ICYMI: Black Creators Deserve Better
Here's what happened on social media this week, August 5
Thanks for subscribing, reading and sending feedback. I’m taking next week off but will resume August 18th. See you then!
💻 ROADMAP
🚫 Facebook Shuts Down Live Shopping: Facebook is shutting down its live shopping feature to focus on Reels. The company announced the news this week, saying: “You will still be able to use Facebook Live to broadcast live events, but you won’t be able to create product playlists or tag products in your Facebook Live videos.”
According to their update, you will still be able to tag products in Instagram Reels and livestreams so viewers can buy or save products added to your shopping video. At least for now.
This is BFD because it’s a massive blow to the live shopping brand ambitions in the West and will have a trickle down effect for creators who were likely to star in a lot of these live productions.
It’s hard to believe Facebook is just giving up on the concept when there’s $500 billion at stake but even TikTok is finding the QVC model difficult to replicate outside of Asia. The company reportedly scaled back its live commerce plans in Europe and the US last month while they work on consumer awareness and adoption.
📲 Pinterest’s New App: Pinterest launched a new app called Shuffles for creative collaging. It takes over for Polyvore (RIP) and Meta’s now defunct E.gg app with a vaguely Tumblr-esque vibe. Shuffles lets you snap, cut out, and animate products into mood boards. There’s also a social component with the option to share, collaborate on collages and remix other people’s work. It’s invite only right now but you can download the app and apply to get on the list here: Shuffles.
Related (not sponsored): Marketer Mandy Hoskins flagged InStories.app after seeing me post about Shuffles. It’s a paid app that lets you create animated collage videos with zero design skills. It’s more highly produced-looking than the lo-fi stuff we’re seeing on TikTok but maybe this return to an old-school aesthetic is part of our collective desire to go back to 2012 social and everything else that came with that era?
🔗 LinkedIn Link Sticker: LinkedIn is rolling out clickable link stickers that can be added to photos and video in creator posts uploaded via mobile.
🏠 Clubhouse’s New Beta: Clubhouse, the live audio app we all tried during the pandemic, is trying to bring the magic back with a private communities feature called Houses.
👆🏻 CLICK THRU
🇬🇧 Instagram head Adam Mosseri to relocate to London
Instagram’s Adam Mosseri is moving to London, shifting the company’s base to the U.K. where he’ll be hiring additional staffer’s to work in Meta’s offices. There are zero additional details on what this means for the company or creators beyond what the Financial Times first reported: Mosseri’s requested relocation away from Meta’s California headquarters is temporary and partly driven by a desire to live in London.
Speaking of Adam Mosseri, his carefully orchestrated Q&A always comes out after I send this email. So if you missed it last week, here are the takeaways from his July 29 Stories:
Video will be prioritized
The immersive full feed experience has been turned off. For now
Recommendations have been scaled back. For now
Smaller creators will be prioritized
Stories + DMs are for friends. Feed is for creators
What does this mean: Make Reels; Good news; Also good news; Less than 1 million followers (based on who is eligible for the new Reels Play fund); If you’re a creator, turn those Stories into Reels instead!
🤬 Triller promised millions to Black creators. Now some are deep in debt.
This Taylor Lorenz piece is heartbreaking: more than two dozen Black creators were promised lucrative contracts and equity from Triller, a TikTok competitor. Now, they’re struggling to get paid.
Not only that, a company executive bragged that, “No other medium has done as much as Triller has for this often overlooked and underrepresented part of the creator economy.”
Instead, creators faced disorganization, unrealistic workloads and non-existent payments that put some deep in debt.
“Us as Black creators work twice as hard or three times as hard just to be seen,” creator David Warren told the Washington Post. “All these platforms preach about diversity, but just like old Hollywood, there’s a lot of people being used as token characters while the owners of the platforms profit.”
📣 QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"I think it's a great streaming option for those who don't have the desire to make their own layouts"
- Chris Thompson, an TikToker with over 1 million followers speaking to Insider about Meta’s new livestreaming tool, Super. Thompson was paid by Meta to test the feature several times: Meta tests a new livestreaming platform for influencers, Super
🧮 DATA OF THE WEEK
87% of viewers believe that they get the highest quality information about products when they’re shopping or browsing on YouTube
- Tara Walpert Levy, Google VP from a YouTube report on How YouTube Shopping buys creators opportunities
🔨 RESOURCES
While people’s parties might have shrunk the last couple years, they’re actually celebrating more often than before, according to Pinterest’s Holiday Planning Guide
The American Influencer Council is hosting a virtual summit titled Achieving Career Creator Wealth, dedicated to helping career creators feel confident in their financial future, on Aug 10 at 2pm ET. Register here.
LA Tech Week kicks off a week of events hosted by VCs and startups on August 15: Details here.
👩🏽🤝👨🏻 PEOPLE
Why Doja Cat is the new model for celebrity brand partnership success -Fast Company
“My Insta Scammer Friend,” a Caroline Calloway documentary was released by the BBC. (It’s only available in the UK but I was able to find a copy on YouTube.)
📖 ALSO ON MY READING LIST…
Alabama Rush TikTok Is Making a Return Sooner Than You Thought -ENews
Brands are getting creative with BeReal -Marketing Brew
Forever young, beautiful and scandal-free: The rise of South Korea's virtual influencers -CNN
TikTok’s ties to China are once again under fire in Washington -CNN
Will TikTok Music be the next big podcast platform? TheVerge
An ‘influencer thrift store’ wants to tackle fast fashion waste -NBCNews
It’s time to retire the influencer marketing term ‘whitelisting’ -MarketingBrew
Patreon CEO Jack Conte: Facebook and Instagram’s changes are bad for creators -TechCrunch
🇨🇦 ✈️ OOTO
I’ll be out next week, traveling to my hometown of Montreal, Canada. In the meantime, here are some of my favorite Canadian accounts and related content.
❤️ 🤍 YouTube video to watch before heading to Montreal: Obsessed with how these YouTubers Sam and Victor depicted my hometown:
❤️🤍 Montreal accounts I follow on Instagram: BabaSouk, Soulful.Simplicity, SolveMySpace, Hey.Maca, Damask_Dentelle (there are others but I just realized I follow a LOT of home design accounts with a Scandi-Montreal aesthetic — with a splash of Morocco thrown in)
❤️🤍 Tech companies you might not realize are Canadian: Hootsuite, Later, #paid, Unsplash, Shopify…
❤️🤍 Just a few all-star Canadian marketers: Taylor.Loren, KatieSteckly, HeyJJMedia, EliseDarma, VanessaLau.Co, DanicaNelson, Kayley.E.R, BSquared.Social