| If you're finding value in our Creator Economy newsletter, I encourage you to consider subscribing to The Information. It contains exclusive reporting on the most important stories in tech. Save up to $250 on your first year of access. Hello! It's time for internet companies to report their quarterly results. One takeaway so far? While digital advertising is still most important for Snapchat and YouTube, subscription revenue is driving growth. Here's the rundown: Snap The company's subscription service, Snapchat+, now has 12 million subscribers, up from 11 million subscribers last quarter and more than double the same time last year. Even though subscriptions represent a relatively small amount of money for Snap, they are helping boost the company's overall revenue growth in a meaningful way. To understand that, Snap's advertising revenue rose 10% to $1.25 billion but the company was able to report an overall revenue increase of 15% to $1.37 billion thanks to non-advertising revenue of $123 million, most of which comes from Snapchat+. Snap has found success with the $3.99-a-month service despite some problems. My colleague Erin Woo wrote a great piece in January that explained the appeal of Snapchat+, including a controversial feature that shows users how their friends ranked them. Snap later turned the feature off by default, citing concerns over user wellbeing. As competition from TikTok intensifies, Snap's user growth in the U.S. is still a nagging problem. While the number of people using Snapchat around the world grew this quarter, North American users have flatlined at about 100 million. Meanwhile, Snap has been making a big push to get more creators using Snap's app and its in-development augmented reality glasses. It said the number of creators posting Snapchat content increased 50% from last year, as of the third quarter. Snap has also done a major redesign to simplify the app, which it plans to roll out as early as the first quarter. (Ten million users are currently testing it, the company said.) CEO Evan Spiegel pointed to the redesign when asked about how Snap plans to improve its ad business. Snap stock jumped 10% after hours, helped by a new $500 million share buyback plan. YouTube Google reported that YouTube's revenue from ads and subscriptions over the past four quarters crossed $50 billion for the first time, making YouTube bigger than Netflix by revenue, helped by features that make it easier for people to watch in living rooms. For the quarter, YouTube ad revenue gained 12% to $8.9 billion, a slight slowdown from the second quarter. As YouTube concentrates on getting more people to watch the service on big screens, it's introducing new options for creators to organize their content into seasons, like traditional TV. It's also trying to make it less awkward to watch Shorts, its TikTok equivalent, on TV screens. Some 70% of channels uploading to YouTube each month are uploading Shorts, executives said. (See our recent newsletter on YouTube's TV efforts.) Here's what else is going on… See The Information's Creator Economy Database for an exclusive list of private companies and their investors. Universal Music Group has partnered with AI music startup Klay Vision on a foundational model for AI-generated music. "Building generative AI music models ethically and fully respectful of copyright, as well as name and likeness rights, will dramatically lessen the threat to human creators," the companies said. Instagram has been reducing the quality of videos on the app when they receive low numbers of views, The Information reports. Justin Flom, a popular YouTube Shorts creator with more than 20 million followers, has launched Flo-Magic, a spray-paint kit available at Walmart. Netflix has created a new feature called "Moments" that allows viewers to share clips from shows to their social media accounts. Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok parent company ByteDance, is now China's richest person, Reuters reports. "We will not allow guests to be demeaned or for the line of civility to be crossed." CNN banned conservative commentator Ryan Girdusky from the network after he made an offensive remark to fellow guest Mehdi Hasan. Dhar Mann, Matt Rife and Alex Cooper are among the creators who made Forbes' top creators of 2024 list. The 50 creators on the list earned almost $720 million over the last 12 months, according to Forbes. A Washington Post analysis found the top political accounts on X have not been getting much attention from audiences in the months leading up to the election. Of the posts that did go viral, almost all of them were from Republicans, the analysis showed. Presidential candidate Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump, once a champion of her father's political ambitions, has been notably absent from his 2024 campaign. Ivanka declined to be interviewed for a New York Times piece on the subject, and instead asked husband Jared Kusher to comment. Asked what the chances were that Ivanka might join her father in the final stretch of his campaign, Kushner responded: "zero." 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 | 
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