Good morning. AI can’t write this newsletter (yet) ((thankfully)), but we have been seeing a lot more stories about AI tech and creators—like how ChatGPT is being used in songwriting or how NVIDIA’s Maxine is readjusting eye contact in video calls. What are your thoughts on this new batch of AI tech? Would you use a chatbot to help produce your next video?

–Hannah Doyle

The saying “let the chips fall where they may” doesn’t apply to dominoes—every piece is intentional, as Lily Hevesh, the creator of popular domino YouTube channel Hevesh5, told us. That intention has come to life in her latest community project, a fan-powered domino art collaboration video.

Context: Hevesh has been sharing her domino art on YouTube since she was 10. Now 24, she’s built a following of nearly 4 million, has a top-selling domino kit on Amazon, and has worked with brands like Disney and Ford.

How is she pulling off a video collaboration with 4 million fans? Hevesh isn’t going it alone. She’s hired a community manager to handle channel interactions, organize events (like the upcoming collab video), answer questions, and generally keep up the vibes for her 100,000-strong H5 Domino Community.

“On the maker-manager spectrum, I identify more as a maker,” Hevesh said. “Hiring out was a huge step, and that’s helped me a lot to be able to manage the business the best and continue building at the same time.”

Big picture: For creators like Hevesh, maintaining and improving community relationships is often a decision that comes down to two options—either 1) DIY it or 2) hire someone. Hevesh went for the latter with a part-time hire, while finance creator Tori Dunlap of HerFirst$100k has built her community with a team of 13. Travel creator Payton Cavin manages her community mostly on her own.

So why hire a community manager? “If we didn’t have a community manager, [the channel] would feel like a one-way street, and it wouldn’t feel as accessible to the viewers,” Hevesh said.

The right time to hire a community manager depends on where you land on the aforementioned maker-manager spectrum. Do you want to be more hands-on in the business operations? Or in video production instead?

When you find that the work requires more than you’re capable of, take a look at your finances and ask yourself if a community manager is the right move to deepen your audience relationships. We predict that the next chapter of the creator economy will value audience quality over audience quantity…which means we’ll see a lot more community manager job postings in our Creator Moves section.

The filmmaker will work to upgrade the quality of MrBeast’s philanthropy channel by deepening MrBeast’s commitment to investing in charitable efforts—and giving away more money in videos—as its new Chief Creative Officer.

Back story: Mace has been on YouTube since 2012 and is a decorated filmmaker (he took home prizes at Cannes in 2016 and 2017). He’s also a long-time Casey Neistat collaborator who helped him build his creative content studio, 368, in 2018.

That brings Mace to Beast Philanthropy, which will be his first major role outside his own channel since building 368. But this isn’t Mace’s first time with MrBeast—he shot a video in Antarctica for MrBeast’s main channel earlier this year.

What makes him a good fit? Mace is a well-respected creator with a unique, recognizable filmmaking style. But his independent channel hasn’t quite taken off.

Creators are getting more opportunities to incubate their careers under more established peers (look no further than the popularity of Paddy Galloway’s YT Jobs). Mace’s hiring illustrates how effective that career move can be: He gets a steady paycheck, 11.5 million people viewing his work, and the chance to build his own distribution at the same time—Mace’s personal channel has grown substantially since he took the job with MrBeast.

Shorts monetization is coming. And other platforms are clearly getting ready for a showdown.

TikTok’s strategy? Slash ad prices.

We won’t have a clear picture on the future of short-form video monetization—namely, who does it best—until Shorts monetization is live next month.

But in the meantime, creators should develop formats that can be repurposed across all platforms in the event that one pulls away from the pack for advertising budgets. Like MrBeast said on Lex Fridman’s podcast—it’s the only time in history when one video could potentially go viral on every platform.

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