|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Six reasons Meta is in trouble
The news last week that Meta was having a bit of a bumpy time didn’t come as a complete shock. This piece in the New York Times has a go at explaining why – from Apple, Google and TikTok to metaverse investment, looming regulation and anti-trust rulings. But basically growth can’t continue for ever.
What did surprise me was some of the ‘Facebook is doomed’ narrative that quickly appeared after the news broke that user numbers were down for the first time. Jeff Jarvis took to Twitter to express his belief that within a couple of years we’ll all be laughing at the idea Facebook was ever a threat to democracy and that it couldn’t go the same way as MySpace and Alta Vista.
Meta isn’t MySpace and this isn’t 2010. Meta still has 1.9 billion users and rapid growth across multiple platforms outside the Western bubble. As much as we’d all love to see the wings of this particular network clipped, dreaming that it’s done is exactly that… a dream.
News Corp cyber-attack: firm says it believes hack linked to China
News Corp has had a rough week too. A hack of emails at the Murdoch company has raised fears for the safety of journalists’ confidential sources. This is obviously serious, especially with the perpetrators allegedly linked to China. But it did raise a rueful smile to think of the owners of the scandal-ridden News of The World complaining about being hacked.
For the first time, Amazon reveals $31.2 billion revenue from advertising
In much better news, for Amazon at least, advertising revenues have risen to more than $30 billion. The company included advertising numbers in its latest earnings results, the first time ad revenues have been broken down. Maybe surprisingly ads, although accounting for just 7% of revenue in 2021, brought in more money than subscription services. Keep an eye out for expansion in this area of Amazon’s business.
Of course young people can afford a home, says daughter of Baroness
Normally when we include links we want you to read the stories we share. Please don’t read this one, it’s ridiculous and yet another example of how out of touch much of the British media is. Listen instead to our interview this week with Sophia Waterfield who rather than this tiresome aristocratic bollox wants to see proper working-class representation in the media.
This content originally appeared in The Media Roundup, a daily newsletter from Media Voices. Subscribe here:
