The Pre-Roll

📸 Nas Academy creates a Creator Community

🏢 WhatsApp launches Communities

📱Facebook shuts down podcast service SoundBites

🎮 Sykkuno joins YouTube Gaming

Nas Academy adds a Creator Community

Meet Nuseir “Nas” Yassin. He has over 50M followers across socials and he’s the biggest Facebook creator in the world. Nas created Nas Daily where he made 1,000 one minute videos in 1,000 days. Read that again. He’s a prolific creator and storyteller. After concluding his 1,000 day journey, he launched nasacademy, an online learning platform for creators to learn skills and become. creators. It’s a place where you pay a course fee to learn from some of the best creators in the world! It’s a great example of a company for creators by a creator.

Well the platform just launched Communities. They started with the tag line “You’re the average of the five people around you” and the creator community that Nas himself will be leading has a threshold of at least 10K followers. You can sign up here if you’re interested.

Being a creator is a mostly solo activity. It can get quite lonely. From editing your videos to thumbnails to coming up with ideas, it’s a daunting endeavor to become a creator. Well like any other hobby, it’s good to seek out a community. A community of people who are also doing what you’re doing and that you can learn and grow from. And who says that community has to be tied to your city or state? The Nas Academy Creator Community is global because creating is global.

WhatsApp launches Communities

You’ve probably been in group chats on WhatsApp - heck you might even have a few chats muted because they go a bit crazy. Well, two weeks ago WhatsApp launched communities - an easy way for you to stay in touch with the communities you care most about. The feature itself is still in beta but the idea is solid.

Communities will allow admins to create pages relating to their group chat or the organizations they run and allow a space for people to learn about resources, engage with others, and get questions answered all without having to leave WhatsApp.

It’s a natural evolution for an app that is based on conversation to launch such a robust Communities integration and now that’s it out - it’s only a matter of time until they fully integrate with commerce. Rumors of a full commerce integration have been floating for awhile now to make it so that everything can be run thru WhatsApp when it comes to community and commerce organization.

Facebook shuts down podcast arm

After just 1 year, Facebook is shutting down it’s podcasting service. Meta as they’re now called launched the service only a year ago in early June 2021 and called it SoundBites. Heard of it? Yeah me neither since last June. Marketing for SoundBites has been pretty bad and now the company is officially changing course.

As of June 3rd, Meta will be shutting down SoundBites. It’ll no longer appear in your feed and will be pulled from the app. The company publicly said “We’re constantly evaluating the features we offer so we can focus on the most meaningful experiences” as per an official spokesperson. That’s basically code for we’re more focused on the metaverse now and not so much on podcasting.

As Meta expands into the metaverse and into more offerings for creators, it’ll be interesting to see how podcasters adapt and use the platform for creation and distribution.

Sykkuno joins YouTube Gaming

If you’re a long time Sykkuno fan, you probably saw this coming. Most of the friends he streams with are on YouTube Gaming so it was only inevitable that he would eventually make the switch. It’s a massive move for YouTube Gaming that is slowly siphoning creators away from Twitch. Many creators are unhappy with how much Twitch takes from the creators and the potential discussion about adding in-video ads has made creators second guess their commitment to the platform.

On the other hand, if you have no idea who Sykkuno is, here’s a quick summary.

Sykkuno is a streamer who mostly streams playing games with his friends including Jack “CouRage” Dunlop, Valkyrae, TimtheTatMan, Toast and many more. He grew his now 4M followers on Twitch (one of the highest on the platform) mainly during the Among Us 2020 craze. He was one of the few streamers that played with Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and taught her how to play the game. That crossover brought a whole new fanbase to Twitch and to streaming as more thousands tuned to see a sitting congress-person play with their favorite creators.

Now Sykkuno will be taking his talents to YouTube Gaming for an undisclosed amount. He’ll be joining the ranks of some of his friends and will most likely launch another venture soon as he continues to stream just on a different platform.