Keeping Up With...

Good morning. After reviewing frozen pizza during quarantine in his popular One Bite Pizza Reviews series, Dave Portnoy has launched his own Barstool Sports pizza via Walmart. He claims it’s a 10/10 in a very unbiased review, but the Publish Press jury is still out on this one, folks. This is yet another example of creators using content as a launchpad for IRL products. Would you try a slice? 🍕

– Alice Ophelia

In Today’s Issue 💬

→ What The D’Amelio Show tells us about the changing face of celebrity

→ Unpacking YouTube artist Ten Hundred’s $1 million dollar Kickstarter

→ How Loot is flipping the script on NFTs

The D’Amelio Show Lands On Hulu

With Keeping Up With The Kardashians concluding its 14 year stint on-air, we have a new celebrity family moving into the spotlight. Last week, The D’Amelio Show landed on our screens, featuring TikTok’s most famous sibling duo, Charli and Dixie, alongside their parents Marc and Heidi. The show takes us through Charli D’Amelio’s record-breaking ascent into stardom, becoming the first person on TikTok to hit 100 million followers. This 8-part series marks the first time a major streaming service has brought a TikTok celebrity into mainstream media. 

The reality series lifts the lid on the entire family business, including Dixie’s foray into the world of music, earning 86 million Spotify streams for her debut alone, and Greg Goodfried leaving his role at UTA to become the President of D’Amelio Family Enterprises last year. 

The show offers a peek behind the curtain at the downsides of life as a creator. The mental health toll of unrelenting content output and the commodification of one’s own narrative is a consistent theme explored: “I have to deal with the fact that people don’t like who I am...I feel like it just gets more difficult everyday”, Charli says.

Our Take

The D’Amelio Show certainly won’t be the last we see of TikTok’s first family, especially for audiences used to seeing them for a minute at a time. While they might not be everyone’s cup of tea, the series does a great job at humanizing the stories of the kind of accelerated fame TikTok can generate. The reality TV format is firm recognition that content creators are accepted as mainstream celebrities now, with a clear appetite from studios to commission this type of entertainment.

Ten Hundred Hits $1 Million on Kickstarter 

Ten Hundred is an artist and YouTuber who has been documenting the process of building “Vivid Kingdom”, his own deck of illustrated playing cards. The 7 part series, shared with an audience of more than half a million subscribers, has been used to promote the launch of his Kickstarter to finance the project. His initial goal was set at $10,000, a milestone backers hit within 3 minutes of the Kickstarter going live. 

By The Numbers 

• $1 million → raised in the first 24 hours 

• 515,000 → views for Ten’s YouTube series 

• 14,500 → backers on Kickstarter

In a video thanking his subscribers for the support, Ten acknowledges how the process became a true community project, including fans' input through voting on polls. Ten stated, “you changed the trajectory of this project, made it better than it ever would have been if I’d done it on my own.” There are still 26 days left of fundraising. 

Our Take

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: community is king. By harnessing the power of his fans, Ten was able to fundraise $1 million from his community directly, without compromising on his creativity to keep external stakeholders happy. What makes this story extra feel-good is the fact that feedback from his viewers directly informed the project, making the process participatory from its inception.  

Thanks to Publish Press reader Carmel Kundai for suggesting this story on Twitter!

Loot is NFT Improv

The Loot project is barely a week old, but it’s already taken the NFT world by storm, with a rather unconventional start. The community-operated initiative simply began with a list of 8 items tweeted by Dom Hofmann, co-founder of Vine and Blitmap. 8,000 Loot bags, containing these 8 items listed for a supposed adventurer, were free to claim and got snapped up almost immediately. 

Visual cues and artwork were “intentionally omitted for others to interpret”, with the list of items presented in white text on a black background. The project has since grown into an open-source decentralized game, where creators have generated the community's value through a bottom-up approach, building the text-based adventure in real time. 

Participation from creators has generated artwork, storylines, and even universes to give the list valuable context. As a result, Loot bags were resold for $46 million over five days, with one “Divine Robe of Power” on sale for 300ETH (~$1 million). TL;DR People are playing games before they’re even built. 

Our Take

Just like Ten’s Kickstarter, there would be no Loot without support and participation from the NFT community, as both evangelists and creators. The value its participants are creating on the go has generated an entirely new movement in the fiercely competitive space, which has recently seen billion dollar months, as reported by us last week. Every creator who has a true community will have a competitive advantage in this space. Loot shows us that the future of the creator economy is multiplayer, creating value that is peer to peer – not just creator to audience.

🔥 In Other News

• Billie Eilish makes her Disney+ debut

• Natalie Rose grew from 33,000 to 2 million TikTok followers in 6 weeks

• Spotify taps former Paramount+ exec as Head of U.S. Studios for Video

• YouTube Reports 50 Million Premium and Music Subscribers

• TikTok overtakes YouTube in US average watch time