Open Up

Happy Friday Publish Press readers. I just finished up a cross-country move that included 30+ hours of driving, seven states, and fifteen different podcasts. After all that I think I’ve finally found my new favorite show of the summer: Dissect from Spotify. The pod breaks down the story and theory behind albums like Yeezus and Lemonade one track at a time. Highly recommend checking out the Frank Ocean episodes. — Max Lowenthal

→ Demystifying YouTube’s Shorts Fund

→ The company addressing the pay gap for creators

→ Why TikTok is coming to a flight near you

YouTube finally dropped the deets for their $100 million Shorts fund. The fund will run till the end of 2022 and pay creators a monthly bonus depending on views and the country of origin of their viewers.

While watermarked content from 3rd party platforms (cough cough TikTok) won’t be able to be monetized, any creator who has posted original Shorts on YouTube is eligible to cash in, whether they’re partnered on the platform or not. The qualifications are more accessible than TikTok, which requires creators to have a minimum of 10,000 followers and 100,000 views to get in on the action. Even before they could monetize, creators were seeing massive growth on YouTube thanks to Shorts. Mainstays like MrBeast and Minecraft YouTuber Dream have already launched secondary channels dedicated to the format, and new creators like Milad Mirg and Dental Digest are using Shorts to grow their follower base by millions of subscribers. By The Numbers 

Creator funds can come and go, but YouTube is special because it pays creators a reliable and consistent source of income. With short-form content being easy to make, easy to watch, and easy to distribute, expect YouTube to pioneer new ways outside of its creator fund to let users make a living by making Shorts.

According to creator marketing platform, Klear, women creators earn an average of $128 less than their male counterparts for sponsored posts. It’s exactly those types of inequities that led to the launch of F**k You Pay Me (FYPM), a Glassdoor-esque creator platform that pulls back the curtain on creator brand deals for platforms like Clubhouse, Twitter, and YouTube. 

The company lets creators leave reviews of brands they’ve worked with - sharing details like advertising budgets, negotiating tips, and advice on how to work with some of the biggest names in the industry. While creators have to submit a review of their own to gain access to the platform, the site’s founders told the New York Times that they’ve already gathered over 2,000 reviews spanning 1,300 brands from nearly 1,500 creators.

It's easy to forget that the creator economy is still growing and that each of us can have an impact on how it operates. In order to not repeat the same mistakes as Hollywood, companies like FYPM are working to bring some much-needed fairness to the world of entertainment.

Apparently, I'm not the only person who mindlessly scrolls on my phone while flying. Earlier this week American Airlines announced a new, limited-time promotion with TikTok to let passengers download and use the app while flying. The promo, which is only available on certain planes and maxes out after 30 minutes of use, is the latest in a string of partnerships for TikTok that has included ecommerce, competitive hacking, and a soccer team owned by the guys from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Why stop at 30 minutes of use? We’d use TikTok for an entire flight if we could.