Good morning. We’re entering the third week of McDonald’s mega-viral Grimace Shake appearing all over our feeds. #Grimace has over 2 billion views on TikTok. Is this the greatest brand marketing accidental win since #gentleminions last July?

— Hannah Doyle & Nate Graber-Lipperman

While most of us have been focused on the launch of Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, the company has been angling to compete in another arena as well: partnering with college athlete creators.

Meta announced the opening of its NIL Empower 3.0 incubator program designed to help female athletes maximize NIL opportunities.

Meta’s earlier iterations of its NIL Empower program in years past have included participants like Penn State basketball player Anna Camden and University of Florida gymnast Leah Clapper.

FYI: Meta’s announcement comes shortly after LSU gymnast Livvy Dunne launched The Livvy Fund, a foundation aimed to help female athletes excel in NIL opportunities. According to Opendorse's 2023 report, athletes competing in women’s sports receive just 23% of total NIL compensation.

The details of Meta’s new program: NIL Empower 3.0 will select 30 female D1-NAIA college athletes for a five-month program run by Meta’s Sports Partnerships team.

Zoom out: As evidenced by Dunne’s fund and Meta’s incubator program, NIL content and brand deals are just beginning. The industry is headed toward a $10 billion-per-year market, according to Opendorse.

This morning, New York-based comedy creators Alexandra Robinson and Danny Kabouni launched their new YouTube series Bare Minimum, which follows fictionalized versions of the duo “doing the bare minimum to survive in New York City” in 15-to-20-minute scripted episodes.

So how’d they get here?

“It was a small cameo that we filmed in just three minutes…[but] you can kind of see the chemistry that we have from the get-go,” Robinson told us.

Fast forward six months: Robinson and Kabouni collaborated on several more sketch comedy videos that ultimately inspired Bare Minimum. Together, they wrote (and starred in) the series pilot.

Zoom out: In the past, comedy creators like Robinson and Kabouni saw YouTube as a stepping stone toward more traditional sitcoms. Now, the pair believes creators can self-finance and distribute a TV-quality production on YouTube itself.

“There’s a lot of talented comedians in New York that are just limited to social media, and I want to put them on a bigger screen and a bigger pedestal that is YouTube…[to] showcase what New York is all about,” Kabouni told us.

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After traveling across Europe for seven days for the second iteration of his popular Penny Series, Ryan Trahan returned to the U.S. last Friday.

The series results:

Looking ahead: It’s unclear whether Trahan will continue the series in the near future, though he appears to be happy with this year’s results.

“One thing the Penny Series always teaches me is that true joy isn’t found in things like money or stuff—true joy is found in love,” Trahan concluded in the final video.

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