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Trump Gives TikTok and Oracle Deal His ‘Blessing'
Gen Z Is Turning to TikTok as Go-To Search Engine, Claims Google
Kristin Snyder
Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
TikTok has already dominated the social media landscape. Now, its users are helping it become a search engine.
While at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference, Google Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan said internal research indicates that users aged 18 to 24 are forgoing Google Search or Maps and instead sending their inquiries to social media sites. Despite growing concern about misinformation on such platforms, TechCrunch reported that TikTok and Instagram are now steering attention away from the core feature that launched the company into notoriety.
“We keep learning, over and over again, that new internet users don’t have the expectations and the mindset that we have become accustomed to,” Raghavan said at the conference.
Google, for its part, wants to highlight TikTok and Instagram videos in its search engine. Additionally, Raghavan said the search engine is incorporating more visuals while also leaning into voice searches.
As TikTok users film their meals and often add short, quippy reviews, Raghavan said Gen Z is turning to social media apps for their next lunch spot. Many TikTok users turn to influencers for food suggestions, with Los Angeles restaurants like The Red Chickz and Paris Tokyo gaining notoriety on the app.
Users often check the app for a wide range of recommendations. Raghavan’s statements confirm that TikTok users are turning to the video-sharing app for information. Videos under the hashtag for facts, hacks and recommendations, #tiktoktaughtme, have gained a cumulative 8 billion views.
Influencers on TikTok, however, often do not accurately disclose when a video includes sponsored content, as required by the Federal Trade Commission. And marketing companies have shifted to incorporate ideologies, like Urban Legend, an ad-tech startup that recruits social media celebrities from macro to nano to create content around everything from climate change to discouraging mask mandates. Urban Legend’s strategy draws on the idea that users who turn to influencers for recipe recommendations or fashion trends may also trust their opinion on political issues—even if many of the posts were not flagged as sponsored.
TikTok has also come under fire for misinformation—from the potentially harmful abortion tips to international elections to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the app has been criticized for not doing enough to combat it. Google has also been criticized for how its algorithm can highlight misinformation, such as suggesting “fake” abortion clinics.
With TikTok’s growing popularity, Google must contend with how to capture Gen Z’s attention as they try to retain that audience. And TikTok, for all its problems, has helped communities come together to inform people about topics ranging from autism diagnoses for women to astrological terms to LGBTQ+ information. Suggestions get local, too, with Los Angeles residents sharing free things to do downtown, vintage stores to shop at and museums to visit—succinctly providing recommendations with flashy videos.
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Kristin Snyder
Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
https://twitter.com/ksnyder_db
Spotter Raises $200 Million To License YouTubers’ Old Videos
05:46 PM | February 16, 2022
Photo by Wachiwit/ Shutterstock
Bruce Springsteen and Sting are not the only artists these days making millions of dollars from their content catalogs: YouTube stars are monetizing their libraries, too.
Since launching in 2019, Los Angeles-based startup Spotter has spent $350 million to license YouTubers’ back catalogs—providing creators with cash up front in exchange for their videos’ advertising revenues. But whereas musicians like Springsteen and Sting have cashed in on their catalogs as an exit strategy, YouTube creators can use Spotter to get the money they need to further grow their brands. And if they succeed, that only makes Spotter’s investment in them even more valuable.
“If we can give creators money that's on an accelerated basis, that's enough to be game-changing at whatever part of their journey they're in,” Spotter founder and CEO Aaron DeBevoise told dot.LA. “They're going to win at such a big level that everyone's gonna win.”
On Wednesday, Spotter announced a $200 million Series D funding round, led by investment giant SoftBank, that values the firm at $1.7 billion. (The company had previously raised $555 million across three previous, undisclosed funding rounds, it said.) In addition to Softbank, Spotter's investors include Access Industries, CoVenture, Crossbeam Venture Partners, GPS Investment Partners and HighPost Capital.
Spotter founder and CEO Aaron DeBevoise.
The company is hardly alone in making a huge bet on the creator economy. Brands are expected to spend $15 billion on influencer marketing this year, according to research from CB Insights. Tech giants and startups alike are spending prolifically to lure creators, ramping up payouts or letting them put content behind a paywall. That jockeying comes as creators with massive followings look for a bigger slice of the revenue pie.
Spotter contends that its model gives YouTubers a way to capitalize on their work quickly without adding debt or losing equity. The startup licenses the advertising revenue rights to creators’ previous uploads for a usual duration of around five years; Spotter has paid creators anywhere from $15,000 to $40 million for their ad rights, according to DeBevoise, who noted that the average deal is worth about $1.5 million.
The idea of YouTube catalogs as lucrative assets has quickly gained ground. Last month, creator economy company JellySmack announced it would spend $500 million on licensing YouTubers’ libraries.
Spotter has already struck deals with some of YouTube’s biggest creators including MrBeast, Dude Perfect, Like Nastya, Aphmau, and Smokin' & Grillin' wit AB. The company said it has licensed hundreds of thousands of videos that generate more than 40 billion viewing minutes per month.
“If these videos that [creators have] created over time are predictable enough to finance, they can really scale and grow their brands a lot more than the current monetization offerings allow them to do,” DeBevoise said of the idea behind his business.
YouTube star MrBeast, for example, used the capital he received from Spotter to fund his Spanish-language YouTube channel. According to Spotter, MrBeast—whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson—has increased his total viewership by roughly 300%, to 1.35 billion monthly views, since its funding allowed him to expand his content’s language offerings.
“The cost of dubbing is expensive and the revenue on YouTube is delayed—you don't get it instantly,” Donaldson said in a statement. “By partnering with Spotter, I was able to keep dubbing videos and uploading.”
Spotter plans to use its new funding to buy more rights to YouTube videos. The company expects to invest another $650 million on back catalogs over the next 18 months, taking its total spent to $1 billion.
Early on, DeBevoise said Spotter had to overcome concerns from some creators who thought they would be giving up all of their monthly ad revenues; in turn, the company would note it had data showing that most ad revenue comes from new uploads. Spotter now wants to enhance its data analytics offerings to give creators insight into the value of their libraries and ideas on how to improve performance.
“Before it was really ‘Hey, can we get people to believe that this transaction is a good economic deal?’” DeBevoise said. “Now it's, ‘How do we move from being thought of as a transaction to a partnership?’”
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Christian Hetrick
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
CrowdStrike CEO Says He Regrets Not Firing People Quicker
03:10 PM | March 04, 2020
Ben Bergman/dot.LA
George Kurtz, co-founder and CEO of the cloud-native endpoint security platform CrowdStrike, says executives should be obsessed with culture. Everyone below him must be fanatical about customer success and outcome and if they aren't fitting in, they need to go quickly. It's one of the biggest lessons he's learned as CEO.
"Not one time have I regretted firing someone too fast," Kurtz told a lunchtime crowd at the first day of the Montgomery Summit in Santa Monica. "It's that I waited too long."
Kurtz founded the company in Sunnyvale, CA, in 2011 and it went public last year. He was joined on a panel by John Chambers, the former executive chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, who said he bought 180 companies during his tenure. But he did not acquire a company that was not a very close cultural fit.
"I walked on one of the bigger acquisitions we were going to do," Chambers said. "Culture is as important as strategy and vision and I did not understand that when I was a young CEO."
Chambers said he was proud of Cisco's 95% employee retention rate when he was CEO, which is well above the industry average. He oversaw a rigorous hiring process to make sure candidates were right.
"If you're not interviewing through 10 people, you're not doing the screening process properly," Chambers said.
If an executive wanted to jump to a competitor, he would try to find out what was at the root of someone's unhappiness. The number one factor: Dissatisfaction with their immediate supervisor.
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Ben Bergman
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.
https://twitter.com/thebenbergman
ben@dot.la
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