Midweek Creator News Roundup: New Creator Companies Raise Money & New Hires
Three new companies raise money from well-known investors
Welcome to the The Midweek Creator Roundup!
This is the Wednesday edition of Creator’s Digest mainly focused on news. On Sundays, I write a deep dive on a single creator. I’ve written about Emma Chamberlain, a TikTok talking dog named Bunny and Liza Koshy just to name a few.
My goal with this newsletter is:
to keep you informed with the latest news
to tell you the origin stories of certain creators
For the latest, follow me on Twitter below and share the digest with a friend!
With that, let’s just jump into today’s roundup!
Today’s edition features our typical new hires in the creator economy, Dispo’s Series A investors, some new creator changes from Instagram and a breakdown of arguably the biggest boxing match in history, the Logan Paul vs. Floyd Mayweather fight over the weekend.
New Hires Across the Creator Economy
Clubhouse hires head of streaming technology
Welcome Justin Uberti to Clubhouse! Justin previously worked at Google as a software engineer for 15+ years specifically on Stadia, the company’s cloud-gaming product. A streaming industry veteran, Justin adds more expertise and a broad streaming network to the audio-only app. As Clubhouse's user base expands worldwide (they’ve currently started doing more international onboarding such as a Japan Town Hall and a German townhall, streaming will get ever more important for the startup.
Snap adds two hires for partnerships
Varhshini Satish (left) joins Snap to be senior associate of talent partnerships while Sam Corrao Clanon (right) joins Snap as the director of content focusing on Snap Spotlight, the short-form video feature. Satish comes from TikTok where she was an early member on the partnerships team there, her role there identified and nurtured some of TikTok’s top creators, built partnerships and accelerated content. Corrao Clanon hails from TikTok as well where he was the lead for content strategy and insights. Prior to that, he worked as the director of strategic initiatives at Group Nine Media, launching the company’s first DTC business.
Now onto the latest news
Dispo announced its Series A investors
Dispo, the company led by Daniel Liss that took the world by storm a few months ago has now disclosed their Series A of investors. It’s a who who in the zoo type of list that includes Seven Seven Six, Unshackled Ventures, Endeavor, 35 Ventures, and F9 Strategies. Specifically, CEO Dan Liss called out Alexis Ohanian (Founding Partner), Katelin Holloway (Founding Partner), Lissie Garvin (Chief of Staff) and the broader Seven Seven Six team for their investment & partnership. They also led the round. You can read more about the investment news here at Dan Liss’ substack post called Dispo 2.0.
There are also some notable names there as well including Kevin Durant (35 Ventures), actresses Cara Delevigne & Sofia Vergara and Andre Iguodala (F9 Ventures) that were a part of the Series A investment round.
Furthermore, as can be seen from the photo above (PS shoutout to Ella Priya, featured center bottom row for organizing this amazing denim theme and getting everyone onboard), the Dispo team has doubled since launching on Testflight just a few months ago. The company is still in its early stages but the stage is set for success.
Instagram unveils new features for creators
Yesterday, Instagram launched its first ever “Creator Week”, a three day virtual event linking some of the top creators on Instagram with people that work at Instagram.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg went live to talk about three upcoming tests and features:
Testing affliate-marketing tools
More tools for creators to sell their own merch
Incentives
First, affiliate-marketing tools will integrate where users can tap on the post and see view products. Those links will take users directly to marketplace thru Instagram’s checkout feature, thus letting users shop directly thru Instagram. Affiliates will get a paid of portion of that once they have set things up and it enables users to complete the whole sales funnel from awareness & ads all the way to checkout & fulfillment directly thru Instagram.
Second, more tools for creator merch. Merchandise has dominated Creator Web 2.0. Many creators launch merchandise either thru their own fulfillment centers or partner with companies like FanJoy on quick designs. Sometimes these partnerships happen in record time as well. If you watched the build up for the fight this past Sunday, you probably couldn’t miss the Gotcha Hat moment by Jake Paul. What you might not know is just an hour after the moment, merch by Paul and team was already available for purchase. Subsequently, Paul was banned from the arena for the fight (he’d later be unbanned) but him and his team were very quick to the punch.
Instagram is allowing creators with their own products to link their shop in their personal profile thus driving more traffic from their fans. Creators will be able to setup their own shops and promote drops on IG later this year.
Third, incentives. This one is fairly nascient, but the idea is around the concept of “milestones” for Badges for IG live & Stars on Facebook. These features will allow fans to pay creators and creators can earn bonuses for meeting those milestones.
Wrapping things up for “Creator Week”, Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram a very lengthy post on the latest information on how they structure your feed algorithmically and serve you up relevant content. Go give it a read here.
Now the main event, The Logan Paul vs. Floyd Mayweather Fight
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve seen some of the breakdowns from this fight. The fight itself was fairly boring (no one won or got knocked out), but this is a milestone for three main reasons.
First, let’s take a look at the brands involved. You couldn’t see a single shot that didn’t have a brand featured prominently. Here’s a list of all the brands I saw featured during the fight and I might have missed a few too:
Some of these brands are relatively unknowns to the new viewer. Companies like Superbid, betonline, blockfolio are all getting a lot of eyeballs by being featured prominently during the fight - however, the question remains as to whether that actually converts into dollars.
At the end of the day, a brand can spend a ton of money on driving awareness, I’m sure some of these brands paid $1M+ dollars to be featured so prominently but is there a good ROI on that investment into a one-time event.
Another interesting area is how much both fighters got paid. There’s been some speculation around this and there will probably be more speculation. The numbers are staggering but what we will probably never get is an itemized list of who paid who how much. And frankly, that’s no fun. Anyway, here’s what we know and then my breakdown is again speculation.
Numbers wise, Mayweather has said he made $30M just from sponsorships on his shorts alone. The pre-fight deal was reported to be $250K guaranteed for Logan Paul, $10M guaranteed for Floyd Mayweather and 10% and 50% of the PPV for Paul & Mayweather respectively according to the New York Times.
Keep in mind that is just the fight payment from the coordinators of the fight, that has nothing to do with sponsorships, pre-fight promo, post-fight documentary promotional material, in arena sales, and merch sales.
I wrote a Twitter thread with a highly conservative estimate of the breakdown. Disclaimer: just speculation.
Here’s a bit of it below (click thru the tweets to read the rest):
Takeaways
1) Both Logan Paul & Floyd Mayweather won the fight at the end of the day. The only losers were the people who actually paid for the Pay Per View stream. Reportedly, the stream itself crashed a few time as well.
2) This is a legacy win for Logan Paul and potentially a minute legacy loss for Floyd Mayweather. Logan Paul now is the only person to draw Floyd Mayweather, his “record” is now 50-1-0 instead of 50-0. That said, there’s an argument to be made that this was an exhibition and thus he’s still 50-0, sure.
Floyd on the other hand may get more critics saying this is a legacy loss for him. Others may say it tarnishes the sport of boxing but if you think of Floyd as the best boxer of all-time, his job as an athlete is to uplift the sport and make it less about himself. If he suffers a bit of a legacy loss by saying “Logan is a great young fighter. He’s better than I thought he was”, then sure. But in my eyes, that’s a great move by someone who has mastered the sport and recognizes talent like no other.
There are literally millions of boxers worldwide who work their whole careers to get this type of authentic endorsement from an all-time great and that alone is a legacy win for Logan.
3) The wave of boxing interest that spurred from the fight.
Google trend search for boxing, Floyd, and Logan spiked like crazy over the weekend. People wanted to learn more about the fight, where to stream it and many people are now looking to get into boxing. Some for the money, some for the sport.
See that blip right there on June 6th? That’s the day of the fight where the search popularity for Floyd Mayweather was at 100, meaning it was one of the most popular searches worldwide for that hour. Right below that was Logan Paul at 79 for worldwide searches and the term boxing itself at 5. The spike is huge for the sport and it’s only going to increase over time as more fights get scheduled.
Personally, I think this crossover is great for boxing. It’s important to get your sport relevant in the eyes of the next generation and the best way to do that is to find people who are respecting the sport, the game and uplift them in any way possible to drive more attention to the game.
That’s it! Thanks for reading and if you have any feedback, feel free to comment below or respond via email to this. I love to hear from readers.
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