When Jon Youshaei talks to creators, one topic keeps coming up: taxes.
The former Instagram and YouTube product marketing manager, who became a creator himself about four years ago, is known for slickly-produced interviews with top creators including MrBeast, Dude Perfect and Marques Brownlee.
Off camera, he’d often hear creators say that they needed help with their finances.
Over the past year or so, Youshaei has been working on a company aimed at solving that pain point. Earlier this week, he announced Boring Stuff, a company offering services to creators such as tax preparation and filing, payroll, contract management and HR systems.
“I met so many creators who lost so much money from taxes, messy bookkeeping [or] working with accountants who quite frankly are dinosaurs when it comes to understanding how the creator economy works,” Youshaei told us during the latest episode of our podcast.
Youshaei founded the company with his business partner and spouse Amanda Marcovitch, as well as Varun Bhuchar and Zack Honarvar, who both work on the business teams of YouTubers Yes Theory and Eric Decker, better known as Airrack. Both are early clients for Boring Stuff, as is the YouTuber group The Try Guys.
Boring Stuff’s team also includes tax specialists who understand the unique needs of creator businesses, including a fast turnaround time.
Creators pay a monthly fee for Boring Stuff’s services. The company is still determining pricing for the retainer-based business model, but Youshaei said costs will depend on creators’ individual needs.
Youshaei remains focused on his work as a creator even as he launches this new company.
He gave us a preview of his latest project: an eight-episode documentary series about how Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, brought the second season of his Amazon Prime Video show “Beast Games” to life, filmed over 45 days. The docuseries will air next year, but Youshaei wouldn’t give many more details beyond that, like whether he produced it on his own or in partnership with a streaming service.
On Thursday, Amazon released a trailer for the second season of “Beast Games,” which premieres with three episodes on Jan 7. It will include a special crossover episode with “Survivor,” including an appearance from legendary host Jeff Probst.
In our interview, Youshaei also shared what it takes to succeed as a creator, his views on AI’s impact on the industry, how Boring Stuff differs from VC-backed accounting startups that stumbled with creators and so much more. Tune into our podcast below for the full interview!
In other news…
The Round Up
Disney is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and will license its characters for the AI company’s video app Sora.
Australia’s social media ban for under 16 year-olds went into effect on Wednesday—and is already running into hiccups with age verification systems failing and teens using workarounds such as VPNs, according to local reports. Read our analysis of the potential ripple effect of the ban here.
The Washington Post rolled out personalized AI podcasts in partnership with voice AI startup ElevenLabs. On the newspaper’s mobile app, users can listen to AI-generated podcasts, which select top stories based on the person’s reading history and topics they follow. Two AI hosts will summarize the news stories and chat back and forth with a more casual tone than a typical news briefing, a WaPo exec told Digiday. We feel like this is pretty bleak, but let us know if you test it out…
The Trump Administration is planning to require some visitors to provide their social media history from the past five years in order to enter the US.
LinkedIn is making it easier for businesses to add verification badges to their app, website or platform. LinkedIn says that verified organizations get nearly eleven times more views and almost eight times more followers on their Pages. In all, LinkedIn now has 100 million verified members, which is about 10% of its total members.
Reddit is also testing verified profiles for public figures and businesses by adding gray checkmarks next to their usernames. This, and LinkedIn’s verification moves, come as AI has made it harder for people to know what’s real and what’s not online.
Operation Bluebird, a Virginia-based social media upstart, asked the US Patent and Trademark Office to cancel trademarks for Twitter so it can use the name for its new social media site, arguing that Elon Musk’s X no longer uses it. The petition was filed by Stephen Coates, a former trademark lawyer at Twitter who is now Operation Bluebird’s general counsel.
Men are twice as likely as women to start a podcast, per new data from Sounds Profitable, the trade organization for the audio industry. But women and men are almost equally likely to keep at it once they’ve started. We went deeper on the data in Thursday’s podcast.
Meta Matters
Meta Platforms is partnering with voice AI startup ElevenLabs to dub Instagram Reels into other languages.
Instagram launched a new AI algorithm called “Your Algorithm” in the US, which shows users a list of personalized topics based on what the person engages with the most. Users can also tell Instagram what they want to see more or less of.
The move comes as people increasingly want more curated social media experiences and as new data suggests that there could be some frictions in Instagram’s algorithm: Reels reach dropped 35% year over year, per new data from Metricool, which analyzed over 39 million posts across major social apps.
Facebook also wants to make its feed more relevant to users by allowing them to give feedback on content. That comes as part of a series of updates to its app, including moving Marketplace, Reels, and Friends to the bottom navigation bar, adding a full-screen view of search results and making content creation tools, such as tagging, adding music and cross-posting, more prominent. These moves make the app feel like a cross between Instagram and the OG Facebook.
In related news, Spotify is also trying to make its algorithm more personalized. On Thursday, Spotify subscribers in New Zealand were the first to test a new feature called Prompted Playlists where they can describe exactly what they want to hear.
YouTube Yarns
YouTube TV is adding 10 different packages next year, including a sports-focused plan.
YouTube added new features to Shorts ads, including comments and the ability for creators to link to a brand’s website.
The video-sharing site is also expanding its A/B test for titles and thumbnails to all creators globally. Eligible creators can test up to three titles, thumbnails or a combination of the two. After about two weeks, the option with the highest share of watchtime will be automatically selected and shown to all viewers.
By the Numbers: 59%
That’s the share of US teens who ever use ChatGPT, according to Pew Research Center’s annual report. That’s more than the share of teens who ever use Snapchat (55%) and slightly less than the share who ever use Instagram (63%). No other chatbot, including Google’s Gemini and Meta AI, broke the 25% mark.
Talent Tracker
Sandie Hawkins is the new CEO of live shopping startup TalkShopLive. Hawkins was the general manager of e-commerce at TikTok when it launched TikTok Shop in the US before moving to AI e-commerce firm Teikametrics. TalkShopLive’s former CEO and co-founder Bryan Moore will become executive chairman.
Ryan Fitzpatrick joined influencer marketing firm Influencer as chief financial officer. Previously, he was senior vice president of finance for Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerX.
Betsy McCormick is the new vice president of creator success at Patreon. Most recently, she was head of go-to-market enablement at Qualtrics.
Katherine Rundell announced she left newsletter publisher Beehiiv, where she was vice president of creators. In a LinkedIn post, Rundell said she will consult and advise AI, consumer and creator-led startups.
The Washington Post is hiring a creator host whose responsibilities will include developing the editorial vision for its new creator initiative and publishing a newsletter about the creator economy. Read our previous reporting about how the news industry is converging with creators here.
Brand Buzz
Ralph Lauren hosted a star-studded pop up holiday experience in Los Angeles last week, capitalizing on the success of #RalphLaurenChristmas, which has been organically trending on TikTok. It’s a prime example of brands doing online-to-offline right.
The Home Depot announced a new creator portal, which aims to connect creators to the retailer for sponsorship deals and to earn money from their DIY content. Earlier this year, Lowe’s announced a creator network for DIY creators who can create storefronts with their Lowe’s product recommendations and earn commissions.
