HERE’S WHAT WE LEARNED FROM YOUTUBE’S REPORT ON CULTURE & TRENDS

YouTube is an absolute beast when it comes to popular culture and people’s preferences. If you were to ask anyone under the age of 25 who their favourite “celebrities” are, the list would almost certainly contain several names that can only be found on YouTube, so when they put together a Culture & Trends report, you know it’s going to be good.

IT’S A WEIRD TIME IN SOCIAL MEDIA

The only constant, as the say, is change – but this is getting ridiculous.

Just a year ago it seemed that the biggest adaptation we’d all have to make was the growth of TikTok and the shift to Reels-style video content.

Now, TikTok and Reels are still very much a thing; Twitter is melting down; Meta has launched an alternative called Threads that 100 million+ people signed up for, but no one seems to know what to do with it; and Canadian news organizations are getting shut out of their accounts.

WELCOME TO THE THREADS ERA

It’s fair to say that Meta’s Threads launch has been a success. The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, Threaded that the network had already crossed 100 million users on Sunday, just 5 days after its launch.

That makes Threads the fastest growing app in history, by a lot.

For context, it took Twitter 5 years to hit that same number. Although that’s a bit of a cheap shot because Twitter launched in a very different time and had to literally teach people how to post a social media update.

IS ZUCKERBERG THE GOOD GUY?

For the past decade or so there has been one thing we could all count on in this ever-changing world of digital and social media; One universal truth that we could all rally around and agree on because it was just so incontrovertibly true: That Mark Zuckerberg is the villain of the Internet. And somehow, Elon is finding a way to ruin that for us all.

What was once written off as a silly lip-syncing app just did over $1 Billion of in-app purchases in a single quarter, which puts it at the top of the app store worldwide, and they haven’t even started selling stuff.

But first, what exactly are in-app purchases? Turns out that it’s almost entirely something called TikTok Coins.