Good morning. YouTube commentator SunnyV2 has leveled quite the take: Some of those ASMR bushcraft channels viewed millions of times over aren’t all they’re built, hammered, and dug up to be—they're sometimes the product of robust teams and modern machinery.

It begs the question: Does authenticity always matter?

–Hannah Doyle

How a Childcare Creator Made a Market-Ready First Aid Kit

So much of creator merch these days are sweatshirts and graphic tees instead of products followers *actually* ask for.

Enter Shannon Tripp. She’s known by her 552,000 Instagram followers for creating content designed to show what to do (and what not to do) when caring for sick kids and handling emergency health situations—a niche she’s earned given a weighty résumé as a pediatric ER nurse and a mom of five. Now, armed with that experience and requests from her followers, Tripp has executed her first big product launch—a first aid kit.

Tripp partnered with first aid company My Medic to build the product, going through a yearlong production process.

“What makes this kit so unique from others on the market is that each pack inside the kit has a QR code that can be scanned and I’ll pop up in a video with the exact instruction on how to use the tools to help ease the pain and administer care to the child,” Tripp said.

A niche product launch that comes with exclusive content from the creator behind it? That's what got our attention.

How she got here:

2017: Tripp switches her Instagram to public and begins giving childcare tips.

2018: Tripp creates a video detailing what caregivers should do in a life-threatening choking situation after her own child chokes on a peppermint candy. The video goes viral.

2020: Tripp launches her first online course, “Mastering Medical Emergencies at Home.”

Our Take

Tripp's content is niche and her first product launch fits the same bill. Sure, a $200 first aid kit isn't for everyone the way that a trucker cap or a laptop sticker are. But specificity can accelerate engagement—sometimes, when you target a small group, you can go big. "We're not stopping until this first aid kit is in nearly every home,” Tripp told us.

Ludwig Retires Mogul Money Series

The gaming creator’s popular series is coming to a close after one year and six episodes of Jeopardy!-style game play, where Ludwig took the role of Alex Trebek and streamers like Pokimane, Sykkuno, and xQc did their best Ken Jennings impressions.

Mogul Money has done serious numbers for Ludwig, with one episode viewed 4.9 million times since last July (making it his channel’s most-viewed video).

Ludwig started the show in June 2021 while he was on Twitch and brought it to YouTube Gaming when he signed an exclusive deal with the platform in November. The finale was taped live July 2 and drew over 5,000 fans to watch IRL at the YouTube Theater in Los Angeles.

“I love the show, but it’s been done the best it can be done,” he said in a recent stream. “At the end of the day, it's just a Jeopardy knock-off with influencers and that’s it. I like doing a lot of collaborative and high-effort events so I'm working on new things.”

Our Take

Ludwig isn’t afraid to end a project, even when it’s popular. As he’s looking to expand and evolve his Mogul brand, views matter, but so do costs accrued, including time and money. If creators want to avoid the pitfalls of burnout, they have to calibrate what’s successful with what they want to do, too.

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Creators Claim the "He's a 10" TikTok Trend

“He’s a 10, but truly believes that birds aren’t real.” “He’s a 6, but he can cook.” The ranking game using #hesa10 and #shesa10 hashtags have taken TikTok by storm, with more than 230 million views on the hashtags combined.

But who started it all? 23-year-old Leah Woods is claiming she and her sister, Mary, and friend, Lucy, did it first when they posted a video playing the game in May. The trend went megaviral, prompting the three women to launch a website and design a card game in hopes of capitalizing on their FYP success, according to a recent profile in Embedded.

Our Take

With few barriers to posting, TikTok makes viral content a possibility for anyone with an idea and a WiFi connection. But it lacks robust resources to set high standards for attribution.

While the platform has taken steps to give credit where credit is due, it’s still largely up to the creator to speak up. And when a viral hit could be the difference between being compensated for your creativity or not, speaking up could matter almost as much as having an idea in the first place.

🔥 Press Worthy

• Good Good Golf releases their own putter.

• Lofi Girl streams have been taken down due to an alleged copyright issue.

• Reddit launches an NFT avatar marketplace.

• MrBeast beats Ninja in the League of Legends charity competition.

• The Creative Companion newsletter is your weekly guide to becoming a professional creator.*

• Creator group OfflineTV travels to Japan for two weeks of new streaming content.

*This is sponsored advertising content.