Good morning. After two years of teasers, 19-year-old gaming creator Ranboo took over Twitter’s trending charts this weekend with the release of “Generation Loss,” a horror-comedy livestream series where viewers vote to determime the actions of its main character (played by Ranboo).

No spoilers here, but given viewers’ overwhelmingly positive response, it seems like interactive gaming creator Markiplier has some competition.

— Hannah Doyle & Nate Graber-Lipperman

Mark Rober Reveals Virtual CrunchLabs Summer Camp

Over the weekend, science edutainment creator Mark Rober revealed a new addition to his CrunchLabs subscription box: Camp CrunchLabs, a virtual summer camp that gives campers access to new Rober videos and design challenges to complete at home.

The Camp CrunchLabs experience will condense the typical CrunchLabs monthly subscription program into a 12-week summer intensive, Rober said in his announcement video.

Context: Rober launched CrunchLabs in June 2022 as a physical studio, YouTube channel, and monthly subscription box centered around a core idea: “Think like an engineer.”

The message seems to be resonating. While Rober hasn’t revealed CrunchLabs’ sales, he told Colin and Samir in December that the business was already generating more revenue than AdSense and brand partnerships from his main channel—and after initially selling out of products in its first week, CrunchLabs had a waitlist “in the tens of thousands.”

Zoom out: Rober has been a vocal proponent for slow and steady growth. This additional Camp CrunchLabs experience comes about a year after Rober started the company. So what comes next?

“Five years from now, we are not going to have all these different lines of boxes—we’re keeping it very simple,” Rober told Colin and Samir in December.

Good Good Hosts First Professional Golf Tournament

Over the weekend, the golf creator group Good Good released the first video following its three-day championship tournament in search of “the next great golfer.”

The details: 63 hand-selected professional golfers played in a qualifier to determine the 12-person field that competed for a $100,000 purse.

For the fans: Reception has been mixed. While Good Good’s recap video notched nearly 1 million views in its first four days, fans on the Good Good Reddit have critiqued the event for 1) barring fan attendance 2) featuring unknown players and 3) lacking entertainment value. One user commented, “They haven’t figured out the format. It was really boring. Saying that, they’ll figure it out.”

Big picture: Good Good has long been vocal about shaping the future of golf, which involves taking risks that influence the game beyond YouTube. The challenge will be balancing their big ambitions with the content their core audience loves.

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A Deeper Look at Creator Merch Businesses

Colin and Samir often say it: brand deals are the lifeblood of the creator economy, followed second by merch. Creators engage their superfans by launching merch and product lines that align with their content and their brand, and mobilize their audience toward an ecommerce site to demonstrate their loyalty.

Today’s top creators—like Mark Rober, Dude Perfect, Zach King and more—are building unique merch stores and brands to bring their businesses to the next level. And they’re launching them using a .Store domain.

.Store is the domain extension empowering creators with the flexibility and autonomy to build your ecommerce site wherever makes sense for you—there’s no lock-in to a single platform or service.

It’s simple for you and intuitive for your audience. Ditch the lengthy URLs and find out why creators are launching their ecommerce sites using a .Store domain.

TikTok Creators’ Financial Information Allegedly Stored in China Servers

The personal financial information of TikTok creators who have shared their social security numbers and tax IDs with the platform to receive compensation may have been stored on servers in China, according to Forbes. Neither TikTok nor its parent company ByteDance have responded to the allegations.

FYI: TikTok CEO Shou Chew told congress earlier this year that all American data was held at the platform’s headquarters in the U.S. and Singapore.

Over the last year, TikTok’s $1.5 billion Project Texas has endeavored to separate Americans’ data from China, where ByteDance is headquartered. That initiative has been central to negotiations with the Biden administration on a deal that would allow TikTok to continue operating in the U.S., where threats of a ban still loom overhead.

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