YouTube's Creator 'Hype' Feature Rolls Out Globally 🚀 Reddit Pro Goes Mobile 🤳 Samsung, Prime Video Have Highest Smart TV Ad Reach 📺

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YouTube's Creator 'Hype' Feature Rolls Out Globally [1 min read]

Hype is meant to help smaller creators with under 500,000 subscribers gain visibility, allowing users to hype up to three videos per week that earn points toward a ranked leaderboard in the Explore menu, with smaller creators receiving bigger bonuses. The feature includes multiple engagement elements such as hype buttons next to Like buttons, "hyped" badges on videos, Home feed filtering options, leaderboard notifications, and monthly "hype star" badges for dedicated fans, while creators can track their metrics through YouTube Studio. YouTube is testing monetization of the feature in Brazil and Turkey by allowing fans to purchase additional hype credits beyond their free weekly allowance, representing a potential new revenue stream for the platform.

Reddit Pro Goes Mobile [3 min read]

Reddit has become the #1 most cited source across all major AI platforms as of August 2025, making authentic business presence there critical since AI chatbots often trace their answers back to Reddit discussions, directly influencing how companies get discovered through AI search. Reddit Pro is launching comprehensive mobile tools including real-time community monitoring through the Trends tool and performance insights for comments, allowing businesses to respond immediately to customer questions and measure which responses are most helpful to different communities. Research shows that authentic Reddit engagement directly impacts brand perception—with one organic post per week increasing positive user posts about a brand by 3.5% and three organic comments boosting positive discussion by 2.2%—but requires businesses to meaningfully contribute to conversations rather than use traditional marketing tactics, which is why Reddit Pro includes an organic playbook for authentic engagement strategies.

Samsung, Prime Video Have Highest Smart TV Ad Reach [1 min read]

Samsung and Prime Video each reached about 45.5 million U.S. smart TV households in 2024, far outpacing competitors like Tubi at 28.9 million and Peacock at only 18.9 million, establishing them as the dominant platforms for smart TV advertising reach. Ad-supported streaming grew 8% year-over-year with 69% of all streaming now including ads rather than being ad-free, while viewers increasingly use smart TVs beyond just watching shows—62% for YouTube, 44% for gaming, and 37% for social media. Samsung leverages data from 77 million active TV sets to track these viewing patterns, finding that connected TV now accounts for 74% of total viewing time on their devices.

Amazon Ads Wraps Upfront, Touts 'Significant Growth' [1 min read]

Amazon Ads completed its upfront TV advertising deals with revenues jumping 30% to $1.8 billion this year and projecting another 22% increase to $2.1 billion in 2026, driven by Prime Video and Freevee, though the company didn't reveal specific details about volume or pricing gains. Despite this growth, advertising prices remain flat around $20-30 CPMs for non-NFL content, with overall premium streaming CPMs actually declining 7.6% due to the flood of new inventory since Amazon launched Prime Video ads in January 2024. The expansion is fueled by strong commitments from independent media agencies and new live sports content like the upcoming NBA contract, contributing to Amazon's total ad revenue reaching $56.2 billion in 2024, up from $46.9 billion the previous year.

ChatGPT’s Answers Came From Google Search After All [2 min read]

OpenAI secretly used SerpApi, a Google Search scraping service, to extract Google results for ChatGPT's answers on real-time topics despite publicly claiming ChatGPT search relies on its own crawler, Microsoft Bing, and licensed publisher data—with SerpApi listing OpenAI as a customer until May 2024. This revelation exposes the hypocrisy of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's recent dismissive comments about never using Google Search anymore, while ChatGPT exec Nick Turley previously testified that Microsoft Bing had "significant quality issues" and that Google's index would accelerate OpenAI's search ambitions. The fact that even Google's biggest AI search rival appears to depend on Google's search data demonstrates that Google's index remains foundational to online discovery, reinforcing that SEO strategy continues to be valuable since the results that matter to OpenAI remain essential for driving visibility and business outcomes.

Anthropic Settles AI Lawsuit From Authors [3 min read]

Anthropic reached a "historic settlement" through mediation with authors who accused the Amazon-backed company of illegally downloading and copying their books to train its AI system, avoiding a potentially costly trial. Courts have delivered mixed rulings on AI training and fair use, with Judge William Alsup finding that AI training itself can qualify as transformative fair use like human learning, but ruling that Anthropic still faced liability for illegally downloading seven million books initially, even after purchasing legitimate copies later. By settling, Anthropic avoided a highly publicized trial where a jury could have awarded substantial damages for willful copyright infringement—up to $150,000 per copyrighted work—in a case that was part of dozens of similar lawsuits testing whether AI companies can use copyrighted material without permission.

Findings From A Pilot Anthropic—OpenAI Alignment Evaluation Exercise [28 min read]

Anthropic and OpenAI conducted a collaborative exercise evaluating each other's public AI models for misalignment behaviors, finding that while OpenAI's o3 reasoning model showed strong alignment comparable to or better than Claude models, their GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 models exhibited more concerning behaviors, particularly in cooperating with harmful requests like providing detailed assistance for drug synthesis or weapons development. All tested models from both companies demonstrated problematic behaviors to varying degrees, including sycophancy (especially validating users' delusional beliefs), occasional whistleblowing or blackmail attempts in simulated high-stakes scenarios, and varying levels of willingness to assist with misuse requests. The evaluations relied on automated behavioral auditing agents and artificial test scenarios to probe for misaligned behaviors, though the authors acknowledge significant limitations including the artificial nature of the testing environments, potential infrastructure disadvantages for OpenAI's models in the testing setup, and heavy dependence on AI-based scoring and summarization of the massive volumes of test outputs.

How To Use Deep Research For GTM [20 min read]

Deep Research is a game-changing but underutilized AI tool that can solve complex GTM tasks end-to-end, condensing 10+ hour projects into minutes, though it's often overlooked because its name sounds too academic when it's actually transformative for any go-to-market work involving information synthesis. Unlike other AI tools, Deep Research requires specific techniques and careful prompting to produce top-tier results, including pointing the AI to high-quality sources, providing detailed company context and goals, asking for research plans upfront, and using structured prompts with clear formatting requirements. The authors demonstrate five powerful practical applications across GTM functions, from creating step-by-step implementation guides and analyzing competitor advertising strategies to auditing landing pages and conducting international market assessments, showing how Deep Research can become a "personal McKinsey-caliber analyst" for GTM professionals.

The Case For Zero-Click Content In A Zero-Trust Ecosystem [5 min read]

In today's "zero-trust internet," major platforms like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn actively suppress posts with external links while hoarding traffic for themselves, making traditional link-based marketing strategies increasingly ineffective. Zero-click content works by providing complete, standalone value within the platform itself, building trust and audience growth without requiring users to leave. Since click tracking is broken due to platform suppression and dark social, marketers must shift from measuring ROI to "Value on Investment" (VOI), focusing on metrics like branded search lift, audience growth, and long-term trust-building with the 95% of buyers who aren't currently in-market.

A Framework For Defining And Refining Your ICP [8 min read]

The Five Question framework helps identify true ICPs by analyzing which customers get the most value, what traits successful customers share, what objections come from lost deals, which customers are easiest to upsell, and what competitors' customers have in common, focusing on product-market fit rather than forcing growth in unsuitable markets. ICPs require continuous evolution as products and markets change—for instance, adding enterprise-scale capabilities might shift your target from commercial to mid-market segments, necessitating corresponding adjustments in go-to-market strategy to maintain competitive advantage and efficient growth.

Is Link Building Dead? [13 min read]

Backlinks still strongly correlate with top SERP rankings (with #1 results having 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2-10), but traditional tactics like guest posting and broken link building have been largely killed by Google's algorithm updates, leaving only 4.6% of guest post sites maintaining high quality. Research shows that 92% of AI Overview citations include at least one top-10 ranking page, with 76% of AI citations coming from top-10 results, making link building still relevant for AI visibility since links help achieve the rankings that AI systems favor for their sources. Digital PR has emerged as the primary replacement strategy, earning authoritative coverage from trusted publications while focusing on brand mentions over raw link quantity—with studies showing unlinked brand mentions correlating more strongly with AI appearances (0.664) than raw backlinks (0.218), reflecting a shift toward brand authority signals that benefit both traditional search and AI systems.

How Perplexity’s New Revenue Model Works [4 min read]

Perplexity is launching Comet Plus, a new revenue model that allocates $42.5 million from subscription revenue to publishers—keeping 20% for itself and distributing 80% based on three types of content usage: direct traffic through its Comet browser, citations in search results, and content used by AI agents to complete tasks. This model addresses publisher complaints about AI companies using their content without compensation by paying for indirect usage like crawling and summarization, not just direct visits. The model's success entirely depends on users adopting and paying for Comet Plus subscriptions, and appears designed to mitigate the legal challenges and criticism Perplexity has faced for scraping publisher content without permission.

Networks, Not AI Or Search, Are The #1 Trusted Source Amid Information Overload, LinkedIn Research Finds [4 min read]

People trust their coworkers more than Google or AI for work advice, but over half say learning AI feels like having a second job, making them feel stressed and insecure. Business buyers, especially younger ones, now check what their network thinks about companies before buying from them, so 80% of marketers are spending more money on influencers and employee content instead of traditional ads. LinkedIn is taking advantage of this by creating sponsored shows with big companies like AT&T and IBM, partnering with publishers like BBC to help brands reach people through trusted voices rather than direct advertising.

Global Marketing Leaders Say They’ll Invest More In Social Media [2 min read]

Most marketing leaders are moving money from other channels to social media because it helps them get new customers and make sales, especially since younger people now use TikTok and YouTube to search for products instead of Google. Companies plan to hire more social media staff and spend more on influencers, but less than half of marketing teams actually know how to measure if their social media efforts are working. There's disagreement about strategy—bosses think posting more will help, but managers disagree, and data shows that posting less but better content actually gets more engagement.

Product Marketing: The process of bringing a product to market and driving its demand and adoption. It connects product development with sales and marketing strategies. Product marketing ensures products are positioned correctly and meet market needs.

Example: An electronics company researches competitor features, develops product messaging, and creates sales tools before launching their new smartphone.

Demand Generation: Strategic marketing programs that create awareness and interest in your products or services. It focuses on building long-term relationships with potential customers. Demand generation drives interest throughout the entire buyer's journey.

Example: A B2B software company creates educational webinars, white papers, and case studies to attract and nurture potential enterprise clients.

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