YouTube Communities, Twitch Discount Promos, and Forbes Top Creators 2025

A new week, a new recap, and there's no shortage of interesting updates this week across the creatorverse! This intro was slated to be a lot longer (as I wrote about 700 words about AI and the future of content creation), but reading it back an hour before you received this, it was longer than the recap itself... So, instead, I've deleted it and will make it a standalone post (and perhaps a YouTube video). And speaking of YouTube, I've finally launched a Highlights channel where I'll post shorter videos from my livestreams! If that's something you might be interested in, please do subscribe! And now, let's jump into the news!

🟪 TWITCH

• Twitchcon San Diego 2010 tickets go on sale on June 25.
• You can now run your own 35% Discounts on 5+ Gift Subs. Conditions: These are Shared Discounts, and you can only run SEVEN promotions for SEVENTY hours during each calendar year. Find the setting here.
• Twitch has officially launched Ghost Trains (aka High Engagement Triggers), where a Hype Train will start at 0% if there's more engagement than usual. You can turn that off here.
• Combos now have a much longer grace period of 30 seconds before a Combo ends. Previously, it was closer to 10 seconds.
• Twitch will display any time Bits have been revoked from your earnings in the Revenue Dashboard.
• Dress to Impress partnered with Twitch for a cosmetic wing drop during their Summer update on June 28.
• Brave now blocks Twitch ads by default.
• Axios interviewed CEO Dan Clancy about why he doesn't say "Gamer" and other ad-related topics. The Game Business interviewed him about profitability.
• Twitch's Marketing Lead, Rachel Delphin, was interviewed about ads.
• Arabic is now a supported language on Twitch.

🟥 YOUTUBE

• YouTube is launching Communities, a way for creators to build deeper community engagement. It will allow your Subscribers to create posts, reply, and react, while non-subscribers can only reply and react. It acts like a Twitter Community timeline. Creators (or their moderators) can moderate the entire community.
• YouTube is launching Open Call, a tool that helps creators pitch brands for sponsored content.
• Google confirmed it trains Gemini and Veo 3 AIs on select YouTube content.
• YouTube will add a Google Veo 3 AI tool directly into Shorts later this summer.
• YouTube Shorts now averages 200 billion views per day.

⬛ TIKTOK

• TikTok is testing Smart Split, which takes long-form videos and automatically converts them into shorter, vertical videos.
• Trump's EO delayed the TikTok ban for another 90 days.

🔲 OTHERS

• Fortune did a profile on the $5B app, WhatNot, a streaming service for shopping.
• Baidu showed off new capabilities by having two popular livestreamers go live for 6 hours, where they sold $7M in products. Both streamers were AI models capable of interacting with each other and the chat. We're so cooked...