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

iDubbbz Makes Up for Creator Clash Losses

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.

• This year, Creator Clash rented out an arena double the size of last year’s venue and paid more fighters a $20,000 training stipend to participate.

• Last year’s event was free for online viewers, while this year’s cost $25–$35 to view. About 50,000 people paid to watch.

• But Jomha said as many as 3 million viewers watched on pirated sites—up to 60x the number of viewers who paid.

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.

Kick Introduces New Content Moderation Tool

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.

• Kick has courted controversy in the past for allowing copyright infringement and porn on the platform.

• Many in the creator space have questioned the role of Stake and other gambling companies in funding Kick creators’ large payouts (many mainstream platforms have banned most forms of online gambling content).

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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Threads Comes Out Swinging

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?

🔥 Press Worthy

• Cleo Abram teams up with MKBHD to showcase the tech that’s changing the movie industry.

• Travel creators The Bucket List Family’s National Geographic coffee table book is now available to preorder.

• Danny Gevirtz directs a mini documentary for Olympian hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.

• This is how creator Danie Jay conquered YouTube through search.*

• The FTC updates its ad disclosure laws for creators for the first time since 2009.

• YouTube is asking users to turn off adblockers or buy a premium subscription after three videos.

_{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

📚️ Thank You For Pressing Publish

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

• Read: GQ writer Adam Nayman explores the winding 10-year path the Barbie movie took to make it to the screen (and all of our Twitter feeds).

• Watch: Travel creator Luke Korns shared an inside look at his spontaneous trip to the Amazon Jungle.

• Listen: Gen Z is still going to movie theaters—it just takes massive marketing campaigns and viral stunts from studios to get zoomers into seats. Entertainment industry podcast The Town digs into the data to learn more.

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