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Short videos are in high demand. Across large platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, users watch billions of videos every day, and companies are benefiting greatly from this explosion of content. For content creators, this often means that there is pressure to create more content than ever before to be relevant and make a living from it, especially as more content emerges. Artificial intelligence generated slope Sneak in These platforms.
Jay New, content creator and former head of short video content at MrBeast, believes that AI can help content creators understand what works for them and also help them generate new content ideas in that direction. That’s why, in collaboration with former Palantir engineer Shivam Kumar and creator Harry Jones, they’re building a platform called Palo To help creative people.
Neo joined MrBeast when he was 18 years old to work on viewer retention. In a conversation with TechCrunch, he said he became interested in studying different metrics to understand where video viewership dropped.
“I was very obsessed with audience retention graphs and knowing why viewers stayed or why they left. I had a document where I wrote it all down. Gradually, my role shifted to having more responsibility around editing and thinking,” Neo said.
The crown jewel for Neo was a video in which the creator asked people on the street if they were going to travel to Paris Get the baguetteWhich received more than 1.8 billion views across channels. MrBeast ended up creating multiple videos in this format.
In 2023, Neo left MrBeast and started several channels under the “Creaky” brand with another MrBeast co-writer and expanded these channels to over 1 billion views per month.
Through these experiences, New realized that there is power in crafting content and analyses. During their time creating Creaky, the team had multiple spreadsheets tracking different metrics around videos. At the time, one of Neo’s advisors suggested turning these ideas into a product for creators, and he began working with the other Palo founders in early 2024.
Palo has three core parts to its application: a thinking and planning tool powered by AI, analytics, and community. The company hires a content creator and asks them to merge all their accounts. The tool then analyzes all of their short videos and provides insight into what works and what doesn’t.
Kumar, who is the startup’s CTO, said Balu uses a combination of models to extract a data tree containing insights about hooks, audience sentiment, topics of interest, originality, and potentially relevant search terms.
“The inference engine, which takes these basic data points and then uses a combination of the best masters in hierarchical clustering of these data points into a hot memory cache, embeddings that can be retrieved later semantically, and various other structured data formats,” Kumar said. “All these things together help us build a personality for the creator, one that is true to them and fully aware of their taste and style.”
AI Blueprint has a conversational interface, like any other chatbot, and creators can ask general questions about their content. Additionally, they can ask the tool to generate a script based on a formula. If someone is a more straightforward creator with less word in their clips, the tool can also create a storyboard with different hooks.
Right now, the community portion is fledgling and allows content creators to message each other.
In the testing phase, the company worked with about 40 creators with more than 1 million users across channels. Today, the company is opening its tool to creators with 100,000 followers at a starting price of $250 per month to use the tool, with more expensive tiers available for higher usage rates.
The company has secured $3.8 million in funding from Surge from Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India), with participation from NFX and retail investors.
Rajan Anandan, managing director of Peak XV, said the company was introduced to the Palo team by one of Nio’s mentors. He said the team’s experience of being part of successful creative teams and technical understanding pushed the company towards investing in the startup.
“Creators everywhere are looking for tools that make their process more seamless without taking away their voice,” he told TechCrunch. “Jay and the team had extraordinary clarity about where real value lies and where it doesn’t, which gave us strong conviction. AI is enabling a new class of identity-aware systems that learn deeply from the world’s best creators.”
The tool can help creators keep up with heavy content demands, said Josh Constine, a former TechCrunch editor and an investor in Palo.
“I experienced burnout as a creator, which is why I invested in Palo. The challenge today is that to keep up with the latest strategies and strategies to beat the algorithm, you have to spend hours a day consuming content, which I think rewires your brain to default to consumption rather than to making something new. This can lead to procrastination, writer’s block, and burnout,” Constine said.
Paloo’s launch comes at a time when there is clear tension between artificial intelligence and the creator community. platforms like Tik Tok, deadand Google They added more AI-powered tools for creators. As creators begin to use AI tools, people like MrBeast have spoken out About the negative impact it could have on the industry.
The primary challenge in creating AI tools for creators is to get them into the habit of creating similar content. Neo said Palo tries to nudge creators in a direction where they might succeed, and he acknowledged that good videos will still come from creators’ inner feelings.
“Here’s an analogy… When a comedian tries out new material on stage, he’s collecting data, consciously and subconsciously, about whether the audience is entertained or not. Each performance becomes an iteration, and each new audience benefits from what the comedian learned from the previous show. We believe AI could give creators a similar advantage,” Neo said.