Welcome to the The Midweek Creator Roundup!

This is the Wednesday edition of Creator’s Digest mainly focused on news. This article is 1054 words long and will take you 7 minutes to read or less if you skim.

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The Pre-Roll

🤑 Pinterest hires Chief Content Officer

🏢 FaZe Clan going Public & Michelle Khare launches fitness app

📱Amazon building Clubhouse competitor

🎵Ed Sheeran launching album exclusively on YT Shorts

Pinterest hires first “Chief Content Officer”

Pinterest has hired Malik Ducard as it’s first “Chief Content Officer”. Ducard was previously at YouTube as Head of Content Partnerships for the last decade. Ducard spearheaded multiple projects at YouTube including the $100M YouTube Black Voices fund, the $100M kids and family content fund and the $20M learning fund.

At Pinterest, Ducard will lead the content & creator teams tasked with developing the content and vision for the company into the creator economy and will join the executive team reporting directly to CEO Ben Silbermann.

FaZe Clan is going Public

You’ve probably heard of FaZe Clan if you’ve ever played video games over the last decade. FaZe Clan started in 2010 under the name FaZe Sniping where players would upload clips of their gameplay. The channel grew quickly and reached 1M subscribers by 2012. They began playing in Call of Duty tournaments shortly thereafter and started creating a whole business around their gameplay. In 2014, they created the first shared FaZe home to branch out into lifestyle content to add to their gaming content. In 2017, they moved to LA to startup the Clout House while continuing to build out a full corporation, the team expanded from almost a handful of folks in 2015 to almost 500 employees now and a whole roster of talent partnerships including Lil Yachty, Kyler Murray (quarterback for my hometown Arizona Cardinals), and Lebron “Bronny” James Jr. (Lebron’s son) amongst others. Earlier this year, FaZe was the first eSports team to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Now the company is merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to be listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker FAZE. The company is receiving $291M from B. Riley Principal 150 (the SPAC) and is now valued at $1B billion dollars.

What This Means

In the same way you can invest in the companies behind a product, you can now invest in your favorite creator brands. This is the first creator-led, creator made company that is going public, so we’ll have to see what that means but huge news for FaZe, gamers everywhere and the fans. #FaZeUp

Michelle Khare launches a Fitness App

Michelle Khare is known as the “Girl that does it all” on YouTube from completing the Navy Seal fitness challenge to running a marathon with minimal training to competing in a chess tournament with just a few weeks to prepare. Michelle loves challenges of the body and mind. The whole series is called Challenge Accepted and Michelle takes on various challenges thru out the show. It’s a proper show that is deep into Season 2 - I highly recommend watching it and trying to not be motivated to go outside for a bit. Michelle is now partnering with Playbook, a fitness subscription app company to launch her own fitness app, MKFit.

The app itself is amazing from step-by-step instructions for every exercise to nutrition guides to a Spotify playlist that includes Hamilton to your workout!!

I started my own fitness challenge for myself to workout daily for the next month and I’m using Michelle’s app for my daily workouts. The gym workouts are brutal but I’m two days in and loving it.

Amazon is getting into the Live Audio Game

Amazon is building a new app, codenamed “Project Mic” that gives anyone the ability to make & distribute their own show. You can add music, have co-hosts and see who’s listening live. As the company who owns Audible, Twitch and has a consortium of hardware devices including the Amazon Echo, Fire Tablets, and more - it was only a matter of time before Amazon started working on live audio.

If you remember, before Clubhouse became Clubhouse, it was actually called Talkshow with the intent that you can start up a room and broadcast that audio to the masses. The app quickly pivoted to what it is today as the co-founders, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth realized that having an app where only one room is there is quite boring, but the idea of broadcasting live audio was born.

Amazon’s Edge over Competitors

Unlike other companies like Spotify and Facebook who have made Clubhouse competitor apps, Amazon has quite the edge as they own the hardware, music and talent pool for driving user adoption. They own over 50% of the home smart speaker market with Amazon Echos, signed great talent including “Smartless”, the podcast by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett and also bought the Wondery, a podcast platform that has ad-right share deals with a lot of leading podcasts. And they also own Audible, home of audiobooks. All that makes Amazon a graet candidate to take over the live audio space whenever “Project Mic” launches.

Ed Sheeran launches new album exclusively on YouTube Shorts

For those that don’t know, I’m like the biggest Ed Sheeran fan. Only behind being the #1 Taylor Swift fan.

Ed’s new album “Equals” is set to debut on October 29th in a few days, but he’s snippets of each of the 14 songs exclusively on YouTube Shorts. You can hear 13-30 seconds in each video.

The move is brilliant and a fantastic way to promote the album before the release. It also gives fans a taste of what each song sounds like without actually releasing the album. It also creates organic hype and trends for an insanely low budget.

Nowadays, an album release is great but a lot of the ways that songs go viral is on TikTok or thru dance trends or viral challenges, this is an incredibly well put together campaign that lets fans interact well.

Furthermore, YouTube shorts is on an insane boom. Around a year old, the creators using Shorts has more than doubled and many creators like Milad Mirg (Subway guy) have grown to 1M+ subscribers in just months off of the Shorts feature.

The album release will be 14 songs on Friday, October 29th.

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