Good morning. Today, Taylor Swift will appear on her first podcast—Travis and Jason Kelce’s New Heights—likely to preview her new album, The Life of a Showgirl. 

Now that podcasts are on the table for Swift, we’re crossing our fingers she’ll stop by Las Culturistas and MD Foodie Boyz next.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

In the past two weeks, more than 2,000 people have placed pre-orders for AI education creator Catherine “CatGPT” Goetze’s bluetooth-powered landline phones, Physical Phones.

Hold please: 

Which brings us to now: “I came back from Cannes and I was like ‘I really want to build equity in something,’” Goetze told us, explaining she wanted to move beyond just sponsored posts and begin building a brand outside of herself.

But why landline phones instead of a course, merch, app, or Notion template?

“My goal is for CatGPT to be a place to show what it looks like to use AI to build companies, products, or tools and that’s a large part of what Physical Phones is,” Goetze said. “I could talk about how the creator economy is super important and how it mixes with this world of AI—or I could just go do it.”

So Goetze announced Physical Phones with a prototype she made two years ago. But the overwhelming response from her audience created way more demand than anticipated.

“It’s a technically bloated tool and expensive to make, but I thought it was cool and I was thinking if I posted a video maybe 20 or 30 people would like these, and I could make 20 or 30,” Goetze said. “Then I got 1,000 orders [over two days] and I was like, ‘f*ck I cannot make 1,000 of these.’”

The solution: Goetze took the delay as an opportunity—working with a manufacturer to improve the product and hiring her brother, an ecommerce specialist, to run the store. She aims to get phones (which range from $75–110) shipped by November.

“I want my videos to radicalize people into being the most high-agency version of themselves,” Goetze said. “I get frustrated with the amount of blind hype that goes on in Silicon Valley around tech for tech’s sake, and the very limited human groundedness, and so the analog phone is a part of that.”

Famous Birthdays is making a data play. Media analytics company Pixability and celebrity database Famous Birthdays have announced a partnership to sell internal search traffic data to advertisers. The goal? Sell advertisers the ability to track a creator’s popularity through Famous Birthdays data.

YouTube gets the Nielsen treatment in the UK. Barb (the UK’s media tracking equivalent to Nielsen) will begin including TV viewing of 200 top YouTube channels in its regular audience reporting. With YouTube overtaking streaming services in TV viewing hours, national media research firms are adapting their strategies to bring creator content into the broader entertainment fold.

Reddit takes a stand. In an effort to curb AI companies from using its data, Reddit is blocking the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine from accessing profiles, comments, and individual posts.

“Until they’re able to defend their site and comply with platform policies (e.g., respecting user privacy, re: deleting removed content) we’re limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told The Verge. This comes about a year after Reddit’s partnership with OpenAI to integrate the LLM into the user experience.

Japanese toy company Epoch has dropped its copyright infringement lawsuit against Irish comedy creator Thea von Engelbrechten—aka Sylvanian Drama—after four months.

Let’s back up: Von Engelbrechten began posting her Sylvanian Drama series in 2021, creating soap opera-inspired scenarios with Sylvanian Family figurines (known in the US as Calico Critters). She grew an audience of 3.5 million across TikTok and Instagram before abruptly stopping in December 2024. 

Why? Her series caught the attention of Sylvanian Family manufacturer Epoch, which sued von Engelbrechten in April for copyright infringement and “irreparable damage” to the company’s reputation. On August 8, Epoch dropped the lawsuit, and von Engelbrechten announced plans to change her account name on August 19.

Zoom out: Parody has always been fair game on the internet—and creators including Hassan Khadair and Most Popular Girls in School have never shied away from plucking humor from existing IP. Some fans—see here—have speculated that Epoch’s real gripe with the series was that von Engelbrechten took brand deals from companies while seemingly representing Epoch.

Only three weeks left until we head east for Press Publish NYC…and we’re sold out. Thank you so much to everyone who applied, and to those coming from around the world to join us? Get ready for a phenomenal couple of days. 

If you snagged a ticket but you’re now unable to make it, please let us know—the deadline for refunds is Friday, 8/22. Hoping a spot opens up? Join the waitlist.

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