Good morning. Now that it’s October, I’m officially brainstorming my niche, creator-inspired Halloween costumes.

Because in a sea of Nikkis from Obsession, I want to be the weird business professional lady from Backrooms with 17 fingers.

— Syd Cohen

Today’s lineup:

It’s fall, y’all—and the winds of change are bringing new creators and formats to YouTube, while saying goodbye to old ones. Let’s drink a metaphorical pumpkin spice latte together and go over the latest →

Hello to:

Goodbye to:

Who did we miss? What old creator format would you like to see make a comeback? Hit reply and let us know.

Hi everyone, it’s Samir. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the show: music creator Jack Coyne stops people on the street, plays them a song through headphones, and offers $5 if they can name the artist. Track Star now pulls almost 3M views a day with guests like Olivia Rodrigo, Kamala Harris, and Dakota Fanning.

This year, former Rolling Stone CEO Gus Wenner made a seven-figure investment in Coyne’s media company Public Opinion. We sat down with them to find out how this 15-year overnight success happened. It came down to testing and iterating.

Test. Public Opinion's first show was NYC street trivia. One video got 10M views on TikTok because a guest named Chinatown as a borough. "We went viral for the wrong reasons," Coyne said. 

They also found that only two in 10 people would stop to play. So they switched to music, since everyone has an opinion about a song. "First episode. This is a hit show."

Iterate. After that, every new format came from something that happened on set. Ed Sheeran showed up with a guitar, so they started in-studio performances. Street interviews ran 45 minutes, so they posted them as long-form YouTube. More artists were asking to come on, so they started a podcast. Each step grew out of the one before it.

Scale, carefully. Wenner’s investment is paying for a sales lead, an app, a live show, and new hosts, including Coyne’s former colleague Lou Foglia. We asked Wenner how he plans on helping scale without falling to the same fate as the Buzzfeeds and the Vices of the world. His answer was too many media companies raised "too much money too quickly" and lost what made them work.

Legacy media was built around big bets with a plan worked out in advance. Creator-led media works more like a lab: run small experiments, watch what the audience actually responds to, and build on what works. 

"The point is to make great videos and tell great stories," Coyne said. "That has always been the point."

Check out the full episode here.

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Last week at Made on YouTube, the platform’s yearly product launch event, the company unveiled new livestream features like auto-dubbing and co-stream matchmaking.

The standout feature? ‘React live,’ which allows creators to select eligible long-form videos to play on their stream. 

How it works:

How we see it: In the wake of YouTube raising monetization thresholds, this opens the door for more creators to earn while livestreaming—since they have a wider library of content at their disposal. However, the new feature could also incentivize streamers to react without adding substantial commentary.

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