Good morning. TikTok just released its inaugural BookTok Best Seller list, including titles like Heated Rivalry and A Court of Thorns and Roses. Lena Dunham’s new memoir, Famesick, was suspiciously nowhere to be found, but we’ll be monitoring the situation closely.

P.S. Our first partner announcement for Press Publish LA is coming later this week. Stay tuned.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Today’s lineup:

Ready to laugh in a six-second loop? Vine, the social app that popularized six second videos in the early 2010s, is relaunching today as Divine. 

Context: Several comedy creators including Danny Gonzalez, Quen Blackwell, Lele Pons (even our own Syd Cohen) got their start on Vine in 2012, years before TikTok arrived. Twitter acquired the app a few months after its launch, and Vine reached up to 100M monthly active users before shutting down in 2017 due to monetization struggles.

Now Divine is launching as an open source app, with over 500K archived Vine videos and a no-AI policy, enforced through watermarks, staff review, and in-app recording. It was funded by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s $10M non-profit, And Other Stuff. 

We sat down with Divine founder, Evan Henshaw-Plath (who goes by Rabble), to hear its creator-first strategy →

"We wanted to focus on creative constraints," Rabble told us. "[A six-second video] is like a haiku. You have to be very precise—you can’t ramble on." 

Creators are already showing up. Over 150K people signed up on day one of beta, including Vine creators like Meghan McCarthy. Some creators are already closing in on 1,000 videos posted. Rabble told us the leaderboard is running almost 50/50 between new content and archive Vines—meaning the nostalgia and the fresh energy are feeding each other equally.

It’s adapted for today. Vertical video replaced Vine's original square format. Subtitles and text overlays are now built in—because nobody watches with sound on anymore. Curation is open to everyone, not just employees. And creator credit is baked into the protocol, so when a video takes off, the original creator gets the traffic—something Rabble said social apps have often failed at, particularly for Black creators whose work was frequently appropriated without attribution.

Will it work? Rabble said he doesn’t want to sell user data or rely on advertising. Instead, Divine is building its business model around creators: exploring direct links without "link in bio" workarounds and brand deal infrastructure. Each creator gets their own domain.

Rabble said he wants to take an open-communication approach with its creators and include them in development. "Tell us how we should build it together. It only exists because of the creators. That is the whole point of all of this," Rabble said.

For most people, “Open to Work” is a signifier of unemployment, but for UK-based comedy creator Ken Cheng it’s just the opposite. It’s the name of his new scripted interview series, made exclusively for LinkedIn. 

His resume: 

Cheng and Portal A shot four episodes in one day on a budget between $10K–$50K. Jacob Motz, Portal A’s director of original projects, told us they made the show as a mid-length horizontal series (à la YouTube) because there wasn’t much proof of which formats worked for LinkedIn yet. So far, the series has underperformed compared to his other content, but Cheng and Motz are taking it as a note for how to improve next season.

Why him: Cheng said he feels uniquely positioned to make parody content, since he has no personal ties to the corporate world (and no boss on LinkedIn to see his outlandish posts).

“A lot of people are sick of going through the motions and following all the rules that you have to follow if you're on LinkedIn and have to maintain a corporate presence,” Cheng told us. “Well, I don't care about any of that. So I think that's the advantage there.”

Nick DiGiovanni just dethroned Bayashi TV as the most-followed food creator in the world with over 37M subscribers on YouTube alone (and 55M+ across platforms). But the trick isn’t becoming #1—it’s staying there.

“I view it as more of a responsibility than a prize,” DiGiovanni told us over email. “We now set the standard for this space.”

One way he did that: Splitting his content into two channels—food entertainment and food education via Nick’s Kitchen—to serve distinct audiences.

“It allows us to better cater to what our different fans seek in their viewing experience,” DiGiovanni said. In a year, the education channel has grown nearly 4 million subscribers and 600M views.