crew showed their process of handling copyright claims on their reaction videos. “You gotta go through and find every clip that the company is claiming, and you use your box of tricks,” editor Dean Hughes said. “Horizontal flip, 1% speed reduction, hue shift, do your own sound design.”

YouTube’s Ad Revenue Jumps 10%

As YouTube continues to dominate podcasts and streaming, the platform is attracting more advertisers. In Alphabet’s first-quarter earnings call this week, the company announced that YouTube notched $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for the quarter, up 10.3% annually.

Alphabet now has more than 270 million paid subscriptions overall, driven in large part by YouTube and Google One, its cloud storage service. Last month, YouTube reported 125 million YouTube Premium and Music subscribers, up 100 million from the year previous. For reference, Netflix has around 300 million subscribers.

Zoom out: YouTube is now the largest aggregate TV content source by view time in the US, according to Nielsen. And by the end of the year, YouTube is expected to overtake Disney as the world’s largest media company, worth $550 billion, according to MoffettNathanson.

AI Slop Tops YouTube View Charts: Now What?

This week, the third most-watched video on YouTube is an AI-generated short of a pug saving a baby from a plane crash, racking up 410 million views and 5.5 million likes over the course of a month. The channel behind the video—which only posts AI-generated pug content—has gained almost 4 million subscribers and 1.5 billion views since its creation in April 2023.

AI slop is not a new concept, but as it rises in popularity and invades short-form content, platforms are beginning to take notice.

Case in point: Facebook announced this week that it’s “cracking down on spammy content” by demonetizing pages that display behavior typical of AI slop accounts—such as exorbitant amounts of hashtags or long captions unrelated to the content in the video.

🔥 Press Worthy

• Tech creator Caleb Denison leaves Digital Trends to start his own YouTube channel and media company.

• Victoria Paris releases a set of necklaces and bracelets in the launch of her jewelry brand, Tenfour.

• Adventure creator Yikes is changing his iconic YouTube avatar—and letting fans decide what’s next.

• YouTube rolls out auto-dubbing for all Partner Program creators.

• Adobe launches an app to help credit creators through invisible, tamper-resistent metadata.

📚️ Thank You For Pressing Publish

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

• Read: For his newsletter Alive in Social Media, Laurent François reflects on the art of commenting as social signaling within Gen Z.

• Watch: Comedian Max Fosh embarks on a journey to find people who were born on the same day in the same hospital as he was. 

• Listen: After three years of anticipation (and an impromptu appearance in NYC’s Washington Square Park), Lorde has returned with her latest single, “What Was That.”