Aged AI and RackaRacka

bye bye bnpl

Blue Ivy is a Reformation girlie (of course she is); Henry Searle, the new teen Boy Wonder of British tennis, secures a sensational Wimbledon win; MTV launches new dating series ‘The Love Experiment’; and NewJeans are taking over, one viral song at a time.

TIKTOK CREATORS ARE RAKING IN CASH AND SCORING MILLIONS OF VIEWS FROM ITS SHOPPING AFFILIATE PROGRAM. WILL IT LAST?, insider
For creators, getting involved with TikTok Shop while rates are high, and the platform is subsidizing shipping and shelling out discounts, has proven to be lucrative.

Grace Secrist, a TikTok creator with 11,000 followers, earned over $1,600 in TikTok Shop commissions after posting videos featuring tank tops from a boutique clothing shop called Alexander Jane. Secrist's tank top posts far outperformed her non-TikTok Shop videos, leading her to wonder whether TikTok or the brand were boosting her videos. "The first two days that it was up, it got maybe like 10,000 views, which was very weird because normally the most I would get is like 2,000, 3,000," she said. "By the third, fourth, fifth day, I was already up to almost a million views and I was like, 'Does everybody really care that much about these tank tops?'"

BUY NOW, PAY LATER APP DOWNLOADS DECLINE, retaildive
Longtime readers know how much I hate BNPLs — they take advantage of young people who don’t know better! — so this is a relief to see: Average daily BNPL app downloads globally for that quarter declined 22.8% year-over-year, to about 104,000.

HOW SKIN-CARE BRAND BUBBLE USES GENEVA, AN APP POPULAR WITH GEN Z, morningbrew
Bubble has gained more than 1 million followers on TikTok and has experienced 500% retail sales growth year over year. The brand’s growth has partly been fueled by their community on Geneva (Slack for Gen Z, basically). Bubble’s brand ambassador program has close to 7,000 members; in exchange for product feedback, they receive free products, discounts, and other perks. (We’ve talked about Bubble’s Geneva here before, but it’s cool to see the strategy is still going strong.)

‘PEOPLE HAVE TO CHILL’: EXPERTS SAY TIKTOK’S ‘AGED’ FILTER ISN’T THAT ACCURATE, highsnobiety
“Aged,” an AI-assisted filter that shows a user’s current face alongside an age-progressed version, is generating strong reactions from Gen Z and Millennials horrified by the appearance of their older selves. Used over 13 million times so far, the filter has some creators spiraling, pairing clips of their Aged selves with audio of a woman’s voice saying, “I need to buy a gun.” I’d love to know how much this meme has boosted anti-aging skincare sales.

FROM BLOWING UP TOASTERS TO A SEVEN-FIGURE A24 DEAL, vulture
Danny and Michael Philippou, known to their 6.74 YouTube subscribers as “RackaRacka,” are the 30-year-old twin directors behind this summer’s biggest horror movie. After gaining significant attention at the Sundance Film Festival, "Talk to Me" was picked up by art-house cool-kid studio A24, which will theatrically release Talk to Me on July 28. On TikTok, fwiw, #rackaracka has 85.2M views.

COLLEGE STUDENTS SHUN TEACHING AS A CAREER, A CRISIS FOR U.S. SCHOOLS, cbsnews
As the population of college students has increased by 150% since 1970, the number of bachelor's degrees in education has plummeted by almost 50% — a steeper drop than that for English, literature, and foreign language majors. College students today are more likely to study business, engineering, and even the visual and performing arts. This is not a problem that’s going to just go away.

One last thought: