Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Begin: WordPress Article Content Amazon unveiled its own plans to compete in the user-generated video market with the launch of a new service called Amazon Video Direct in a surprise announcement this morning. This service, explains the company, allows creators to upload their own videos to Amazon’s Prime Video and generate royalties based on the hours streamed. Creators…
Today in Tedium: How arrogant do you have to be to name your product after an entire country, to assume that you’ve earned that right? On Tuesday, the no-longer-American company Anheuser-Busch InBev announced that it was temporarily changing the name of its inexplicably popular beverage Budweiser to America, ahead of the 2016 election. “It’s something…
JPMorgan Chase paid its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, $27 million in 2015. In another Wall Street universe, the hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin made $1.7 billion over the same year. Even as regulators push to rein in compensation at Wall Street banks, top hedge fund managers earn more than 50 times what the top…
With the backdrop of the Olympics and a comically botched election, this summer is bound to be what Ricardo Marques, a vice president from Budweiser, calls “maybe the most American summer ever.” So Budweiser is going to potentially ingenious, potentially absurd branding extremes. The company has kept the same can you already know, but…
I got my start writing for the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin. What is interesting about that statement is that the appropriate follow-up question is “Which student newspaper?” For many years Wisconsin was unique in being the only university with two daily newspapers, both with five-digit print circulations. The older paper, The Daily…
Illustration: Jim Cooke We are, right now, in the midst of a digital media upheaval. What was previously conventional wisdom—that a media company with hopes of turning a profit needs, above all, to achieve scale—is being proven false. The new conventional wisdom is that video will be digital media’s savior, but it is only a…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, we had both the founder of AdBlock Plus Till Faida and Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO Randall Rothenberg on our stage — but not at the same time, mostly because Rothenberg refused to even shake hands with Faida in public. Rothenberg minced no words in his dislike…
Moderators of Reddit’s popular technology subreddit, which boasts more than 5 million subscribers, are considering banning links from publishers, specifically Wired and Forbes, that force users to disable ad-blocking tools to access their sites. In a message posted yesterday, r/technology moderator “cerq” signaled out Forbes for reportedly serving users malware when ad-blockers are turned off resulting…
Google is reportedly jumping deeper into the ad blocking issue by exploring an acceptable ads policy, publisher and industry sources say. Google, together with Facebook, controlled 64 percent of the digital ad market last year. With that clout, Google could have an outsized impact on the kinds of ad formats that become the industry standard. Intrusive and…
A cache of internal documents shows that despite growing revenue, Palantir has lost top-tier clients, is struggling to stem staff departures, and has recorded cash collections at just a fraction of its customer bookings. A trove of internal documents and insider interviews has pulled back the curtain on one of Silicon Valley’s most secretive and highly-valued…