The show with the $5m prize

This week we have 5 stories including YouTube stars crossing into other platforms, Reddit’s IPO, reasons to be optimistic about ad spend, and a very neat way to reuse packaging.??

Mr Beast goes to Amazon?

Mr Beast - aka YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson - has just announced a deal to bring a game show format to Amazon Prime Video, and be shown in 240 countries.? Donaldson has 250m subscribers to his YouTube channel, and regularly does ‘challenge’ films, for example re-creating the games from Squid Game in real life.? Netflix went on to make a live action Squid Game last year, but Donaldson’s show will trump that - in prize money at least - when it launches.? Few details have been released, but it will have 1,000 contestants competing for a $5m prize, and is likely to have all sorts of satellite content on YouTube and elsewhere.? This is the most high profile deal yet for a YouTuber to make ‘professional’ content - although you could also include Jake Paul’s boxing deal with Netflix - and it shows how online celebrities are moving to bigger screens.

Reddit’s IPO outperformed?

Reddit went public yesterday - 19 years after founding - and saw the price of its shares rise nearly 50% in first day trading.? A bit like X, Reddit punches above its weight in influence.? It has about 70m daily users, but those users are often the most obsessed people on any particular topic; and there is probably a dedicated forum to almost any topic you can imagine.? Future monetisation will be fascinating - they will have to share more data now that they have gone public - and while ad spend is likely to rise, what might be more interesting is how it monetises through commerce.? If it can get the experience right you would think that many of its communities would also be great places to sell.??

Reasons to be optimistic about ad spend

A new report from Mediaocean, from a survey of 1,085 people across the marketing industry, shows respondents expecting to increase or maintain their spending on many channels including social, display, connected TV, search and retail media, with only a few expecting decreases.? It also shows more respondents seeing brand advertising as critical than in previous waves - up from 36% in October 2022 to 47% in November 2023 - although to be fair performance has also risen in the same period (respondents could select multiple options).? It also asks about current uses of generative AI, with data analysis and market research coming out top.??

The 14 page report should be easy to download here?

Threads enters ‘the fediverse’?

Yesterday Meta announced that users of their Threads service in the US, Canada and Japan, would be able to opt into ‘the fediverse’ - essentially a way of linking different social networks together (a bit like being able to read Tweets in Facebook, as an analogy).? What this means in practical terms for those who opt in, is their their posts on Treads could be seen by users on other services like Mastodon, who will be able to find the Threads profile and like, repost and share the posts with multiple audiences.? It is very early days, but potentially makes social media a lot more open and interoperable, a bit like how anyone can email anyone else, no matter what software they use.? It could also mean that at some point in the future users - and brands - could decide to have one main profile, which could be seen across multiple services.??

& finally - Maria Kondo for Barilla?

A clever partnership for Global Recycling Day earlier this week: tidying guru Maria Kondo demonstrates how to fold up clothing sold on resale platforms using pasta boxes as packaging rather than buying new boxes to send items in.? Very neat.??

Feedback appreciated - more stories next week.