So how much is MrBeast worth these days?

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View this email in your browser Welcome to the Fourth Floor newsletter, your weekly feed of the biggest news, developments, insights, and analysis from the ever-evolving world of influencer marketing. Amazon has launched livestream shopping in India. Over 150 creators have been recruited to host Amazon Live, the ecommerce giant’s livestream shopping offering. The idea is that influencers with already-large followings will drive their fans to the shopping app and influence them into buying products. Influencers have struggled in other jurisdictions to port their communities across from other platforms to Amazon in order to sell to them. According to, Amazon Live is currently hosting livestreams across several categories, including electronics, fashion and beauty, and home decor. The videos were averaging 30 to 600 simultaneous views at the time of publication. Kim Kardashian hit with $1.26m fine for not disclosing amount she was paid to promote crypto Kim Kardashian was fined $1.26m this week for failing to disclose she'd been paid $250,000 to promote a crypto token sold by EthereumMax. The fine will be paid to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The celebrity influencer also agreed to not promote any crypto asset securities for three years. In a, Gurbir S. Grewal, Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement said: "The federal securities laws are clear that any celebrity or other individual who promotes a crypto asset security must disclose the nature, source, andthey received in exchange for the promotion." Grewal continued, saying "Investors are entitled to know whether the publicity of a security is unbiased, and Ms. Kardashian failed to disclose this information." Kim Kardashian promoted EthereumMax via an Instagram Story in June 2021. Kardashian clearly labeled the content as an advertisement. The Story also carried the words: ‘This is not financial advice’. The advertisement passed the FTC’s checks but fell foul of SEC laws. Cryptocurrencies and tokens are considered securities by the SEC, and require celebrities to disclose how much they were compensated by the brand in return for endorsing the product. The US is not alone is seeking to curtail influencers’ non-adherence to financial regulations. In India, creators rather than celebrities caused over 92% of allcrypto-related advertisement violationsbetween January and May 2022. These are the findings of the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) - the equivalent of the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority. We covered this story in newsletter #63. Similarly in the UK, we reported in newsletter #22 back in September last year that the chair of the Financial Conducts Authority Charles Randell had called out influencers promoting crypto assets: “There is no shortage of stories of people who have lost savings by being lured into the crypto bubble with delusions of quick riches, sometimes after listening to their favourite influencers ready to betray their fans’ trust for a fee.” India’s government set to crack down on influencer disclosure Influencers posting sponsored content in India may soon be forced to disclose their material connection with brands, orface fines of up to 50 lakh(around $70k). New influencer guidelinesby India’s department of consumer affairs, and are slated to be put in the public domain any day now. In June last year (newsletter #08), we covered the news that the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) had issued guidelines for influencer marketing, which said influencers must label branded posts if there's a material connection between them and the advertisers, failing which both parties shall be held accountable. The new government standards drafted by India’s Department of Consumer Affairs will be legally enforceable. Meta has been live-testing Instagram’s Creator Marketplace since July, with a select group of US-based creators.spoke to over a dozen creators within the test group to gather feedback on the marketplace’s success to-date. The feedback wasn’t great. Despite signing in to the programme, most are yet to negotiate a brand collaboration via Marketplace. Are these just teething problems with the feature? Is it an awareness issue with brands, that just needs more publicity to correct? Two months is probably insufficient time to form an educated understanding of the situation. Watch this space. Instagram must try harder to satisfy creators, says internal memo A September memo to Instagram staff from CEO Adam Mosseri says his platform needs to try harder to satisfy creators. Thecites the memo, in which “Mosseri said that surveys of creators showed that Instagram “lag[s] behind TikTok and YouTube on all the dimensions that are most important to creator satisfaction,” including several unrelated to the ability to make money, such as “fun, reach, fair algorithm and care.” Mosseri also said the team is “behind where we need to be” on initiatives to help creators make money on the platform, but is “upping our urgency and progress.” Instagram is testing a product to help creators make. Creators then use these resumés to tout for brand sponsorship collaborations. This isn’t a new concept. We reported back in January (newsletter #40) that YouTube had rolled outto help creators land more brand deals. and YouTube’s media kits are useful. Each shares platform-specific viewer stats, subscribers, unique viewers, average watch-time per clip, etc. Increasingly though, creators are platform agnostic. So platform-specific media kits run the risk of limiting up-take from creators. Entrepreneur Jimmy Donaldson - aka MrBeast - told aaudience he’d been offered $1 billion to take over his YouTube channels and businesses, but that he’d turned it down saying he’s worth far more. Speaking on the Flagrant podcast, MrBeast said “If we have a mobile game company and we got 100 million people playing it, and we have a thousand physical Beast Burgers [restaurants], and Feastables in 20,000 stores, it would probably be like $10 billion, $20 billion." YouTube Shorts creators can now use thevoiceover feature to narrate Shorts videos. The new feature (available only on iOS currently) enables creators to narrate their content (think: instructions, explanations, reactions, funny comments, or even adding new sounds). Wanna know how to add a voiceover to your Shorts after recording content? Follow these. TikTok grew turnover in Europe six-fold in 2021. Revenue was $990.46m for the calendar year, compared to $172m the previous year, according to filings from the UK’s. UK revenues were $531,775,408 for the period, close to twice the size of revenues from the European Union, which brought in $279,277,352 of revenue. However, pre-tax operating losses were $895.58m. The Company said creators were an important driver to the business’ future success. In its Companies House filing, TikTok said: “The size of TikTok’s user base and the users’ level of engagement are crucial to our business, which continue to be significantly determined by our ability to retain our existing users, keep them engaged and acquire new users in a cost-efficient manner and our ability to attract, cultivate and retain content creators to contribute content.” TikTok to launch liveshopping in US by Black Friday TikTok is set to launch liveshopping in the USin time for the holiday season. Rather than via TikTok Shop, liveshopping will be rolled out through a partnership with TalkShopLive. TikTok has struggled to gain traction with livestream shopping, despite it being a significant revenue stream for sister platform Douyin in China. Part of the reason for slow take-up for TikTok Shop was the relative lack of local experience. TalkShopLife has that experience. Set up over four years ago, the firm is headquartered in Los Angeles. It oversees thousands of livestreams a year, and counts Walmart and Microsoft as clients. Twitter is channelling TikTok, by rolling out animmersive, full-screen media viewer, available in one click. To activate full-screen video, simply tap/click on a video in the Twitter app. Once the video has been launched in full-screen mode, Twitter has made video discovery easier as well. Just scroll up to start browsing more video content. If you want to exit the viewer and go back to the original Tweet, click the back arrow in the top left corner. Twitter has launched ato help users find more videos they like, alongside Tweets and Trends that might interest them. To access the video carousel, just open the Explore tab to discover some of the most popular videos being shared on Twitter. Instagram is to let users upload longer uninterrupted Stories.Stories lasting under a minutewill no longer be cut up into 15-second segments. LinkedIn is testing a new way to display messages in its users’ inbox. The plan is to make it easier for users to find and respond to the messages that matter most. This new feature categorises incoming messages into two tabs - Focused and Other. Focused contains the most relevant new opportunities and outreach, while Other contains the remainder of your conversations. Blake Barnes, Product VP at LinkedIn, shared the update this week via a(where else?) Kardashian’s reminder of the perils of marketplaces This week, Kim Kardashian was fined $1.26m for failing to disclose she'd been paid $250,000 to promote a crypto asset (see above). The financial settlement with the SEC is a reminder of the increasingly nuanced disclosure landscape. It’s a reminder to brands that there are rules and that there will be scrutiny. Kimmy K satisfied FTC’s influencer marketing guidelines, but failed to follow securities laws. She remains a defendant in a class action lawsuit filed in January, which claims she promoted EMAX as part of a ‘pump-and-dump scam’. If Special K can get it wrong despite her army of advisers, managers, and social media experts, shouldn’t that be a red flag to social media platforms rolling out marketplace options? These marketplaces are matchmaking services enabling brands to identify creators based on their demographics and those of their audiences. Meta has been live-testing Instagram’s Creator Marketplace since July (see above).launched in 2019. These offerings do well to democratize the influencer marketing space by opening the channel to smaller creators and local brands. But at what cost? It’s unclear how marketplaces can help smooth pay disparity for creators, or protect consumers from greenwashing, crypto scams, misrepresented medicines and healthcare products, or the promotion of products unsuitable for children. We’ve seen too that creators are becoming actively platform-agnostic, so as to increase audience outreach, foster community, and safeguard against being beholden to the vagaries of any one social media platform’s business strategy. For example, Instagram’s pursuit of TikTok at all costs has irked big-name creators and left the platform limp and lagging in areas important to creator satisfaction (see above). This means that a platform-specific marketplace will have increasingly limited appeal to creator and advertiser alike.