The growing pains of Apple’s subscription addiction

Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review! Last week, we talked about how YouTube has managed to skate along while Facebook has gotten pummeled over platform responsibility concerns. This week, we’re looking at another slippery slope Apple is dancing on the edge of. If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can […]

TikTok adds new sound partners to allow brands to leverage audio on the platform

TikTok is announcing new partnerships aimed at making it easier for brands to tap into music and sound on the platform. The company has expanded its TikTok Marketing Partners program and introduced six certified partners that will help brands create “sound-on” strategies for the platform. TikTok notes that it essentially wants to connect brands with […]

Twitch streamers respond after huge leak of creator payout data

Twitch confirmed yesterday that a massive cache of internal data, including creator payouts, was published online after a breach. The streaming platform said in a blog post that the leak was caused by an error in a Twitch server configuration change, which was then accessed by a malicious third party. For many streamers, this leak […]

Co-streaming rolls out to all creators on Facebook Gaming

Co-streaming is rolling out to all users on Facebook’s game-streaming platform Facebook Gaming. The feature will allow users to team up and stream with one another, while enabling viewers to navigate between co-streams and choose which perspective they’d like to see the action from. The feature had previously only been available to streamers in the […]

Instagram ditches the IGTV brand, combines everything but Reels into an ‘Instagram Video’ format

Instagram head Adam Mosseri recently said was “no longer a photo-sharing app,” noting the company was prioritizing a shift into video amid significant competition from TikTok and YouTube. Today, Instagram is taking another step towards its larger goal of making video a more central part of the Instagram experience with news that it will now […]

TikTok’s new ad products invite users to interact with taps, swipes, likes and more

TikTok this week presented its new plan to ramp up advertiser investment in its video platform with the expansion of e-commerce, a new promise of “brand safety” and the launch of several new and interactive ad formats, ranging from clickable stickers to “Choose Your Own Adventure”-type ads to “super likes” and more. The additions, the […]

TikTok Shopping expands with more partnerships, LIVE Shopping, new ads and more

TikTok is expanding its investment in e-commerce. Earlier this year, the video platform began piloting TikTok Shopping in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, in partnership with Shopify. The deal allowed Shopify merchants with a TikTok For Business account to add a Shopping tab to their TikTok profiles and sync their product catalogs to the app […]

Twitter Super Follows has generated only around $6K+ in its first two weeks

Twitter’s creator platform Super Follows is off to an inauspicious start, having contributed to somewhere around $6,000 in U.S. iOS revenue in the first two weeks the feature has been live, according to app intelligence data provided by Sensor Tower. And it’s made only around $600 or so in Canada. A small portion of that […]

Driven by livestreams, consumer spending in social apps to hit $17.2B in 2025

The livestreaming boom is driving a significant uptick in the creator economy, as a new forecast estimates consumers will spend $6.78 billion in social apps in 2021. That figure will grow to $17.2 billion annually by 2025, according to data from mobile data firm App Annie, which notes the upward trend represents a five-year compound […]