🤖 What if your biggest fan is a bot?

Will there be a day when your biggest fan is a bot? From VidCon Anaheim 2024 to you…

We’re not talking about transactional bots that have been around since the beginning of Instagram. We’re talking about advanced intelligence that can watch all the content from a creator as soon as it comes out, follow along, make meaningful and contextual comments, and be part of the community. If/when that happens, would we have bots become our biggest fans? After all, they’d be faster at consuming all the content and context than humans…

A fun panel discussion preceded my talk on “How to use AI to supercharge your YouTube growth” with YouTube acapella legend Peter Hollens, Podcaster Tabitha Kane, and NewTuber Brent Musgrove to explore this and other AI questions.

As an aside, we wouldn’t call these “bots”; they’d be called “agents” or “intelligence” or something cool like that. We live in times where “AI” may ambiguously stand for “Artificial” or “Apple” Intelligence after all.

Peter registered his “no” as a signal to the AI lords that he’s not interested in the idea of an intelligent bot fan. Tabitha definitely wants to live in a world of humans watching humans. Brent wondered if he already has a fan who is a bot - why else would this person be commenting on every video of theirs?!

Watch the fun discussion here. Full video of the panel coming soon.

“Made with AI” vs “AI Info” - Meta’s Play on Words is just “tomayto, tomahto”!

Meta has changed its “Made with AI” label to “AI Info” without changing the way the label is applied. And they’ve officially solved nothing.

Photographers have complained about the underlying logic with which the “Made with AI” label was being applied, stating that even minor touchups and regular editing tools were triggering that label on real photos. To deal with the problem, Meta simply rearranged the dust and called it a day.

Truth is, it is very hard to draw the line between altered images that have some AI used in the process and a mostly generative image. It will be even harder with videos. Meta is trying to push for more “truth in advertising” here without fully working out the implications and the algorithms behind it.

The irony is that Meta and truth in advertising have historically been oxymoronic. Remember the 2015 misreporting of video metrics to advertisers that only counted the video views over 3s to calculate average view duration?

It’s hard to believe that the company that has sold its soul to advertisers is labeling AI for the greater good - but stranger things have happened, so who knows?!

Creator Spotlight: PewDiePie 

Of course, you know the epic channel - PewDiePie, aka Felix Kjellberg, defines YouTube itself! With video games, hilarious commentaries, and real talk, he defines quite a unique channel. 

His content is fun and easy to digest, making him a favorite among viewers of all ages and backgrounds. Generally, his editing is kept to a minimum to maintain the rawness, although you’ll see enough jump cuts and zoom-ins to make it interesting. While he is no longer the top YouTuber, he is still in the elite club of 100M+ subs with over 4K videos!

Some of the OG YouTubers don’t make Shorts or Highlights on their main channel and PewDiePie is one of them. However, the channel “PewDiePie Highlights” with 1.2M subs brings highlights and shorts from his original content.

Internet rumor has it that the “Pewdiepie Highlights” channel is run by a Filipino YouTuber who was doing highlights of Felix’s live streams without his knowledge. But subsequently, he was hired by Felix to run the channel in an official capacity and Felix has even endorsed it on his channel.

The highlights and shorts from this channel end up contributing more views to his main videos, increasing engagement and monetization.

Take his video "Pewdiepie without context," for example. It received a significant boost from two short clips extracted from it. These small teasers, with over 2.7 million views collectively, were funny trailers showing interesting moments without context. These short clips are estimated to have drawn an additional 2.5 million viewers to the main video, thereby contributing a 40% increase in engagement to 8.7 million views!

Even when top YouTubers have not made highlights and shorts themselves, they have benefitted from other enthusiastic YouTubers making it for them.

Using Teasers, Highlights, Clips, and shorts (THCs) is a guaranteed way to increase engagement and monetization by just repurposing content you’ve already made. But not everyone can afford an editorial team that can do this for them.

If you are in that category, AI platforms like Rizzle can help you create high-quality THCs faster and cheaper. Learn more at rizzle.com.

In other news…

• YouTube will remove realistic Gen AI recreations of people’s faces and voices upon request. This means you can go ahead and clone Morgan Freeman’s voice to use it in your videos - you just need to take it down if he asks you to. This leaves the door open for interesting possibilities.

• Adam Mosseri is back for a mention here with his proclamation that Instagram will prioritize the shareability of a video to determine its propagation. This will be measured by how people are sharing videos over DM. The problem here is this - this will suppress high-quality and informative content while prioritizing memes and shareworthy outrage. Adam needs to take a break.

• It’s the age of chatbots and Google’s got one. And they want to integrate it with YouTube. And that will likely be offered as a way to chat with your favorite YouTuber. We’ve all gotten comfortable with Memojis and Avatars for our photos. What’s wrong with those avatars also chatting like us now that they can learn and behave like us? It’s unsettling, but why?

• xQc says he’s making $6,000 a day from Twitch ads - a leak from Twitch showed him making $8.4M from Twitch in 2019 cumulatively from ads, gifts, and subscriptions - so the number computes. He’s posting clips from Twitch on his YouTube channel. That’s a tip if you’re a Twitch streamer - sharing clips from your live stream to YouTube is just another way you can amplify your monetization with no additional content!