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We’re less than a month away from our annual 2025 creator economy event on June 3 at Neuehouse Hollywood! The Future of Influence: What’s Next for Creators, Entertainment and AI will include speakers such as Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, Substack CEO Chris Best and executives from Meta Platforms, Spotify and Coca-Cola. Space is limited and you can buy tickets here. We have set aside a small allocation of free and discounted tickets for creators. If you’re a creator interested in attending, please fill out this form.
Hi! It’s Sylvia reporting from Washington. A central tenet of the government's antitrust case against Meta Platforms is that its 2012 Instagram acquisition crushed competition and left consumers with too few social networking options—just Snapchat, Facebook and a few others. Meta has argued that it actually competes with many more, notably TikTok. To buttress its argument, Instagram head Adam Mosseri on Thursday trotted out statistics to illustrate the seismic shock TikTok made when the app formerly known as Musical.ly hit smartphone users with its short, vertical videos and addictive algorithm. Mosseri pointed to an internal report from September 2019, which showed that Instagram metrics, including how much people were using disappearing “Stories,” had started to plateau. One internal slide shown in court estimated that 40% of Instagram’s year-over-year decline in time spent on the app was “due to TikTok.” The stats had caused deep concern inside Instagram. “For us, growth is everything; you‘re either growing or you’re slowly dying,” Mosseri said in court. Then in 2020, Mosseri wrote to staff: “Time spent has dropped, stories consumption and production have plateaued. Feed’s decline has continued, and time in Explore has been sliding since the summer of 2018,” the note said. Some of that was due to their own mistakes, and some came down to “competition from TikTok and Snapchat.” Earlier in the trial, Meta shared an analysis it had prepared for Meta’s board showing that in 2020, Meta expected to lose so much time spent to TikTok that it translated to billions in revenue shortfall. It’s not a surprise that TikTok’s popularity roiled Instagram. Instagram rolled out its competitor, Reels, in 2020 and many of its growth initiatives over the ensuing years have targeted creators as a way to lure their fans. Both Mosseri and CEO Mark Zuckerberg seem happy to copy other apps’ features if they’re a hit. But the executives are rarely as forthcoming in public comments as they have been when sounding the alarm with their staff or the board. If anyone needed a reminder that this is TikTok’s decade, Thursday’s testimony underscored how much the ByteDance-owned app rattled its U.S. counterparts. Read more on Meta’s antitrust trial here, here and here. Now on to Kaya Yurieff for what else is going on… See The Information’s Creator Economy Database for an exclusive list of private companies and their investors. Subs.com, a new creator startup founded by OnlyFans founder Tim Stokely, launched on Wednesday. Stokely said his new company will help creators with helping them find new audiences and offer more ways to earn money, including charging fans for exclusive content, direct messaging or one-on-one video calls with a creator. Snapchat’s popular Snap Map feature, which shows real-time locations of users and local hotspots, hit 400 million monthly active users. Substack next week will launch audio-only livestreaming for publishers. The newsletter startup also announced other features including new settings around notifications so users can control where and how they get alerts. LTK, a creator-focused shopping app, partnered with Warner Horizon’s The Bachelor franchise to launch a new channel on the app so fans can shop fashion, beauty and home products featured on screen. • Samsung launched Samsung TV Network, or STN, a free ad-supported streaming TV channel with content exclusively on Samsung TV Plus, including with top YouTubers Mark Rober and Dhar Mann (who is speaking at our June 3 creator event!). Samsung is also partnering with Spotify to launch a video podcast channel featuring top shows from The Ringer. • YouTube announced a new hub for creator partnerships for advertisers, which makes it easier for them to search for creators and find sponsored videos. It also launched a new search product called Insights Finder to find relevant creators, among other announcements at its NewFronts presentation on Thursday afternoon. Fizz, a social app focused on anonymous posting and messaging at universities, filed a lawsuit on Thursday against Instacart and online event invite company Partiful for trademark infringement. Earlier this week, Instacart announced a new drinks and snack delivery app called Fizz, which it said Partiful would integrate into its invites for hosts and guests. An Instacart spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. President Trump nominated wellness influencer Casey Means, who is close to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to be surgeon general after withdrawing his initial pick, Fox News medical contributor Janette Nesheiwat. Reece Feldman, a creator behind the “Guy With a Movie Camera” account on TikTok and Instagram, wrote and directed his first short film, which will be shown by a special event hosted by TikTok during the Cannes Film Festival next month. Sam Corrao Clanon is LinkedIn’s new director of product for its creator-focused team. Clanon previously held senior roles at Snap and TikTok. Sahil Lavingia, founder of creator economy startup Gumroad, has been working as an unpaid contractor for the Department of Veterans Affairs, in a role facilitated by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. “I really believe that I can have billions of dollars of positive impact just by being technically minded,” he told FastCompany. Thank you for reading the Creator Economy Newsletter! I’d love your feedback, ideas and tips: kaya@theinformation.com. If you think someone else might enjoy this newsletter, please pass it forward or they can sign up here: https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/creator-economy | 
