TOGETHER WITH

It’s Tuesday and Bluesky’s newly-crowned CEO says the platform is motivated by one key belief: “the future of social media should serve the public good.”

Today’s News

🔉 YouTube cracks down on ASMR
🏍️ A motorbiker makes waves
📈 This week on the branded charts…
👀 Shorts shakes up viewer habits
🎤 KATSEYE goes Wild on YouTube

ASMR UPHEAVAL

ASMR creators have found themselves without channels after YouTube’s crackdown.

YouTube deleted top ASMR channels over content it deemed “sexually gratifying”

The nuke: ASMR creators ItsBunniiASMR, Slight Sounds, Nananightray, Roseasmr, Simoneasmr, and Janina Wilhelmsen opened their emails last week to an unpleasant surprise. YouTube had deleted their channels without prior warning.

The platform informed them they had “severely violated” its policies, and that “[e]xplicit content that’s meant to be sexually gratifying isn’t allowed on YouTube.”

In a later comment to 404 Media, YouTube said the creators had violated its external link policy, which says creators can’t link their channels to content that’s against YouTube’s TOS, even if said content is hosted on an entirely different platform.

Some of these creators do post NSFW ASMR content, but say they keep that content completely separate from their YouTube videos. Slight Sounds, who’s been posting ASMR videos online since 2013, said she thinks her content was targeted because “people, especially men, confuse closeness and intimacy with sex.”

“I think that ASMR has always had this undercurrent of: No matter what you do as a woman in ASMR, someone is going to find it sexual. Someone’s going to call it weird. Someone’s going to fetishize it.”

Slight Sounds

The policy: YouTube targeted these channels under established policies, but creators say its policies aren’t clear, and that their safe-for-work content—often aimed at helping viewers relax, sleep, or calm down from panic attacks—is being incorrectly labeled “gratifying.”

This case is also a wake-up call that, via its external link policy, YouTube considers any content that creators link to within its purview, regardless of where that content is hosted.

🌟 SPONSORED 🌟

VidSummit has unveiled its 2026 speaker lineup. Here’s a sneak peek:

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Meet the speaker behind one of VidSummit’s hottest sessions: “How I Get 50 Million Views: Dr. Plants Takes the Stage”

Dr. Plants is one of the fastest growing YouTube channels in the creator economy, averaging over 50M views per video. His nature-themed content has attracted more than 670M views and 5.5M subscribers on YouTube alone.

At VidSummit, Dr. Plants will join 70+ other expert speakers—including Financial Audit creator Caleb Hammer, Hammer Media President & COO Robert Kaliati, and award-winning streamer Cody "Clix" Conrod—to share actionable growth strategies you won’t discover anywhere else.

VidSummit 2026 will run from September 29 to October 1 in Dallas, Texas. Visit the website to claim your spot:

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HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

Edward combines motorbiking with morality skits.

A motorbike creator named Edward is making waves on YouTube after adding 400,000 subs in a single week and rising to #12 in our ranking of most-subscribed YouTube channels. (Tubefilter)
Some creators are facing backlash after attending an OpenAI brand retreat designed to familiarize influencers with ChatGPT Work (TechCrunch)
The European Union’s AI Act has officially gone into effect, requiring social media platforms to “label any AI-generated or manipulated image, audio, and video deepfake content that’s designed to look real.” (The Verge)
A survey conducted by researchers at the University of Milano-Bicocca suggests that children who join social media earlier in life may perform worse in school than peers who open accounts later on. (Gizmodo)

GOSPEL STATS 📈

This week’s Brand Report is all about twinning.

Are YouTube viewers treating long-form videos like Shorts?

The good news: Long-form YouTube videos are still popular—but according to a recent report, the arrival of Shorts may have changed the habits of the typical U.S. YouTube user.

That insight comes from Metricool’s 2026 YouTube Study, a broad survey of the platform that incorporated data from 799,718 videos across 71,177 accounts. One of the report’s key findings is a win-win for creators of long and short-form content alike. Year-over-year, YouTube videos are getting more views on average—regardless of format.

On the long-form side of the platform, Metricool found that views are up 76% year-over-year, while watch time has risen by 11%. Shorts traffic, meanwhile, has more than doubled year-over-year, with 61% of all measured views now coming from the Shorts feed. Overall, YouTube now reaches nine out of every ten Americans.

The concern: The most notable result of Metricool’s 2026 YouTube Study, however, could spell trouble for advertisers. While viewers are watching more long-form videos, they’re moving on to the next one at a rapid pace, with much less average watch time than in previous eras. According to Metricool, YouTube’s long-form engagement is down 45% year-over-year. Even on the Shorts feed, where YouTube now facilitates longer videos, the average view duration has fallen dramatically.

So while Shorts may not be cannibalizing long-form videos—as many creators initially feared—long-form videos are behaving more like Shorts. As indicated by a 51% year-over-year drop in YouTube ad impressions, that trend has massive ramifications for advertisers. After all, if viewers are clicking away earlier, then there are fewer opportunities to serve mid-roll ads.

Metricool’s solution to that problem involves gaming the algorithm with a more restrained approach to posting. The report recommends “2-4 videos per week” as “the sweet spot for maximum long-form video views.”

WATCH THIS 👀

Will KATSEYE be BTS’ YouTube successor?

The KATSEYE is out of the bag

The BTS successor: Once upon a time, BTS was a regular chart-topper in our Global Top 50. Now, however, the group’s recent decision to omit their music from Grammy consideration seems to suggest that BTS is ready to tone down their fame.

That step back would leave room in our YouTube charts for the next big pop sensation—and another HYBE product seems ready to fill that gap. KATSEYE, a “global girl group” associated with the same K-pop hitmaker that brought BTS to the world, is thriving on YouTube, where its lifetime view count totals nearly ten billion.

As fans await the group’s upcoming album, Wild, a single called “Animal” has been lighting up the YouTube charts. Even during a week when other channels saw their viewership drop, the song allowed KATSEYE to snag 347.7 million weekly views—twice as much traffic as they earned the previous week.