Good morning. Last night, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives concluded its third season with a cast reunion. If you didn’t see it—fear not.

There are plenty of opportunities to catch MomTok beyond the FYP: Whitney Leavitt is starring in Chicago on Broadway in February, while Taylor Frankie Paul is debuting as the new Bachelorette in March.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

POV: You wake up, turn off the alarm on your phone (powered by Beast Mobile). You check the balance of your MrBeast bank account and take a bite of a MrBeast beef stick. This could soon be a reality, with Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson’s newly announced business ventures.

This week Donaldson spoke at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit to unveil his plans for his holding company, Beast Industries, currently valued at $5.2 billion. 

Donaldson and MrBeast CEO, Jeff Housenbold, outlined a three-pronged business structure →

Media. The brand will continue to invest in MrBeast’s YouTube and social channels, BeastGames Amazon show, and Beast Animation. Content currently makes up half of Beast Industries revenue, according to Housenbold.

Consumer Products & Services. Beyond Feastables, Lunchly, and MrBeast Labs toys, MrBeast is expanding into telecoms with Beast Mobile, plus a financial services platform.

Creator Marketing. MrBeast is launching a global marketplace to match creators with marketers to work together on brand deals.

The goal is for these verticals to introduce more revenue diversity into Beast Industries.

“[The business] is over-indexed [on me] at the moment [...] I hope people like me, but it’s not fundamentally why we get 200 million views every video,” Donaldson said. “It’s because we do these crazy concepts that are more replicatable, so that’s why we’re working on building out other channels and other IP.”

Looking ahead: With a multi-billion dollar valuation, Housenbold said an IPO may be in Beast’s future. “At some point, we want to be able to give the 1.4 billion unique people around the world who have watched Jimmy’s content the last 90 days a chance to be owners of the company,” Housenbold said.

Hi, it’s Hannah. As someone who writes a newsletter and reads many of them (an occupational vice), this week I attended the five-year anniversary breakfast for one of the stalwarts of the creator space: ICYMI, written by journalist and social strategist Lia Haberman. 

A highlight of the morning was a conversation Haberman hosted with MacKenzie Kassab, the creator behind Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty newsletter, Rare Beauty Secrets. 

Some context: The weekly Substack launched in April, joining the wave of branded newsletters from American Eagle, The RealReal, and Nike. 

I wanted to know: how are these newsletters holding up? Kassab shared Rare’s POV →

She said the newsletter is for reaching the existing Substack reader and providing a place for Rare fans to go deeper with the brand.

Worth noting: Kassab is Rare’s director of creative strategy, and is only able to spend about 10% of her time on the newsletter. She calls Rare Beauty Secrets an experiment and hopes to increase its frequency.

Kassab’s perspective made me think of a sentiment I’ve heard a lot about recently—brands are entertainment. Brands are media companies, Gymnasium founder Adam Faze says. Reporter Derek Thompson asserts that everything is television now. Is that the same for text-based media? 

With the decline of legacy lifestyle magazines, I wonder if newsletters like Rare Beauty Secrets, if invested in, could become the next generation’s Allure and Vanity Fair magazine. But in a world of conversion KPIs, proving that newsletters are worth investing in may be a tough sell for brands.

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Vaibhav and Sorabh Munjal, the creators behind the Indian pop culture show Chalchitra Talks, relaunched its second YouTube channel for narrative projects: Chalchitra Originals.

Their first project? A feature film, Scenes from a Situationship, premiering for free December 24.

“People are a little upset, angry and exhausted by just a certain few platforms having all the power to decide the future,” Vaibhav told us. 

His goal with the new channel is to create a more equitable platform for Indian creators looking to distribute their films on YouTube.

“A film is made to be seen by as many people as possible, and there’s one medium we truly understand that allows that: YouTube,” Vaibhav said on Instagram.

Big picture: Just as Hollywood is converging with the creator economy in America, India is experiencing the same shift. Bollywood actor Aamir Khan released a movie on YouTube—bypassing streamers altogether. And creators like Ashish Chanchlani are creating long-form series on YouTube (the first episode gaining 20 million views in a week).

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