Marni Levine, Head of TikTok Shop’s U.S. Operations, Small and Medium Businesses (right), with The Information’s Kaya Yurieff
We’re hosting hundreds of attendees at The Information’s Creator Economy Summit and the conversations are flying. Here are some of the highlights so far.
Marni Levine, who leads TikTok Shop’s U.S. operations for small and medium businesses, said the app doesn’t plan to reduce e-commerce content in its powerful For You tab, despite complaints from some users that they’re seeing too much of it. Levine also said it’s planning to bring more book publishers into its e-commerce business, capitalizing on the success of #BookTok, and she highlighted the platform’s work with bigger brands like Estée Lauder and Mattel. (See our full story here)
Mike Minton, chief monetization officer of Twitch, said that Twitch parent Amazon is testing using content from the live streaming platform to train its AI models. Asked if Twitch was considering AI services such as generating short clips from live streams and developing chatbots for communities on the platform, Minton said, “all of the above” could be likely, but declined to say how soon more AI features would arrive.
Ty Haney, who co-founded athleisure company Outdoor Voices but left roughly four years ago in a dispute with the startup’s board, said the “good and bad” of her experiences at the startup led her to form her new startup, Try Your Best. She also said she expects to work with a pop star to launch an album with TYB, which rewards consumer-focused companies followers when they help expand their business. (Read our full story here.)
Scott Manson, operating partner at consumer focused investment firm The Chernin Group, spoke on our venture capital panel and acknowledged that investing in creators directly and backing a single voice can be risky because there is a “single point of failure.” For that reason, Manson said he prefers to back creators that can amplify other voices, too, effectively hedging that risk.
Neil Waller, co-founder of creator talent management company Whalar, brought some data to highlight how robust creator economy businesses have become: 70% of creators Whalar works with either have a manager or an agent on their team, up from 50% this time last year; 20% of the creators Whalar works with has at least one full time employee.
Tomorrow we’ll have more from the afternoon’s sessions, including DJ and EDM music star Diplo and panels on how Hollywood and sports are converging with the creator economy.
Here’s what else is going on…
Deals & Debuts
See The Information’s Creator Economy Database for an exclusive list of private companies and their investors.
Yahoo bought Artifact, the AI-infused news reading platform developed by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who co-founded Instagram. Yahoo said Artifact won’t run as a standalone application anymore, but its AI capabilities will be infused into Yahoo and Yahoo News.
Music technology company Venice Music launched Co-Manager, an AI career assistant that will help musicians market and distribute their music.
CommentSold, a video e-commerce company, launched PopClips, a tool that allows retailers to create short video clips with tagged products that can be embedded onto Shopify websites and other platforms and websites.
TikTok is implementing its feed dedicated to science, technology, engineering and math in Europe and will start the widened feature launch in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
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