| 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! Ann here. TikTok Shop, the short-form video app's e-commerce platform, made a big splash nearly two years ago when it first launched in the U.S. Even though it's reduced the initial deep discounts for shoppers and sellers, quieting some of the initial buzz over the service, some startups are still betting TikTok's social shopping features will grow. One is Conduit Commerce, which is coming out of stealth this week and recently acquired the software startup Wally, according to Conduit's co-founder and CEO Rohan Shah. Wally creates storefronts that retailers and creators can use to sell products within TikTok's app, rather than having shoppers navigate to their websites. Conduit's strategy and the deal haven't previously been reported. Conduit, which has raised seed funding from investors including Susa Ventures, First Round Capital, Box Group and Night Ventures, aims to help distributors that have historically sold their products in bulk to brick-and-mortar retailers to start listing and selling their products online to individual consumers. Conduit connects warehouse management software and other inventory tools with software like Shopify's, as well as other apps such as TikTok. Shah says there's an opportunity for the startup because many warehouses rely on older tech called electronic data interchange, or EDI, which makes it difficult to share information with retailers about products and inventory levels. Conduit, in contrast, uses application programming interfaces that makes it easier to connect the warehouses' data to retailers' websites or electronic storefronts like TikTok. "They're really good at keeping tabs on inventory, but they're not good at exposing that data to third parties or taking in orders from different sources of demand," Shah said of the wholesalers and distributors that are Conduit's clients. Conduit has already facilitated more than $500 million in sales through its software, Shah said. The company works with distributors like Universal Music Group and Alliance Entertainment, a wholesale seller of vinyl records, DVDs and video games. Shah said that several existing Conduit customers had been asking for ways to sell products on TikTok, as well as ways to tap in to the affiliate and influencer marketing tools TikTok has that can help products quickly go viral. Expanding onto TikTok will allow Conduit to expand its clients to include wholesalers selling products ranging from Korean beauty products to pickleball equipment to small electronics and gaming accessories, Shah said. Wally's founders and employees will serve as advisers to Conduit, Shah said. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. "There are all of these shops and stores on Main Street which have one of two options. They either continue with their existing business model and probably get competed out, right? Or they change with the times and adapt," he said. Here's what else is going on… See The Information's Creator Economy Database for an exclusive list of private companies and their investors. TikTok is requiring starting Sept. 1 that brands that want to advertise their products on TikTok Shop will have to use a tool called GMV Max, Business Insider reported. GMV Max is an AI-powered tool that takes into account a brand's budget and the items they want to promote and automatically decides what ads to use to maximize return on the ad spending, but some ad buyers are reluctant to hand over control to an algorithm, the report said. Instagram is making it possible for users to link a series of Reels short videos, which it says will help creators organize their content and link related posts together. The feature is similar to TikTok's playlist feature. The Wall Street Journal is hiring a "talent coach" to help the newspaper's journalists develop skills and strategies in "content creation and audience engagement" and to build their personal brands. Caitlin Covington, known for the "Christian Girl Autumn" meme based on her fall-themed social media posts, drummed up interest for her annual fall trip and photoshoot this week. Covington first told fans that she wouldn't be able to post fall videos this year, saying she felt "a lot of pressure to make each video better than the last." Less than a day later, she said she was just kidding. "Plot twist: I would NEVER cancel fall," she wrote on TikTok on Wednesday. Jake Paul will box Gervonta "Tank" Davis in a November match that will be streamed on Netflix, ESPN reported. Eddie Renard has become the first chief operating officer at Whalar Group, a holding company for businesses that include creator management, a gaming studio and software for talent managers called Foam. Previously, Renard was the company's president of people and operations. A former Meta Platforms employee alleged in a U.K. court filing that the social media giant misled advertisers and may have circumvented Apple's privacy rules. To burnish the performance of its ads, Meta included costs like shipping fees and taxes as part of the revenue Meta told companies they earned as a result of ads, according to the complaint. The complaint also alleged that Meta used personal data like emails, phone numbers and IP addresses to link activity on Meta's apps to activity on other websites, which could have violated Apple's privacy restrictions. A Meta spokesperson said the allegations are "without merit." 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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