Good morning. Taylor Swift’s latest rerelease arrived this morning, putting 2010’s Speak Now back in the spotlight.

The response? Taylor’s Version broke records by reaching No. 1 on iTunes in 125 countries—showing just how evergreen truly creative storytelling can be, even 13 years later.

— Hannah Doyle & Nate Graber-Lipperman

Ian “iDubbbz” Jomha, comedy creator and co-founder of charity boxing series Creator Clash, shared on Monday that this year’s Creator Clash event lost $250,000, rendering it unable to donate any money to partner charities as planned.

So on Wednesday, Jomha hosted a live Twitch stream to raise the money he’d hoped to donate from the April event. In 24 hours, Jomha raised $160,000 for organizations like the Critical Role Foundation and the American Kidney Fund.

How did Jomha wind up $250K in the hole? Last year’s Creator Clash raised over $1 million for charity. Jomha said he “foolishly thought” upping the stakes for Creator Clash 2 would mean more revenue and more money to donate.

But…a combination of higher expenses and pay-per-view piracy kept his team from breaking even.

The learning: “We had a big streamer audience, that’s who we’re appealing to—people who watch things on Twitch and YouTube for free generally,” Jomha said. “I think it was in a lot of ways bad to appeal to that crowd and not give it away for free.”

Jomha said he’ll upload the Creator Clash 2 event and individual boxing matches to his channel for free next week.

Zoom out: Creator events can be tough to pull off at scale. Look no further than QTCinderella, who said she’s put nearly $1 million into the Streamer Awards.

Upstart streaming platform Kick announced plans to increase its content moderation efforts this week.

Viewers can now hide NSFW content and gambling streams using a new toggle feature, the company said on Monday. CEO Ed Craven said the new features were a step towards removing “unnecessary exposure to gambling related content,” adding that “viewer experience is equally as important to [Kick] as creators” in a tweet last week.

Context: Kick is majority owned by Craven and Bijan Tehrani, the cofounders of online cryptocurrency casino Stake.com.

Big picture: As it continues signing top streamers to massive deals, Kick is pitching itself to creators as a legitimate alternative to Twitch. Recent moves indicate that the company may be interested in promoting more brand-safe content in an effort to sell advertisers on the platform.

FYI: During June, Kick grew from 5 million to 12 million signups and has “seen $5,000,000 in [paid] subscriptions,” the company announced on Tuesday.

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Meta’s text-based Twitter clone, Threads, officially launched Wednesday night, and the platform already has 30 million signups, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a Threads post yesterday (some outlets are reporting as many as 50 million signups this morning).

For comparison: It took Facebook 852 days and Twitter 780 days to reach 10 million users. But when those platforms came out in 2004 and 2006, respectively, far fewer people were active on social media. In 2021, 72% of Americans used social media, up from 7% in 2005, Pew Research found.

Worth noting: Fast starts don’t always translate to sustained success. In 2011, Google’s now-defunct social media platform, Google+, reached 10 million users in just 16 days.

We’re curious: What has your initial impression of Threads been so far?

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