Meta Talks Up Muse

Meta spent a lot of time on its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday telling investors how Muse, its new personal AI agent, is a big step toward the company’s goal of achieving “personal superintelligence.”

But the most common use case for Muse was pretty mundane: Shopping. Over a quarter of people who use Muse do so to shop, with an average purchase size of $200, per the company.

That’s a pretty solid sum for social commerce purchases, which are often smaller. But it’s roughly the same amount as the average revenue Meta generates per Muse user annually in the US, which the company said is “several hundreds of dollars.”

With the exception of travel, many of the other top use cases mentioned didn’t get much more exciting, including connecting Muse to other services like your email and calendar.

To be fair, it’s early days for Muse, which first launched in September. And despite growing privacy and security concerns, the initial response to the product has been largely positive: Meta said that the agent has now been set up by over 10 million people in the US and Canada.

Muse has also remained near the top of Apple App Store rankings of free apps, though its streak as the No.1 app was ended by Dave’s Hot Chicken, which narrowly took the top spot for a 24-hour period this month. (Apparently, the fast food restaurant was giving away free sliders that day and people had to download the app to get one.)

And Meta clearly has big, though somewhat vague, plans for Muse. “We expect to grow Muse to serve billions of people. This is both our mission and our strategy,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the call. He also started to lay out a plan for how to monetize Muse, which will mostly rely on taking a cut of transactions that it helps businesses facilitate and subscriptions.

In the Q&A with investors, Zuckerberg also said the company would likely start to work on monetization earlier than it has for its other products.

Still, that wasn’t enough to satisfy investors, who remain skeptical about Meta’s hefty spending on AI. Meta’s stock slumped by around 8% on Thursday, despite reporting a whopping $64.6 billion in third quarter revenue. That was up by 26% year over year.

The sales growth also went hand-in-hand with a rise in engagement on Meta’s core social platforms. On Instagram, for example, Meta said that global time spent per user reached an all-time high and grew by double-digits over the third quarter last year.

As we’ve previously reported, a lot of the growth is due to Meta’s strength in serving the right content to the right people at the right time: In the third quarter, Meta said that nearly 45% of recommended Instagram Reels were less than a day old.

As for creators, they once again took a backseat on the call. One data point that stood out to us was that Meta’s partnership ads product, which allows advertisers to extend creator content as paid ads, grew by 97% year-over-year and surpassed $15 billion in annual revenue run rate.

But less airtime can also be a good sign. Investors may no longer need as much convincing that creators pay off.

On this week’s podcast, Jasmine sits down with LTK co-founder and president Amber Venz Box and Northwestern University professor Frank Dudley to discuss their new research on how CMOs are changing their approach to influencer marketing in the age of AI. 

A major takeaway? Brants want more creators and more content to help them cut through the noise and show up in LLM results. The episode is embedded below and available anywhere you get your podcasts.

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Spotify launched paid memberships for creators in the US and other markets. Creators can offer fans exclusive audio or video content, bonus episodes, fewer ads, early access or a combination of those options. Creators can select tiers and pricing, and Spotify will take a 10% cut of memberships.

In other Spotify news…The company said it has pulled over 50 million slop and spam tracks out of its recommendations amid a crackdown on AI music. 

Whop, a startup offering a marketplace where people get paid for creating and clipping content, announced $200 million in Series D funding at a $5.1 billion valuation led by Sequoia and Shopify Ventures. In February, it was valued at $1.6 billion. Read more about the rise of the clipping economy here. 

Substack announced dynamic ad insertion for podcasts, so creators can run campaigns with sponsors and update ads across past episodes without re-editing them. 

Popular Demand, a new startup working with creators and fandoms to create and distribute content to niche audiences, launched this week. It was co-founded by Jon Leland, the former chief strategy officer at Kickstarter, and Lucasfilm exec Ivan Askwith. We’ve seen a lot of momentum around activating fans, or fans even becoming creators themselves this year. (Just look at the World Cup!)

Meta was ordered to pay $25 billion by a New Mexico judge on Wednesday, one of the largest financial penalties issued against a tech giant, according to the New York Times. The state sued Meta in 2021 over a scandal involving political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, alleging the company misled users over data privacy practices.

The decision comes nearly a decade after news of the scandal broke and as AI is bringing new concerns over data privacy.

That’s the percentage of creators who heard from brands about holiday shopping campaigns in September, according to new data from influencer marketing platform Fohr. Another 21% heard as early as August.

The holiday shopping season is starting earlier and earlier. While spending likely won’t peak until Black Friday and Cyber Monday, almost 20% of shoppers this year started before August, according to a report from Accenture. 

The new data tracks with trends we saw during the back-to-school season, with shoppers kicking off as early as June, according to the National Retail Federation.

Steven Bartlett, the host of the “Diary of a CEO” podcast, told Fortune his broader business would generate about $60 million in revenue this year. He didn’t name names, but also said he turned down a deal that would have required “more advertising and taking the show off YouTube.” His rationale for doing so? “That is four times more ads than I have to put in now.”

Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo, hosts of the “Giggly Squad” podcast, sold out their first live show at Madison Square Garden, and now will appear for four nights. For context, pop star Olivia Rodrigo played four shows at MSG, so this is quite the feat for two podcasters! 

Tinx, whose real name is Christina Najjar, will host Hulu’s reboot of reality competition series “The Circle,” which premieres Nov. 17. Celebrities and creators compete in a game of popularity while viewers’ votes shape the show. 

The Wall Street Journal is planning an expansion into streaming TV and held discussions with Substack writer Emily Sundberg about a video show, Business Insider reported. But the “Feed Me” founder dropped out of the talks a few weeks ago, per the outlet. 

Kyla Scanlon, a financial creator and CNN commentator, announced a new video podcast with Vox called “Best of Luck” which goes live next week.

Pittman pointed to the podcast industry’s spending “exuberance” during an interview with Axios this week, suggesting that rivals are paying more for shows than they can recoup.  

“Giggly Squad” recently signed a four-year deal with SiriusXM, while Joe Rogan reupped his $250 million Spotify deal. 

Joel Kaplan, policy chief at Meta, is leaving next year after more than 15 years at the company. Kaplan was a central figure in guiding the company through the Cambridge Analytica scandal and later helped Meta build a relationship with the Trump administration. "Joel has worked on virtually every tough issue Meta has faced for more than 15 years,” Zuckerberg told Axios in a statement.

Lauren Glaubach is joining Sony Pictures Television in a newly created role of executive vice president, distribution, digital and social platforms. The Pinterest exec, who previously worked at YouTube, will focus on expanding on YouTube and other digital platforms.

Substack is hiring a senior communications manager for shows. The role will help creators launch new products and promote those building businesses through both audio and video on Substack. The focus on shows stood out to us, though it’s not a surprise given how much this format has been exploding.

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