📡 Who are you making money for?
Pulse #126 — Big tech’s monetisation of your attention + censorship.
First of all, here’s a little tune for you while you’re reading today’s newsletter.
Today, I’m gonna keep this piece short as I have included two excellent pieces in the Worth Your Attention section.
One’s about China’s ByteDance and its censorship machine from an insider who helped to build it.
The other one is about how big tech companies command and monetise your attention.
If you enjoyed the song above and want more of the same sort of music to listen to, you can do it here.
By the way, I’m always trying new things here, and you’re always welcome to share your feedback. just sayin’
News
Judge approves $650 million Facebook privacy settlement over facial recognition feature [link]
Stadia’s failure, Facebook’s Bars, and the next Batman comic series [link]
Twitter’s new features, ByteDance to settle, and Coinbase to go public (and the long way it’s come!) [link]
Clubhouse’s latest celeb, Australia & Facebook, and Bitcoin [link]
Australia and Facebook becoming friends again, Android’s new features and someone bought $170M worth of Bitcoin [link]
Spotify’s lossless audio, Apple’s lead in the smartphone market, and Google finally adds iOS’s privacy labels [link]
Zuck’s intervention, New malware discovered, and Metallica’s least metal music — ever! [link]
💃 a gift for you.
Worth Your Attention
An insider talks about ByteDance’s censorship machine. This applies pretty much to any social app in China. You need tens of thousands of human moderators + lots of automated systems scanning everything for any kind of sensitive discussion. The government will shut you down otherwise. [link]
Prof Scott Galloway talks about how tech is battling for our attention. From fitness to dating to news to travel to investing to cooking, every slice of our day is a battleground among tech players for our monetize-able attention. Two factors drive strategy in this battle: the value of the attention that firms command and the means to monetise that attention. Hence, a 2x2 matrix. [link]
Chart of the Week
US Offline Media Spend in 2020 & the Outlook for 2021
Total US advertising and marketing spent in 2020 dropped by 10.2% YoY to total $340.3 billion — $39 billion less than the annual spend in 2019. The brunt of the decline in spending was felt by offline media, which fell by 22.9% over 2019, totalling $171.9 billion.
Read more on MarketingCharts.
& more stats
The YouTube channels with the most subscribers [link]
Finance apps in Q4: downloads increased 15.2% YoY, sessions increased 20%, time spent in-app rose about 9% YoY [link]
Downloads for Business category apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams surged by approximately 132% in Europe during 2020 to 705.8 million [link]
Tools & Apps
Deep Nostalgia™: Animate your old family photos
this is the best use of deep fake so far!
Iceberger: Draw an iceberg and see how it will float
Work at Dunder Mifflin: The Office TV show ambient sounds
Humanotion: Free avatar pack, perfect for Notion
TimeBloc: Time blocking & schedule planning. [iOS | Android]
Ray.so: Create beautiful images of your code
Neumorphism CSS Generator: Soft UI CSS generator for front-end developers
Remind Me of This Tweet: reminds you of any tweet whenever you want
instead of bookmarking them
Spotted
Twitter keeps working on the Subscriptions feature — code name was “Rogue one” [link | link]
Twitter keeps working on limiting replies and reactions in DM for each Fleet [link]
Twitter is working on a Business Profile pilot [link]
Twitter Spaces is working on removed users lists in efforts to hold abusers accountable [link]
Instagram is working on a new sticker: ❤️ Send Love [link]
Snapchat continues to work on dark mode (screenshot) [link]
GitHub is working on customisable repository watch options for the mobile app [link]
TikTok is working on a new ending watermark [link]
You can now schedule the publishing of new TikTok videos [link]
Medium is working on ePub/e-book reader [link]
Google Search dark mode [link]
think a bit more 🤔
laugh a bit more 😂
and now we’re done for this week
What did you think of this issue?
Also, if you’d let me know what’s your favourite section of the newsletter and what you’d like me to write about in the first section, that’d be great. You can either reply to this email or just comment here 👇