Hey creator,

My goodness, it was so hard to escape the news that Taylor Swift was appearing on her boyfriend’s podcast.

While everyone was very excited for the episode to drop, I was very excited to see that she chose a podcast to drop news about her 12th studio album: Life Of A Showgirl.

Taylor Swift gets it.

A year from now, we will see the clear distinction in podcasting pre-Swift and post-Swift.

Why? We dive into what this means for podcasting in today’s Worth The Read.

Now,

Let’s get into it 👇

BTW I hold 1:1 strategy sessions, which you can schedule here: https://calendly.com/smalleyjess/powerhour 

This issue will bring you up to speed on what’s happening in the creator economy:

• Quick Fire news headlines

• Worth The Read news stories

• Social Media Updates that you need to know about

• Check out my READ, LISTEN + WATCH recommendations for this week

Was this forwarded to you? Sign up here 🤙 

Quick Fire 🧨

• Supreme Court opens door to social media age-gating in US

• Instagram's new location-sharing feature is raising privacy concerns 

• Microsoft is trying to poach Meta AI talent and offering multimillion-dollar pay packages, internal documents show

• The Washington Post launches a creator network unit

Worth The Read

What Taylor Swift’s appearance means for podcasting

Taylor Swift, the popstar princess and business queen, appeared on her boyfriend’s very male-skewed podcast, New Heights.

There was just no way of avoiding the overwhelming news that Taylor Swift was appearing on a podcast.

Within 24 hours after the episode went live, it clocked in 13 million views just on YouTube alone.

So what does this all mean for podcasts?

No doubt, this is a highly orchestrated moment from Swift. I mean, she’s cleverly avoided speaking directly to traditional media to promote previous album announcements.

So it works entirely in her promotional favour that the last place we would guess would be a podcast. What a marketing genius.

But by far the biggest takeaway from all of this is that Taylor Swift is using podcasting to control her narrative.

For two hours, Taylor Swift controlled her narrative while simultaneously in conversation with her audience, chatting intimately about the things she knows we want to know about. Kelce brothers were just vessels who allowed that to happen. 

Because, while she did announce a new album, she also redirected and overshadowed the negative narratives that swirl around her. 

We listened to Swift share the moment when she found out from her mother that she successfully bought back her master’s,
“I just, like, very dramatically hit the floor … I started bawling my eyes out.”

This reveal comes after Scooter Braun, the former celebrity manager with whom Swift was publicly feuding, appeared on Diary Of A CEO podcast to assert his own experiences about the matter.

But, it still doesn’t answer the question: why choose Kelce’s audience and not her own? 

Well, if you believe the Super Bowl halftime rumours, Swift appearing on her boyfriend's podcast softly helps her win over the football crowd by showing that she’s directly engaging with them. 

So, despite not being a Swifty, I loove what this has done for podcasting. 

It sets a benchmark for how brands and marketers (many of whom still underestimate podcasting’s influence) should be thinking about the medium as a strategic platform in a world of fractured attention.

Socially Updated

Meta

• Prol Dashboard now has a fully-functional comments manager on the web, plus new metrics, ‘Popular with your Followers’ insights, and more

Instagram

• is upsizing posts to 1080x1440 on the main feed.

YouTube 

• increased its image limit from five to 10 photos per post.

• rolled out new call-to-action buttons for Promote campaigns, letting creators use "Book Now," "Get Quote," or "Contact Us".

The Dig

READ: MrBeast just surpassed 400 million subscribers on YouTube, and the channel continues to up its game with every single post. A question that haunts us all is, how?! So when we receive some form of insight into what goes on behind the scenes, we eat it up. Former employees anonymously share what goes into a viral MrBeast video.

LISTEN: Business is particularly difficult to distil into actionable steps. There are an innumerable number of variables, and oftentimes people don’t know how to communicate the lesson (I used to work for businessman Mark Bouris and saw this a lot). So it gets a certain corner of the internet excited when entrepreneurs and great communicators like Codie Sanchez, Alex Hormozi, Daniel Priestley and Steven Bartlett get together to record a roundtable about business. This is one of those episodes where you have to be ready to make notes and make time to listen to it twice.

WATCH: Former Editorial and Brand Director at FlightStory and Diary Of A CEO hire number 3, Grace Andrews, has left nest after spending 5 years helping Steven Bartlett scale his media business to what it is today. She’s decided to start a YouTube channel, kicking off her first vlog and taking you with her for the final week at Flight. Personally, I love hearing from someone in a similar work position to myself, and I love the scrapiness of it all. It’s not the best, most optimised vlog for YouTube, but she went ahead and hit publish anyway.