Behind the Scenes: Inside Passionfruit’s Editorial Process

Issue #151 | July 13, 2023

Passionfruit Editorial Channel: Adelia Chamberlain, Drew Grant, Leslie Horn Peterson

Drew: So, Lon’s piece went in a different direction, and I don’t know what to write for the newsletter intro now. I’m thinking about making it about how creators need to take a page from influencers and need to be more platform agnostic.

Leslie: Oh, I think that’s wise. Especially when the platforms are vying for supremacy now that Twitter is tanking. Lon does make the point that it’s good to diversify, and I think you could use that as a way in/to expand on that. He zooms in on the race to be the next Twitter. You can do the same and make it more broadly applicable to creators.

Drew: Yeah, I was thinking about it in terms of reactors. I was talking to one last night, and he was like, “Yeah, YouTube knows they have a monopoly on us. We can’t jump to another platform because no one else does long-form video, and YouTube knows we depend on reach to bring in page views. People who discover our channel mostly find us through YouTube’s recommended videos, and we can’t take the risk that the numbers won’t follow us to another platform.”

Adelia: I know that for the channel that I’m a part of, we have discussed in the past where we could potentially move our content to, but there are no other options for long-form on-demand content out there but YouTube.

THE COMMENTS SECTION

“Writers strike. Actors strike. YouTube content creators ought to strike. What YT has done pushing their shorts has been terrible for all the people you go to YT to watch … Without content creators, YT is nothing.”
—Twitter user ipsuel (@Ipsuel) on why content creators should also go on strike.

Drew: Exactly. Reactors by definition need long form, but they could learn a lot from Gen Z, who will chop up their videos and put it on whatever platform pays the best or gives them the biggest audience. And if TikTok stops paying out, they’ll jump to Twitch until the policies over there stop being favorable, and then they’ll go to YouTube Shorts or whoever is paying out a creator fund that day. Influencers understand that platforms don’t give a sh*t about them. They know they’re essentially products of social media, but they’re the ones who own their brand.

Leslie: Adapt or die, I guess, is the lesson.

Drew: Whereas many career reactors have been using YouTube for sometimes well over a decade. So even as they get dicked over by draconian censorship policies, abuses of the copyright system, decreasing percentages of the ad revenue, or arbitrary demands that they turn their content into Shorts to feed the algorithm, they quite literally don’t know where else to go that people could just find them. Like what, Vimeo? Vimeo is the worrrrst.

Leslie: Totally.

Adelia: Hard agree.

Drew: Well … that’s just f*cked up.

NOTED BY LON HARRIS

Inside Threads-Gate: What the Battle Between Twitter, Bluesky, and Threads Means for Creators

Can the Social Media Wars actually benefit people using these platforms to share their work?

By Lon Harris, Passionfruit Contributor

→ READ THE FULL STORY

PARTNER

The Publish Press brings you the news from the creator’s point of view.

IN THE BIZ

SAG-AFTRA has gone on strike along with the WGA for the first time since 1960, leaving only directors and Ryan Murphy to attend San Diego Comic-Con this year.
Redbox and TikTok have teamed up so that you can watch short-form videos while renting movies at a kiosk, somehow managing to troll the fans of either service.
The FTC has opened an investigation into OpenAI’s consumer AI practices, just in time for the ChatGPT founders to announce a team up with the Associated Press for a novel approach to journalism that involves Star Wars misinformation.
Discord has introduced parental control tools into their Family Center that allows them to spy on their kids’ communications on the platform, reversing a long-standing policy of the platform: “Parents just don’t understand.“