The New Classic
Featuring a new video series, a big rebrand, and more inclusive photography.
Hey honeys and hustlers,
Let’s kick off this week with some creator economy news! I’m busy preparing for my talk at the Empowered Podcast Conference later this month and catching up on podcast episodes and YouTube videos (editing will be the death of me). We’ve got some new video series and some creative tech company announcements in store. And as always, you can find me and other community members in the chat, so come say hello!
In Readworthy News
Keith Lee has a series with Microsoft
Keith Lee is a popular food TikToker who goes to different cities and reviews food from different Black and African-owned restaurants and food trucks. Sometimes, after a good review a restaurant will receive an outpouring of love and support from the community. Now, we get to revisit those locations with Keith Lee in a new series with Microsoft called “The Reheat” to see how their business has grown. The first episode in the series drops TODAY so check it out!
Netflix buys rights to Sue Bird documentary
Surprise, Surprise. It looks like Netflix does in fact know how to invest in media. They recently purchased “Sue Bird: In the Clutch,” marking the first time the documentary will be available on a streaming service. The documentary starts with her first consideration of retiring from the WNBA. Since then, she’s gone on to buy a stake in a major sports team and is collaborating with her fiance, Megan Rapinoe, on a soccer rom com series (which I personally am excited to see). Yay for sports and athletes creating media and leading the charge in the creator economy as I predicted they would.
Variety releases ‘Actors on Actors’ 2024 lineup
“Actors on Actors” is a series that pairs two actors in a one-on-one interview with questions curated by the Variety team. While I think the concept for this YouTube series is perfect, I’m interested to know what you all think of their 2024 lineup and who you’re most excited to see! They’ll have 20 episodes this year with a few already released, and much more to come.
ConvertKit rebrands in public
ConvertKit CEO Nathan Barry announced that the email marketing giant will now be known as Kit. This is in line with a multitude of exciting announcements coming from the company in recent weeks, culminating with a presentation by Nathan Barry at ConvertKit’s Craft + Commerce conference in Boise, Idaho. They recently announced a new free plan that will give creators with up to 10,000 subscribers access to a limited suite of features. From my understanding after talking with their support team, it’ll mainly be a secure publishing platform without much access to the eCom features the platform is known for (which is still a huge deal). He also announced KitStudios, a suite of five podcast studio spaces available for free to ConvertKit customers in Boise, Idaho. According to Nathan Barry, ConvertKit has reached $40M/year and he’s not done yet. Very excited to see what their continued growth will look like!
Canva inks partnerships with pocstock
pocstock is a global stock media platform that focuses on people of color and it’s partnering with Canva to bring its collection of images to the design platform. Outside of Adobe Creative Suite, Canva is the most used design platform, valued at $26B, outpacing popular design platform, Figma, which is valued at $8-9B. Canva, Adobe Creative Suite, and Figma arguably target designers at different levels, but the reason Canva will continue to grow is because they understand was designers who aren’t actually designers need.
Riverside introduces VideoDub
I am both terrified and intrigued by this latest AI integration. We’ve likely all seen Spotify implement language dubbing through AI, keeping voice tonality of the original creator/speaker. Now, Riverside is adding a featuring that allows for voice dubbing in their editing suite. When you change the text in your transcript, you will now look and sound like you said the corrected text. First use cases that come to mind would be if someone accidentally misgenders someone or mispronounces something. Riverside seems to want to ensure that the feature is used ethically and will be rolling it out slowly to all users to keep up with user feedback.
Happy Monday folks!
Please Hustle Responsibly,
🤙🏾✨
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