Good morning. Rosalía may have tipped Taylor Swift’s crown (for a week, at least). The Spanish singer’s new project Lux was the most played album on Spotify during its release week, temporarily dethroning Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl.

The Swifties may have already reclaimed her throne, but this was definitely a win for a multi-language operatic pop album.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

In just 11 months, lifestyle creator Shelby Church grew her podcast, Step by Step, from zero to 15K downloads an episode, making over $1,400 an episode. But now she’s walking away. Here’s why. 

“It’s not bad for the first year of a side project,” Church said in a video. “At the same time, I do question if it’s worth my time.”

Podcast snapshot, 11 months in:

$25-30 → CPM (cost advertisers paid per 1K downloads) 

$12,998 → amount made from ad reads over 33 episodes

$4,868 → Amount made from YouTube AdSense  

“You can see how this scales and you can make a lot of money from podcasts,” Church said. For example, if a creator does 4-7 ad reads per episode at a $25 CPM with 50K downloads per episode, they can make up to $25K per month. 

But to get to 50K downloads per episode? Church found that it takes a lot of promotion. And her content goals deviated from what her audience wanted. FYI: Church’s other revenue comes from main channel videos, vlogs, and real estate.

“It’s not simple to make a good teaser. And what people wanted to see from me isn’t what I wanted to make. I also started to run out of episode ideas. I never want to be making content because I feel like I have to be making it,” Church said.

Zoom out: Church—like The Try Guys, who recently ended their podcast after six years—articulates a complex reality for creators with podcasts these days: It’s getting harder to sustain these shows as simple side projects. As video podcasts grow in prominence, advertisers have been holding creator spend to better suss out what success looks like across media. With that, big shows like The Diary of a CEO and Joe Rogan get bigger, while podcast side projects become less convincing to time-strapped creators.

The creators behind Pop the Balloon or Find Love—Arlette Amuli and Bolia Matundu—just met their match: Luv Or Pop, a dating app to help their fans find love.

The download: Amuli is approaching the two-year anniversary of her YouTube dating series Pop the Balloon or Find Love, which includes 80 episodes, over 265 million views, and a Netflix adaptation. The series even inspired a copycat dating app of the same name.

Luv Or Pop will include common dating app features like chatting and matching, but with a twist—some contestants from the show will be featured on it.  

Amuli and Matundu are not the first creators to dabble in the dating scene—Jubilee’s Nectar dating app uses a Meyers-Briggs-type personality test to find user’s “loveprint,” and Poppies Studios’ relationship card game is designed to test players’ connection to their partner.

Big picture: Dating apps like Hinge have become subject to scrutiny by Gen Z and Millennials—this year, 69% of dating apps downloaded were deleted within a month. Creators like Amuli, who has gained strong audience engagement in the last year, want to improve the user experience, both on the app and on YouTube.

Which creator would you trust to make a dating app? Hit reply and let us know, and Syd will swipe right (accept) or left (reject) on your idea.

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YouTube and Facebook still reign as the most-used social platforms in the US, but TikTok and Reddit are on the rise, according to a new study by Pew Research Center.

Here are the highlights from its annual survey of the top social platforms among US adults:

Of the 5,000 survey respondents, social media use was roughly the same as last year. YouTube is still the most commonly used social platform among US adults, at 84%.

Worth noting: YouTube and Facebook were the only platforms resonating with users over 65. No other platforms reach more than 20% of senior citizens. Could appealing to an older demo be the key to market saturation?