Creator Economy
By Isabelle Sarraf Supported by Deloitte
Hello!
More videos created with the help of AI tools are circulating online. In one of the latest examples, a commercial for an imaginary pizza chain created by a video producer with the handle Pizza Later garnered more than half a million views across YouTube, Reddit and Twitter. The anonymous producer used a bevy of AI tools, including OpenAI's GPT-4 technology for the script, Midjourney to generate images, and Runway's Gen-2 software to make the video clips. The creation took just three hours, the producer said in a tweet.
Now add one more AI tool developer to the mix. Aug X Labs, a two-year-old startup, on Tuesday launched Augie, an AI assistant for custom video creation and editing. Users can upload text, narration or audio clips and Augie analyzes the context behind them to create a video that matches the words in a script created by a human or AI, according to co-founder and CEO Jeremy Toeman. It uses OpenAI's GPT-3 large machine-learning model to power the software.
There are a bunch of startups in the video AI field already. Notably, Descript sells a tool that helps producers edit audio and video by changing a text transcript. Runway can churn out videos by analyzing a user's text prompt. Augie, unlike Midjourney or Runway, doesn't use AI to create new images or videos, but rather to pair the scripts, commercially available images and users' uploaded videos to create professional-quality videos, Toeman said. (For more creator startups that use artificial intelligence in their products, check out our Creator Economy Database.)
"We don't consider ourselves generative video," he clarified. "Our job is to sit adjacent to those technologies and incorporate them into the product."
The tool uses paid and free videos and images from Getty's Unsplash library, Pexels, Meta Platforms' Giphy, Microsoft's Bing search engine and Stable Diffusion search engine Lexica.
Toeman, a former vice president of product management for WarnerMedia, got the idea for the product that would become Augie when he attempted to make a narrated video trailer for his podcast. He started taking self-paced tutorials on video editing, but said he "spent hours pounding [his] head against the wall" trying to navigate professional video creation tools.
Augie has some features similar to popular video editing software like Adobe's Premiere Pro and the newer ByteDance-owned app CapCut, Toeman said. The software is not meant to supplant video editors, but rather trim the amount of time creators spend on storyboarding, matching visual content to scripts and creating a rough cut of their videos, he said.
Augie is free for individuals, nonprofits and educational institutions. The free product includes an Augie watermark on exported videos. Its pro tier for small and medium businesses and creators costs $40 a month, with no watermark on videos. Augie's enterprise tier for companies, which includes collaborative features, costs $95 per user per month.
The company, which has nine employees, raised a $1 million pre-seed round in October by investors that include Untappd.VC, Crosscut Ventures Scout Fund and individual angel investors, at an $8 million valuation, according to the company. Prior to the launch, Toeman said there were 6,000 individuals on Augie's waiting list, with about 1,000 users who have tried the product before its public launch.
"There's still an insatiable demand for video content," Toeman said. People are asking themselves, "why is my teenager on TikTok more prolific than the average marketing team at professional video?"
Here's what else is going on…
See The Information's Creator Economy Database for an exclusive list of private companies and their investors.
TikTok is opening up the latest version of its creator fund in the U.S., which includes a new rewards formula that offers creators a higher average gross revenue for qualified video views and an updated dashboard with insights on video performance and estimated revenue. Creators must have at least 10,000 followers and 100,000 views in the last 30 days to qualify. Tiktok says content needs to be "original, high-quality" and longer than one minute to be eligible for monetization under the new program, according to a Wednesday announcement. The Information reported details about the new fund in February, prior to the company's initial testing of the program with some creators.
Separately, TikTok announced a new feature ahead of its NewFronts presentation on Thursday, called Pulse Premiere, which allows some publishers like Condé Nast and Buzzfeed to sell advertisements alongside their posts and take a 50% cut of the revenue.
ByteDance, the China-based company that owns TikTok, is getting rid of the free tier of its music streaming service Resso, which is available in India, Indonesia and Brazil. The app, an alternative to Spotify, will be a paid-for-only service starting May 11, the company announced on Wednesday. A Resso subscription in Brazil costs $3.35 a month, which is cheaper than the equivalent Spotify subscription, while in India it costs $1.45 a month on iOS, the same price as Spotify.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk threatened to transfer NPR's main account on the app under the @NPR handle to another company in a series of emails sent to a reporter, NPR reported on Tuesday. NPR said it would stop posting to Twitter last month after Musk falsely labeled the news organization's account as state-controlled. The labels have since been removed, but NPR hasn't resumed posting to Twitter.
Lemon8, the ByteDance-owned app pitched as Instagram meets Pinterest, is falling lower on Apple's App Store charts, an indicator of recent popularity and number of downloads. Lemon8 got a lot of buzz a month ago when it soared to the No. 10 spot for free apps and charted ahead of other social media apps like Snapchat and Twitter. It's fallen to No. 74 in the lifestyle charts and is no longer in the top 200 free apps.
Fandom, the entertainment website and wiki hosting service for online communities, announced on Wednesday the launch of quarterly workshops for top website contributors. The workshops will teach Fandom creators how to curate and promote their content on social media, among other content marketing skills, the company said.
Firework, the live shopping platform, launched on Wednesday a generative AI-based live shopping tool that allows customers to use an in-video chat function to ask the AI assistant questions about featured products or services.
Duetti, a music financing platform funded by former Tidal and Apple Music executives, announced a $32 million funding round on Wednesday from Viola Ventures and Viola Credit, Roc Nation, Untitled and Presight Capital. Duetti enables artists to sell master catalogs and individual tracks.
Pocket.watch, an entertainment company that helps turn YouTube stars into multi-platform franchises, announced its original series, "Love, Diana," is now streaming on Hulu. The show stars kids from the third most-viewed YouTube channel, Kids Diana Show.
Substack added new customization tools on Tuesday that allow its newsletter writers to include custom fonts, a magazine-style layout to their homepage and tags to organize their writing. The publisher also updated its dashboard for newsletter creators to share statistics about paid subscriber retention and the growth rate of paid subscriptions.
Pietra, an e-commerce startup that allows creators to launch their own product line or brand, announced on Tuesday it closed a $16 million Series A extension led by M13. CEO Ronak Trivedi told TechCrunch the recent round boosted the company's valuation 30%, which The Information's Creator Economy Database last reported was $75 million.
BlueSky, the decentralized alternative to Twitter backed by Jack Dorsey, is receiving a flush of new interest, according to TechCrunch. The Twitter clone has been installed globally 375,000 times on iOS devices as of last week, according to estimates from app intelligence company Data.ai.
Reddit announced new features on Tuesday for its app on iOS and Android devices, including the ability to share Reddit content directly to other social networks like Instagram and Twitter. The company is also making it easier to share Reddit links on messaging apps like iMessage, giving a more visual preview of content shared in texts via a link.
Stream Elements, a startup providing tools for livestreamers, announced on Tuesday the recipients of its annual Creator Diversity Program, which provides Twitch streamers from underrepresented communities promotion and funds for their channels.
ICYMI: Spotify-owned audiobook creation service Findaway Voices is no longer taking a 20% cut of royalties for books sold on its DIY Voices platform if the sales were made on Spotify, the company announced on Monday. The move to cut audiobook fees could draw more indie authors who publish their audiobooks on Amazon's Audible, which pays authors a 40% cut. Spotify bought Findaway Voices for $123 million last summer ahead of the launch of its audiobook vertical in September.
Sidemen, the seven-member British YouTube channel who post vlogs and challenge videos, signed a multi-million pound video licensing deal with U.K.-based funding partners Viewture, which funds YouTube creators based on their advertising revenue, according to a Viewture press release.
• Opinion: The Writers' Strike, DVDs and the Death of Free Money (The Information)
• At Instagram's Favorite Hotel, the Other Guests Are Part of the Draw (The Wall Street Journal)
• For Bluesky to Thrive, It Needs Sex Workers and Black Twitter (TechCrunch)
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Kaya Yurieff brings you everything you need to know about the booming creator economy, from the platforms to the people to the deals.
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Isabelle Sarraf is an editorial fellow at The Information based in New York City. Contact her at isabelle@theinformation.com or follow her on Twitter at @isabellesarraf.
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