Tag: pay

Netflix finally learns the oldest rule in Hollywood: Hits matter

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Netflix is dramatically upping its content spend in 2021—to $17 billion—signaling that it will be making more bets on big movies and TV shows as it fights to fend off competitors like Disney Plus and HBO Max. While the latter have built-in access to popular franchises like Star Wars and Wonder Woman due to their Hollywood studio parents, Netflix has had to buy its way into the franchise business. It recently made a deal with Sony to become the streaming home to Marvel films such as Spider-Man and Venom , and it paid $465 million for the two sequels to Knives Out , the whodunit thriller starring Daniel Craig. As co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on an earnings call on Tuesday, “big event content” is crucial to the company’s strategy going forward. Indeed, these big bets on known film entities (up until now, Netflix had mainly splurged on TV showrunners such as Shonda Rhimes, whose first big project, Bridgerton , was one of the few bright spots for the company so far in 2021) are likely to continue as the streamer wades into ever-more competitive territory and tries to maintain the momentum it enjoyed in 2020 as COVID-19 kept people strapped to their couches. On the earnings call, Netflix announced that its subscriber growth was slowing this year: In the first quarter, it added nearly 4 million subscribers, short of the 6 million it had projected. The news sent the company’s stock falling in after-hours trading, down 11%. Read More …

Amy Klobuchar: Apple, Google app store rules are “pretty outrageous”

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Executives from Apple and Google will testify in front of Congress on Wednesday, and are likely to face tough questioning about the way they manage their respective app stores. Apple’s chief compliance officer Kyle Andeer and Google’s senior director of government affairs Wilson White will appear in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, which is chaired by Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. The hearing  comes as Congress readies legislation that could revamp antitrust law to better deal with 21st century monopolies, and better arm government agencies to enforce the law. The main topic of discussion will be the revenue sharing requirement imposed by the app stores on developers. Larger developers must pay 30% of their app or subscription revenue to Apple or Google during the first year of inclusion in their respective app stores. Many developers, whether they’ll say so publicly or not, think the 30% fee is onerous. Some have spoken out, including the music app developer Spotify, the dating app developer Match Group, and the Bluetooth tracker app developer Tile–and all will testify Wednesday. They’ll likely find some sympathetic ears on the other side of the room. You can’t argue that telling consumers they can get a better deal another way somehow jeopardizes security.” Sen. Amy Klobuchar “The 15% to 30% tax is such a whopping amount of money that the companies are charged for advertising on the app store,” Klobuchar told me on Tuesday evening. “The thing that I noticed myself was, like other consumers, I sometimes wonder why I can’t get that app on the app store–what’s wrong with that company? I never understood it until I looked at this [app store issue], and it’s because they don’t want to pay that amount of money.” Klobuchar says she hopes hopes her committee can learn some things about the app stores and the app economy by hearing both sides of the debate. But, she said, it’s also important that the public learn about the business practices of Apple and Google. She zeroes in on the fact that Apple makes it very hard for developers to avoid using its In-App Payment system, and paying the 15% to 30% fee. Read More …

The devastating cost of the Big Tech billionaires’ immense wealth

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COVID-19 was a boon for the superrich. There are few better examples than the founders, CEOs, and spouses of the five Big Tech giants: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Mackenzie Scott, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Apple’s Tim Cook and Laurene Powell Jobs. I call them the tech barons. The recently released Forbes World’s Billionaires List includes some shocking figures about our tech overlords. At the start of 2020, the tech barons were collectively worth $419 billion. A year later, their wealth had soared to $651 billion—a 56% increase. The hoarding of that wealth harms us all: It distributes resources away from those who need it most and, by allowing the tech barons to influence government policy, corrodes democratic society. Most of us will never grow our wealth by 56% in a year. But wealth begets wealth Read More …

PearPop wants to boost your social following by connecting you to TikTok stars for collabs

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In the social media ecosystem, there are influencers seeking new revenue streams and aspiring influencers looking to grow their followers. PearPop wants to be the bridge that connects the two. PearPop, which launched last October, is a platform where users pay TikTok influencers to collaborate on content. The influencers set their price for a duet, stitch, or sound (prices range anywhere from $15 to $3,333 per post), and users have the option to pay outright or bid a higher amount if there’s strong demand. In turn, that access to top influencers could boost a growing account. It’s an idea that’s catching on with investors and creators. PearPop recently announced raising $16 million in a Series A led by Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, with angel investors including Gary Vaynerchuk, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Mark Cuban, Snoop Dogg, and YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast. PearPop currently has more than 10,000 creators on the platform (including such celebrities as Heidi Klum, Snoop Dogg, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kerry Washington) and has facilitated more than 1,000 transactions. (The company takes a 25% cut.) These early collabs have yielded some success stories. Model Leah Svoboda went from 20,000 to 141,000 followers after a PearPop duet with Anna Shumate (10.2 million followers). After musician Tobias Dray collaborated with Katelyn Elizabeth  (1.6 million followers) for $25 using one of his tracks as a sound on TikTok, that song got a bump from being used 30 times to 671. “I always thought there should be a way to pay someone to collaborate with you directly,” says Cole Mason, founder and CEO of PearPop. “It blew my mind that there wasn’t a way to do that.” Making a market Cole Mason [Photo: courtesy of PearPop] It’s easy to compare PearPop to the celebrity shout-out platform Cameo , but PearPop is establishing a distinct lane by creating a two-sided exchange with creators: High-level influencers earn revenue and budding influencers gain social capital Read More …

Would a ‘SNAP’ program for broadband help bridge the homework divide?

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Sarah Kelsey is an instructional coordinator at Greenup County School District in eastern Kentucky. Her school population is mostly rural and internet access is limited. “The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a lot of unequal learning experiences for our students,” Kelsey said. “About 25 percent of our students don’t have access to internet, which is causing a great deal of students to fall behind.” The experience of Greenup County Schools   is unacceptable, but unfortunately all too common. At a time when access to educational opportunities are so critical for long-term success, an estimated 17 million students in unserved and underserved communities lack the connectivity that makes distance learning possible. And new research from the Morning Consult shows that while more than three quarters of parents and teachers are concerned about today’s homework gap, more than 70 percent also expect the traditional classroom learning environment to rely more heavily on technology after the pandemic. If we think this is a problem just for parents, we are wrong. Policymakers and business leaders should also be concerned. The digital divide has been with us for much too long, and now poses a crisis to education that threatens an entire generation of leaders and innovators. The stakes are high, and Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy online learning platform, described them to us: “Even when the school districts, the cities and the local telecom carriers have done heroic efforts to get kids internet access, there are still 10-15% of the kids that are disengaged. If we don’t really engage them, we are going to see long-term consequences for economic viability.” (Khan Academy is among our collaborators as we work to bridge the homework gap by providing free services, devices and educational content to schools and communities.) AT&T is helping by providing free hotspots and internet to students around the country. Earlier this year we provided Sarah Kelsey’s district in Greenup, Ky., and more than 100 organizations and schools with free wireless hotspots and connectivity as part of our $10 million Connected Nation commitment. And today AT&T is committing more than $2 billion to deepen our relationships while expanding affordability and subsidies over the next three years to help bridge the digital divide Read More …