💰 These Guys Make $100K/Month Selling Seeds

A few weeks ago I made the argument that Messi might actually be bad for MLS, and I’m officially doubling down… unless the league makes one change.

But they’ll have to credit Jaylen Brown for the idea. In the meantime, here’s what’s on tap for today:

🗞 The Big Story: 6-Figure Sunflower Seeds

📉 Biggest Loser: SI Gets Caught Using AI

🏆 Winner’s Circle: St. Louis is a Fútbol Town

🗞 The Big Story

Cole Schaefer and Brian Waddick make six figures per month selling sunflower seeds on TikTok.

And they might have just started a cottage industry worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

SMACKIN’s History: Cole and Brian were college roommates at the University of Minnesota when they realized that their sunflower seed selection had been the same for decades.

So in 2019, they started SMACKIN’ Sunflower Seeds and saw early traction fueled by viral organic TikTok videos.

But that model of selling seeds on TikTok has since evolved, to the point that even you could make thousands selling their seeds on the app.

TikTok’s Takeover: It’s no secret that TikTok is pushing its in-app shop like crazy. To give you a sense of what that looks like, consider this:

You’re scrolling through on the FYP in 2020 and the breakdown of 10 videos you might see would look like this:

• 7 organic videos (70%)

• 2 ads (20%)

• 1 live stream (10%)

But then the platform started realizing that in order to subsidize the payments it was making to creators, they had to make more money.

Enter: TikTok Shop

Now, when you scroll through 10 videos on your FYP, it probably looks like this:

• 4 organic videos (40%)

• 3 TikTok Shop videos (30%)

• 2 ads (20%)

• 1 live stream (10%)

These numbers are, of course, an estimation but it gives you a sense of the type of digital real estate TikTok is dedicating to videos promoting in-app purchases.

And it’s at the expense of organic videos.

A Cottage Industry Emerges: Creators took notice of this shift, and suddenly it became “easier” to go viral if you linked to a product on the TikTok Shop.

Plus you could earn a commission on top of it, and this is where SMACKIN’ comes back into the picture.

Cole told me that they have dozens of creators making thousands of dollars per post because of TikTok Shop.

In fact, one creator made $11,000 last month while another made $5,000 from just one post.

SMACKIN’ offers creators a 30% commission, meaning they have to sell 10,000+ bags of seeds to make this kind of money.

Seed Empire: Based on the figures Cole provided, I estimate that SMACKIN’ is pulling in upwards of $100,000 per month in revenue just selling seeds on TikTok Shop.

And heading into the holidays, there’s no sign of this trend slowing down.

📉 Biggest Loser

Sports Illustrated just got caught red-handed and their mistake could cost them millions.

Get Caught Up:

• SI has been publishing stories written by AI

• They're claiming these articles were written by real people

• They tried to hide the evidence when they were caught

Credit to Futurism for the great reporting on this, but they discovered some awkward-sounding articles published on SportsIllustrated.com that included phrases like:

“Volleyball can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with.”

A far cry from the award-winning journalism the company used to be known for.

But when Futurism did some digging into who wrote these clunky-sounding articles they realized the people credited for them weren’t real.

• They were AI-generated photos that you can buy online

• They used fake names and AI-generated bios

“David Ortiz” wrote the line about volleyball and is said to “enjoy spending much of his time outdoors” but when you search for a “neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes” on an AI photo generator site you get the same picture.

Which led Futurism to reach out to Sports Illustrated for comment, and instead of addressing the claims they just removed all of those articles from their site.

Denial: Now, it seems that Sports Illustrated’s parent company, The Arena Group, regularly cycled through these fake people to help hide the fact that they’re AI-generated, and existing articles were then just attributed to the new, fake writers.

Which is what happened to “Drew” this summer, when all of his articles were suddenly said to be written by a “joyful asian young-adult female with long brown hair and brown eyes” or as Sports Illustrated called her, Sora Tanaka.

What is Journalism: The articles that were being written by AI weren’t front-page stories but rather product review articles with affiliate links.

And as The Arena Group claims, they were paying another company called AdVon to produce these articles.

Now, AdVon obviously said these articles weren’t written by AI and The Arena Group took them at their word and released a statement basically saying all of these articles were written by real people.

The only issue is that The Arena Group has other publications like TheStreet, Men’s Journal, and Dealbreaker which have all been caught posting AI-generated articles.

Fallout: The Arena Group has managed to piss off all of the writers at Sports Illustrated who said this discovery was “horrific.”

And as for what’s next, well companies like OpenAI and Meta are all currently being sued by writers for using their original work as training data for these types of spammy articles.

And it’s quite possible that publications, like Sports Illustrated, who use AI to write articles and then lie about who wrote them could also be on the hook legally and have to pay out their own staff and readers millions in potential damages.

Not a good look.

🏆 Winner’s Circle

This is the coolest stadium in the country and you won’t believe what it cost.

MLS Expansion: When St. Louis was selected to host Major League Soccer’s 29th team, the design firm hired to build the stadium knew it wanted to draw heavy inspiration from SoFi Stadium.

There was just one problem, they didn’t have $5 billion to spend on a 100,000-seat stadium.

So instead they just took the most important aspects of it and built one of the nicest sports venues in America.

Stadium Design: CityPark was designed to feel accessible to the city around it:

• The pitch is set 40 feet below ground level

• All four corners of the stadium are open

All 22,423 seats are also within 120 feet of the field, giving the stadium that sort of hyper-condescended, ruckess European feel.

Stadium Tech: It’s also 100% ticketless, and cashless and was modeled after fast-casual restaurants like Panera and Papa John’s.

This inspired the use of checkout-free concessions around the stadium where you’re automatically charged as you pick up items, cutting down visit times to as short as 10 seconds.

Or fans can use the team’s custom-built app to order food and drinks ahead of time, which accounted for upwards of 45% of total concession orders during the team’s first season.

First-Year Success: CityPark’s technology-first approach returned pretty impressive attendance numbers in the team's first year, selling out every one of its 12 MLS regular-season home games in the 22,423-person stadium.

But by far, the most impressive part of all of this is that the stadium only cost $500 million to build and was completely privately funded but its female-majority ownership group - which is just 10% the cost of a new NFL stadium like SoFi and arguably just as fun an experience.

⏱ In Other News

• Is NCAA Football 24 back on track?

• What is Mark Cuban doing?

• Is David Tepper the worst owner in sports?

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👋 Happy Friday! If you’re looking for something to watch this weekend, might I suggest the YouTube video I just dropped?