Good morning. Social media is now officially considered an environmental toxin in NYC, according to Mayor Eric Adams, right up there with guns and cigarettes. While NYC hasn’t implemented any rules around the new designation, it does make us wonder…how might this impact creators? FYI: Creators are part of the city’s creative sector, which accounts for 13% of NYC’s total economic output.

— Hannah Doyle & Nate Graber-Lipperman

Jubilee Launches a Relationship App

Longtime YouTube channel and media brand Jubilee, which makes human interest videos on hot-button topics like politics and religion, has launched its first app: Nectar.

The details: Nectar is based on Jubilee’s YouTube channel of the same name, which explores relationships with videos like blind dating girls based on their dads and whether exes can fall back in love.

Video participants get a “Loveprint,” similar to a Myers-Briggs personality type for love and relationships. Jubilee made the Loveprint test available for anyone to take in 2022—and 1 million users took it within three months of launch, according to Jubilee founder and CEO Jason Y. Lee.

“Our audience is so captive with our content, we want them to be able to participate now,” Lee told us. “And we feel like technology is one of the things that we can really scale.”

Enter: the Nectar app, which is currently focused on personality and compatibility for anyone (regardless of relationship status), but Lee says it could evolve into a dating app.

• “I think there’s a reason why Gen Z loves horoscopes and personality tests. It’s because they want to understand themselves better, and by proxy, other people. So we want [Nectar] to start there,” Lee said.

• “Not too far down the line this could be a really exciting dating app that is built on a completely different foundation from competitors.”

Zoom out: Dating app satisfaction has dramatically fallen, and shares of Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, and OKCupid, have fallen 40% in the past year.

How would Nectar succeed? “Over time we’ve recognized that people really trust us with that kind of vulnerability and we never thought about it as data, and we still don’t,” Lee said. “But we’ve learned so much from the hundreds of thousands of people that have joined the casting database and videos…and we’re better able to understand where people are at right now.”

Creator Spotlight: F.D Signifier

Video essayist F.D Signifer’s first upload of 2024 followed his typical format: analyzing Black media and pop culture. But it marked a new era, as Signifier spoke openly about tokenization and censorship on YouTube as his channel blew past 650,000 subscribers in 2023 while uploading just 12 videos.

“A big part of it [was], how can I communicate to my audience how the sausage gets made when I provide for them a video that entertains or educates…and they provide for me AdSense and Patreon dollars.”

Context: Signifier, a former teacher who doesn’t share his real identity online, began uploading videos in 2020 while pursuing a PhD in sociology.

• He was a longtime fan of YouTube creators such as Lindsay Ellis—known for her film and theater deep dives—but saw a gap worth filling.

• “It was very explicitly the absence of Black voices [in the video essay genre],” Signifier told us.

As his videos took off in 2023, Signifier considered quitting YouTube due to the “unintended consequences” of his success: grappling with viewers’ (and the creator industry’s) perceptions of him while trying to “continue to relate to the Black spaces” he still resides in.

• Signifier credited creator-owned streaming startup Nebula as an outlet to upload longer, uncensored videos that he believes would either be buried by YouTube’s algorithm or demonetized entirely.

We spoke to Signifier to hear more about his experience on YouTube, when we’ll see more academics sharing their ideas via video essays, and more. Read our full conversation here.

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Ethan Chlebowski Launches Recipe Site ‘Cook Well’

Food creator Ethan Chlebowski announced his new website and cooking brand, Cook Well, on Tuesday, promising “the cleanest recipe experience on the Internet.”

The vision? Take his YouTube audience of 1.9 million food lovers and…

• Bring them a free, online cookbook that evolves over time

• Focus on driving viewers through YouTube—not “bloated,” text-filled recipe pages that optimize for SEO 

• Offer a platform for other creators to share their favorite recipes and (one day) launch cooking products

“I want to make it the world’s best cooking company…if we’re going to set up a system for a better way to read recipes, I want to have recipes from all over the world and work with creators from all around the world,” Chlebowski told us.

🔥 Press Worthy

• Science creator Emily Calandrelli talks about STEM education at the White House.

• Twitch is expanding its Partner Plus Program to include more streamers.

• QTCinderella’s Streamer Awards 2024 nominations are out.

• TikTok is testing a cap on video lengths up to 30 minutes.

• MrBeast is launching an action figure line.

• Movie commentary creator Straw Hat Goofy is launching a podcast, Get Rec’d.

📚️ Thank You For Pressing Publish

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

• Read: NYT columnist Ezra Klein mourns the loss of Pitchfork and the recent wave of media layoffs, exploring what might be next for journalists online.

• Watch: Food creator Halle Burns vlogs her time at culinary school in Goa, India.

• Listen: Journalists Clare Malone and Bryan Curtis discuss how modern wartime coverage has evolved (and what newspapers will look like in 2024) on a recent episode of The Press Box.

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