Video game distributor Steam is officially done with NFTs.

Word of its doneness comes from the developers of Age of Rust, a forthcoming mecha sci-fi game that revolves around players buying out-of-game NFTs to unlock missions where they will collect in-game NFTs.

“A few minutes ago, we were notified that @Steam will be kicking *all blockchain games* off the platform, including Age of Rust, because NFTs have value,” the Age of Rust team tweeted this afternoon. “Behind the scenes, we’ve had good communication and have been upfront with Steam.”

According to the devs, “Steam’s point of view is that items have value and they don’t allow items that can have real-world value on their platform.”

Fair enough, but it’s also worth noting that whether or not NFTs actually have legitimate real-world value (and will hold on to that nebulous value down the road) is a hot topic of debate.

Attached to Age of Rust’s tweet was a screenshot of Steam’s newly updated terms and conditions, which now explicitly ban “Applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs.”

At this point, we will put our energy back into gamedev, creating more NFTs, & empowering the community than try to fight Steam alone. We will continue to publish our @madewithunity game elsewhere. We are moving forward, we NFTs, we @enjin, and our community. Onward!
4/4 pic.twitter.com/HoTYp4EogL

— Age of Rust (@SpacePirate_io) October 14, 2021

As The Verge points out, the new ban is not currently reflected across Steam’s swathe of legal notices and documents; though it’s on the distributor’s Rules and Guidelines page under “What you shouldn’t publish on Steam,” it’s not yet on the page that lists requirements for developers who want to sell their games on Steam.

Tubefilter has reached out to Valve, the video game developer/publisher that operates Steam, for comment on its decision. We’ll update this story with any new information.

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One year ago, YouTube debuted the first public version of its TikTok copycat, Shorts. Between then and now, the platform expanded Shorts to all YouTube users around the globe, launched a $100 million fund to pay some of the users making content for it, and saw the average number of daily first-time creators uploading videos to Shorts more than double.

So, what has it learned?

In a “one year of Shorts” wrap-up posted today, YouTube said the past twelve months has taught it to focus on three key aspects of development: “building a creation experience that empowers anyone to create and find an audience; refining our viewer experience to make sure we’re helping people find Shorts that they’ll love and discover new creators; and determining more ways we can reward creators for the Shorts they make that delight the YouTube community.”

“Reward,” of course, refers to monetization–understandably a topic of concern for creators, especially those who’ve been raking in hundreds of millions or even billions of views a months with their Shorts content, all without compensation.

Kevin Ferguson, YouTube’s director of global operations and partnerships for Shorts, told Variety that the $100 million Shorts Fund “is the first-stop solution” for monetizing Shorts content.

“We are working on a long-term business model,” he said. “We are lightly testing ad formats right now.”

In its wrap-up post, YouTube said it plans to “[bring] together past, present, and emerging paths to monetization.” It also said that since launching the Shorts Fund, it has “invited thousands of creators to receive a payment.”

YouTube has not disclosed exactly how much it pays creators, but it has said they can earn between $100 and $10,000 monthly. The amount is based on the engagement their Shorts generate. (And Shorts are getting a lot of engagement: Collectively, Shorts videos generate more than 15 billion views per day, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during Alphabet‘s latest quarterly report.)

It’s worth noting that YouTube treats monetization eligibility for Shorts completely differently than monetization for long-form content.

With long-form content, creators have to be part of the YouTube Partner Program to earn revenue from the ads run on their videos. Shorts creators, however, can get a slice of the fund without being in YPP–and without partaking in all the strings and/or benefits that come with the program, including having more direct contact with YouTube staff for help with any issues.

That might change in the future, though.

“We are dealing with the next generation of mobile creators,” Ferguson told Variety. “We are figuring out how we partner-manage these folks.”

YouTube highlighted a handful of fast-growing creators in its one-year look-back, including DankScole and Katie Feeney, two of the folks we here at Tubefilter have featured in our Creators on the Rise series.

The wrap-up also ran down a list of more things that could change for Shorts in the future, including more separation between Shorts content and long-form content; updates to Shorts’ audio picker so creators will be able to search music genres or bookmark sounds they like; a “new, more precise text timeline editor”; and allowing users to pluck more sounds from long-form YouTube videos that they can then remix and include in their Shorts.

You can read the full wrap-up here.

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TikTok model and activist Amelie Zilber has landed a new roundtable talk show at Facebook Watch, following a growing line of TikTokers launching longer-form ventures on the social network in collaboration with digital studio Brat.

Don’t @ Me, bowing on Oct. 21, will see Zilber sit down with a panel of Gen Z activists — including Vanessa Pena, Zahra, and Taylor Cassidy — to discuss the biggest issues facing today’s youth. Each of the 11 episodes will touch on a different topic — from voter registration to racial discrimination to climate change. Panelists will also delve into their personal experiences and answer questions via DM.

Don’t @ Me, directed by Fay Robles, will air across Facebook’s family of apps, including Instagram and Messenger‘s Watch Together tool.

Nineteen-year-old Zilber has more than 10 million followers across social media — including 7 million on TikTok alone. Zilber also writes an eight-year-old weekly newsletter titled Two Minute Times, has collaborated with myriad voting nonprofits, worked with the Biden-Harris campaign, and serves as a youth ambassador for UNICEF.

Brat, the Gen Z-focused digital studio behind Chicken Girls, has raised over $45 million in venture funding and says it is on track to clock $35 million in revenues this year. Brat operates a pact with Facebook Watch to produce a dozen creator-driven series, including Random Acts Of Magic with SeanDoesMagic and The Shluv Family.

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The Beatles are back.

On TikTok, that is.

“Nearly 60 years after scoring their first-ever number one hit, The Beatles hold a special place in the hearts of music listeners across the globe,” the platform wrote in a company blog post. “This #Rocktober, we are thrilled to announce that the Fab Four have officially joined TikTok, bringing dozens of their most-beloved songs with them.”

Thanks to a deal with record labels Apple Corps Ltd./Capitol/UMe, TikTok has added 36 of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr’s songs to its sound library, which means creators will be able to use them in videos.

Also part of the deal is a Beatles TikTok account (@TheBeatles) that will have behind-the-scenes footage from the recording sessions of Let It Be, the foursome’s final studio album, along with “deep dives into the creation of individual songs, featuring interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr,” per TikTok.

Among the songs now available to TikTokers include “Get Back,” “Across the Universe,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “I Me Mine,” “The Long and Winding Road,” “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and the iconic “Hey Jude.”

@thebeatlesThe Beatles. Now on TikTok. ##TheBeatles ##LetItBe♬ Get Back – 2021 Mix – The Beatles

The Beatles’ arrival on TikTok kicks off the aforementioned #Rocktober, the platform’s monthlong celebration of contemporary rock artists sharing their music on TikTok, “and the towering figures that paved the way for them,” TikTok says.

While this is the first time the Beatles’ music has come (officially) to TikTok, the band’s members have had individual presences on the platform. TikTok brought in Lennon’s solo catalog in October 2020, McCartney’s in December 2020, Starr’s in July 2021, and Harrison’s in August 2021.

And Lennon and Harrison aren’t the only late stars to have places on TikTok courtesy of deals with their record labels or estates. Frank Sinatra, Prince, Whitney Houston, and George Michael all have accounts that share footage from their lives and the music they made.

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YouTube has provided a rare window into its in-house creator partnerships team, which works one-on-one with thousands of top creators to offer production advice as well as guidance in maximizing ads, brand deals, and other monetization prospects.

The team has been in the works for a decade, reports The Wall Street Journal, which turned a spotlight on the relationship between veteran creator Adande ‘Swoozie’ Thorne (7.6 million subscribers) and his manager, Audrey Eatherly. All told, YouTube has 1,000 creator partnerships managers across 45 countries who counsel resident stars, and it’s looking to hire more. (YouTube has roughly 10,000 employees in total). Each manager has a portfolio of about 10 to 20 creators, enabling the team to advise about 12,000 creators, according to the Journal.

“We’re texting with them at all days, all hours,” Jamie Byrne, YouTube’s senior director of creator partnerships, told the outlet. “We have a close connection.”

Thorne, for his part, was first given a partnerships manager in 2011, after he’d reached roughly 100,000 subscribers. At the time, he was concurrently offered a $3,500 gift card to purchase a new camera.

He began working with Eatherly, who handles top creator partnerships, in 2016, after he’d amassed 4 million subscribers. She subsequently helped land Thorne a six-figure deal that saw him host the YouTube Original design competition show Lace Up, and then hooked him up with a $100,000 grant to improve his channel operations. He used these funds to hire animators — including a Disney vet. When Thorne hit 7 million subscribers, Eatherly sent him his favorite meal, Fettuccine Alfredo from The Olive Garden — a testament to their bespoke connection.

Thorne told the Journal that his relationship with Eatherly was so productive that it led him to part ways with his talent agency, CAA. (While talent agencies typically take a cut of the deals that they help broker, the Journal notes, YouTube does not).

The Journal notes that while other platforms have similar teams dedicated to creators, they pale in comparison to the scale of YouTube’s. TikTok has dozens of strategists, for instance, while Instagram similarly has roughly 40 staffers dedicated to emerging talent.

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Addison ‘Rae’ Easterling joked late last night that it was “time to get a job” after her account was permanently banned due to “multiple violations” of TikTok’s Community Guidelines, per a screenshot shared to Twitter.

However, as of this morning, Easterling’s account was back up and running as normal. We’ve reached out to TikTok to see what happened, and will update this post with any additional information.

Notwithstanding the temporary blip, Easterling has done a stellar job of finding work outside of her flagship TikTok hub, which counts 85 million followers.

In addition to signing a multi-picture deal with Netflix following the success of her first film, the gender-swapped He’s All That reboot, Rae also forayed into music with the release of her debut single, “Obsessed,” in March. She also hosts a Spotify-exclusive podcast titled That Was Fun?, and is the proprietor of a cosmetics brand called Item Beauty.

Well time to get a job pic.twitter.com/BJ4xDyFfko

— Addison Rae (@whoisaddison) October 15, 2021

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Welcome to YouTube Millionaires, where we profile channels that have recently crossed the one million subscriber mark. There are channels crossing this threshold every week, and each creator has a story to tell about YouTube success. Read previous installments here.

“Something old, something new” might be a weddingtime adage, but for Ben De Almeida, it’s working out just fine as a content strategy.

De Almeida, aka BENOFTHEWEEK, is 22–and, like most of Gen Z, he grew up watching YouTube. He was ten years old when he started uploading his own content, and 13 when he launched the channel that’s still his today. All that video-watching had “marinaded” him in the YouTube trends of the early 2010s, he says, so by the time he was ready to commit to being a content creator himself, he had a well of ideas ready to go.

That being said, it’s probably not surprising that a lot of De Almeida’s content-making happens on Omegle. For those who haven’t had the…experience, shall we say, of using it, Omegle is an anonymous text and video chat platform that randomly matches total strangers for conversations about anything and everything. It was founded in 2009 and has since been used for great and terrible things. (All joking aside, though, it has struggled with child safety issues.)

For De Almeida, Omegle is a double hit of nostalgia + the rest of his brand, which largely consists of prank calls, “hacking” Zoom meetings, and surprising people in general with high-octane antics. In the last year or so, De Almeida has taken to Omegle to terrorize people with his dog, terrorize people with jumpscares, (maybe?) meet a BTS member, and ask strangers for sausages.

Blending these attention-grabbing content concepts with oldies like Omegle (and teasing the videos on his TikTok account) has helped De Almeida’s channel grow from around 890,000 subscribers at the start of 2021 to, now, nearly 1.8 million.

Check out our chat with him below.

Tubefilter: How does it feel to hit one million subscribers? What do you have to say to your fans?

Ben De Almeida: It’s a crazy feeling. I’d always see my favorite YouTubers get to this point and wonder what would be going through their head. It’s super surreal, but a sort of validation for all the things that got me here. And by that, I mean anyone who’s ever supported me in any shape or form. They are 100% the people that I owe everything to.

Tubefilter: Tell us about you! Where are you from? What did you get up to before you started making digital content?

BDA: I’m from all over, but I started making videos when I was 10 and living in this little town in Canada. I genuinely didn’t have any other friends or hobbies (other than a LOT of Minecraft) so I just poured all my time into it.

Tubefilter: You launched your YouTube channel waaay way back in 2013, and have been uploading content pretty regularly for the past two years. But we see you’ve had some massive growth in views and subscribers in 2021. What happened that made your channel take off?

BDA: I actually had a less refined channel from 2010-2013 too! The content on there was about what you can expect from a 10-year-old. with unsupervised internet access. Starting TikTok in 2018 gave my channel a little bump in audience numbers, but it was 2020 where I learned to convert my TikTok audience to YouTube by giving little bites of videos on TikTok so people would check out the full YouTube video.

Tubefilter: How do you come up with ideas for videos? Do you keep an eye on what’s trending on YouTube? Do you ever take suggestions from viewers?

BDA: I feel like my brain has marinaded in a decade of YouTube trends, so I’ve learned that trends and challenges that were big in the early 2010s can be re-appropriated to make for an entertaining video in today’s age! It’s like thrifting for ideas.

Tubefilter: You balance making content for TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. How often do you film/edit/etcetera for each platform? How do you manage your time? Walk us through the average day.

BDA: I can’t pretend like it’s easy or I’ve struck any type of balance. At least once a month, I’ll realize I’ve found myself a bit in over my head with the amount of content I have planned for the week. I do everything end to end from planning to filming to editing (minus my podcast, which I get help editing for). It’s a lot, but I’m constantly trying ways to finally strike a good time balance between everything.

Tubefilter: Do you have any strategies for growing your audience? Have you noticed any particular kind of content getting more traction than others? Do you adjust what you film depending on how your viewers react?

BDA: I find it super important to know who you are and what you bring to the table in terms of your content. The first eight years of me posting on YouTube I would just make whatever clickbait possible, thinking that’s what would bring people in. But I promise you that method gets you nowhere. Listening to what types of videos my subscribers want to see is crucial.

@benoftheweekI AM INNOCENT Stream the new series ##OneOfUsIsLying on @peacocktv ##partner♬ original sound – ben de almeida

Tubefilter: How do you make your videos stand out amidst all the noise on YouTube?

BDA: I really try and think, what do people genuinely want to see? What are things that people would laugh at that no one has really tried out?

Tubefilter: What’s your favorite part of making content?

BDA: Knowing that there’s at least someone out there who watches my video and has their day made from it. There’s been lots of creators throughout the years that have been that person for me, so knowing that my videos can have that effect is amazing.

Tubefilter: What’s next for you and your channel? Any plans looking to the future?

BDA: I have a lot of big ideas that I’ve been held back from executing due to the pandemic, but I am gearing up to bring them to life. A few other things for me, too, but I’m not sure if I can talk about them just yet!

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YouTube’s crackdown on misinformation about the 2020 U.S. presidential election had positive ripple effects on Twitter and Facebook, according to new research.

In November 2020, after early election results indicated Joe Biden would beat then-incumbent Donald Trump, accusations of vote tampering swarmed social media. Conspiracists spread claims that Democrat poll workers and mail-in voting handlers had dumped or changed Republican votes, or simply added fake Biden ballots, particularly in key states.

When Biden’s win was more firmly predicted by major news organizations, the accusations redoubled, and proponents resorted to claiming that Trump had won the election no matter what the vote counts said.

All of these claims at first spread largely unchecked on YouTube. The platform had touted its election misinformation policies, holding them up as efforts to “better support” democracy. But in the days following the election, it said its policies focused on suppressing content that misleads people about the mechanics of voting–things like polling dates and locations, and voter registration info. Lies about vote tampering weren’t covered, and neither were claims that one candidate had won when they really hadn’t.

Less than a month later, YouTube backpedaled, deciding that hey, those things maybe were serious election misinformation and deserved to be similarly banned.

That’s when things started to change on other platforms.

The amount of misinformation spread on Twitter and Facebook dwindled with each new YouTube policy

A study by the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University found that on Dec. 8, the day YouTube finally banned election conspiracies, the amount of YouTube content used to spread conspiracies on Twitter “dropped sharply,” as The New York Times reports.

Before that date, around 30% of all election-related videos shared on Twitter were clips about election fraud that came straight from YouTube. Among the top-shared channels were Project Veritas, Right Side Broadcasting Network, and One America News Network.

By Dec. 21, less than 20% of election fraud claims on Twitter involved YouTube videos. And by Jan. 20–after YouTube’s Jan. 7 pronouncement that it would give a Community Guidelines strike to any channels that endorsed election misinformation–less than 5% was from YouTube.

That decrease didn’t only happen on Twitter. NYU’s study also showed that before YouTube cracked down on misinformation, 18% of all videos shared on Facebook contained election fraud. By Jan. 7, that figure was down to 4%.

As the Times lays out, NYU conducted this study by collecting a random sample of 10% of all tweets and Facebook posts each day. From that 10%, they isolated tweets/posts that contained YouTube links, and looked into whether the videos shared contained election misinformation.

Megan Brown, an NYU research scientist who worked on the study, told the Times that it’s possible YouTube’s crackdown simply eliminated many videos that would’ve been used to spread conspiracies on other platforms; however, it’s also important to note that interest in election misinformation might have dropped in December and January as Biden’s win became more and more concrete.

Overall, the study indicates “these platforms are deeply interconnected,” Brown said, and YouTube is “a huge part of the information ecosystem, so when YouTube’s platform becomes healthier, others do as well.”

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UTA has signed fashion influencer Marcel Floruss, whose mission is to help men tap into their sense of style, according to the talent agency.

Floruss is a blogger and vlogger, who counts 920,000 YouTube subscribers and 500,000 followers on Instagram. He will work with UTA globally in every facet of his career, including endorsements and other digital ventures.

Floruss launched his One Dapper Street blog and Instagram account in 2013, and subsequently launched his very own footwear brand, Ankari Floruss, in 2016. In 2017, he made the leap over to YouTube. Floruss was named to Forbes’ ’30 Under 30′ list last year, and has also strutted his stuff as on the runways of Milan Fashion Week.

Prior to launching his career as an influencer, Floruss was a model signed to New York Model Management. He graduated from FIT with a degree in fashion merchandising management.

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HyperX, the gaming gear division of computer giant HP, has onboarded Bella Poarch as brand ambassador.

Poarch, who is the fourth most-followed TikTok creator with 84 million followers and a burgeoning music career, will star in ads debuting later this fall for the Quadcast S microphone. The ads will touch on Poarch’s love for gaming, music, and streaming. As part of the partnership, the 24-year-old will also be receiving free gaming headsets, keyboards, mice, mousepads, and microphones — and exclusively use this gear in any ensuing content.

“I’m loving the opportunity to bring my style and passion for life and music to the HyperX family,” Poarch said in a statement. “I bring my love for people to be happy and healthy in everything they do and look forward to sharing this with HyperX fans, family, and community.”

Starring alongside Poarch in the forthcoming microphone campaign are streamer YouTube streamer and esports commentator HungryBox, FaZe Clan founder FaZe Temperrr and member FaZe Faxuty, and basketballer Semi Ojeleya.

Other HyperX brand ambassadors include footballer JuJu Smith-Schuster, basketball players Gordon Hayward and Ariel Powers, tennis player Daniil Medvedev, ice hockey star Filip Forsberg, soccer pro Dele Alli, professional race car driver Sage Karam, and skateboarder Minna Stess.

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In TikTok’s latest Community Guidelines Enforcement Report, the platform said that it removed nearly 82 million videos between April and June 2021 for violating its guidelines and/or terms of service.

That is less than 1% of the total videos uploaded to TikTok within those three months, Eric Han, TikTok’s head of U.S. safety, said in a company writeup of the report.

“Of those videos, we identified and removed 93.0% within 24 hours of being posted and 94.1% before a user reported them. 87.5% of removed content had zero views, which is an improvement since our last report (81.8%),” Han added.

More than 40% of the 81,518,334 videos TikTok removed were taken down due to violations of its very broad “minor safety” policy, which umbrellas everything from “harmful activities by minors” (aka underage drinking, smoking, or illegal drug-doing, plus dangerous pranks and stunts) to “grooming behavior” committed by adult users to nudity and sex.

Another 20.9% of videos were removed for “illegal activities and regulated goods,” 14% were removed for adult nudity and sex, 7.7% were removed for violent and graphic content, and 6.8% were removed for harassment and bullying.

In the report, TikTok noted that it’s rolling out automatic moderating tech that detects and removes “some categories of violative content.” Out of the 81,518,334 videos TikTok took down between April and June, 16,957,950 of them were removed by this tech.

Also worth mentioning are the 8,542,037 videos TikTok removed for fake activity and/or being posted by spam accounts. The platform’s report specifically mentions that it is working to “evolve and adapt our safeguards by investing in automated defenses to detect, block, and remove inauthentic accounts and engagement.”

As a result, the aforementioned videos were taken down, and TikTok additionally: stopped 148,759,987 fake accounts from being created; prevented 632,416,873 follow requests from fake accounts; terminated 71,935,583 fake accounts that successfully followed other users; prevented a whopping 9,612,942,242 likes from spam accounts; and “corrected” a further 91,812,066 fake likes that’d already been left on videos.

On top of removing violative user-generated content, TikTok rejected 1,829,219 advertisements for violating policies and guidelines, it said.

TikTok’s now letting livestream creators mute individual commenters

Han’s writeup revealed that TikTok is introducing an expanded anti-harassment featuring today. With this update, livestreamers (or their approved moderators) will be able to select individual commenters to mute for a few seconds, a few minutes, or the entire duration of the live stream.

Han also pointed out that TikTok says it’s continuing to crack down on antisemitism.

“As participants to the Malmö International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism, today we’re proud to reaffirm our commitment to combat antisemitic content on TikTok by continuing to strengthen our policies and enforcement actions,” he said. “We also want to keep expanding our work with NGOs and civil society groups so they can harness the power of TikTok to share their knowledge with new audiences, and direct our community to educational resources so they can learn about the Holocaust and modern-day antisemitism.”

You can read TikTok’s full report here.

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Nineteen-year-old digital comedy brand Smosh, co-founded by YouTube OGs Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla (who left the company in 2017), has hired its first chief executive.

In a bid to grow its reach into traditional media, Smosh has tapped Daniel Tibbets, who most recently served as GM of the famed director Robert Rodriguez’s El Rey streaming platform, Deadline reports. Under Tibbets’ tutelage, Smosh will explore TV, live events, audio, publishing, and physical and digital games. Smosh is also moving into a new production studio space in Burbank in coming weeks.

Tibbets will report directly to Mythical co-founders Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal, per Deadline. Mythical, the parent company of the hit YouTube series Good Mythical Morning, acquired Smosh in Feb. 2019 for a reported $10 million. Prior to that, Smosh had been in something of a state of limbo, following the abrupt — and scandal-ridden — shutdown of parent company Defy Media in November 2018.

“Sixteen years of work in internet content, leading Smosh through so many changes in the digital business, has taught me a lot about what it takes to be a lasting brand on the internet,” Hecox said in a statement. “Daniel is just the person we need to take us into the future, and I can’t wait to see what we can do together, in digital and beyond.”

Prior to El Rey, Tibbets served as chief content officer for (now-defunct) gaming network Machinima, SVP of digital media for Bunim-Murray, and VP of production at 20th Television.

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