Good morning. Despite all the bad PR FoodTok’s been getting since the pink sauce fiasco, I tried my first TikTok recipe this weekend. The verdict: Though the mechanics were tough (try replaying a TikTok with messy hands), the results were well worth it. Amy Wilichowski’s pesto eggs—would recommend.

–Hannah Doyle

Google Maps Gamer Grows on YouTube

TikTok asks, “How to give girls butterflies?” Jump cut to Trevor Rainbolt, aka Georainbolt on TikTok, playing the Google Maps geography guessing game GeoGuessr. “France,” he says, glancing at a Google image of a random location and pinpointing it on the map in under a second. He’s usually right.

For a little over a year, Rainbolt has played the game for 4–8 hours a day and uploaded the highlights to a growing audience of 1.1 million TikTok followers. His most popular video has 18 million views.

Zoom out: Rainbolt and other GeoGuessr streamers, including Geostique and GeoWizard, are bringing a new mass appeal to a game that was created in 2013. On TikTok, the hashtag for the game has over 1 billion views.

Though this trend has been growing on TikTok for the greater part of a year, Rainbolt’s recent brand expansion illustrates a growing trend among creators: expanding your audiences cross-platform.

Rainbolt started a YouTube channel about a month ago and now has 115,000 subscribers. The Rainbolt who followers see on YouTube is more dynamic—instead of fast-paced highlight reels, Rainbolt is collaborating with Ludwig and donating to other streamers in MrBeast fashion.

Our Take

With Georainbolt leading the charge, TikTok has done to GeoGuessr what Twitter did to Wordle—breathed viral life into a simple but sticky online game. But just as the Twitter-famous often move on to more commercially lucrative pastures in the long run, TikTok gamers like Rainbolt are diversifying their personas (and revenue streams) by jumping to platforms like YouTube to showcase just how magnetic they can be.

Remi Bader Experiences the Emma Chamberlain Effect

Too often for creators, becoming less relatable means becoming less likable. Remi Bader, the reigning “realistic try-on haul” queen of TikTok, is getting a taste of that following the launch of her long-awaited Revolve collab (and the brand's first extended-size collection).

Some context: Revolve has hardly been known for leading the charge on size inclusivity. The retailer typically taps thin, homogenous looking influencers to style their clothing, much of which maxes out at size XL.

Which makes this a big moment for Bader. But as Bader shared on Call Her Daddy, big moments can be double-edged swords: “The people that followed me from the start want me to be this original, relatable girl that wasn’t getting these brand deals, struggling, and crying every day. It’s like the second I start to be happy, I feel like I’m losing these people, like ‘she’s not one of us anymore.’”

Our Take

Creators who build brands around being relatable might eventually stop being relatable because of their newfound fame—leaving little of their original familiarity for their fans to engage with. Perhaps Bader can take a note from Emma Chamberlain, who also received backlash for losing relatability, and take it as a time to lean into other ventures—of which she has plenty, including a modeling career and a consulting role at Victoria’s Secret.

TikToker Creates New Movie Production Role

Reece Feldman has become the face of movie set TikTok, documenting his adventures as a production assistant on the set of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and behind the scenes at the Oscars.

His newest job takes a turn for the meta. He’s running TikTok for Hulu’s Not Okay—doing his best to do numbers on social media for a movie all about the pressure of doing numbers on social media.

Our Take

By bridging two skill sets—movie production and TikTok creation—Feldman carved out a new kind of career path for both himself and other similarly talented creators. As the latest and greatest social platforms produce a range of new talent, every industry will want in—creating new jobs that don’t even exist yet.

🔥 Press Worthy

• Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road music video surpasses 1 billion views on YouTube.

• Deadline Approaching (8/19): Win a free trip to FinCon 2022 from MoneyLion. Type “Publish Press” in the “Referred By” section of the form on this page to be entered.*

• Emma Chamberlain is the face of the Ganni and Levi’s collaboration.

• News and tech company Lil Durk launches a $10 million program for Canadian creators.

• Pew Research finds 95% of teens use YouTube.

• DrDisRespect throws a mean spiral.

*This is sponsored advertising content.