BuzzFeed is trying to sell YouTube sensation Hot Ones for $70M
Poultry in motion Faced with a wall of debt and agitating activist investors , BuzzFeed is trying to sell one of its hottest commodities. But, after months of talks, the struggling media company is ye...
WSJ: It took 3 minutes for Instagram to show 13-year-olds adult-sex content
We all know that it’s possible to get to some very dark parts of Instagram . The Wall Street Journal and an academic researcher found that it also happens within minutes for young teens. Using new acc...
FTC refers TikTok complaint to Justice Department
The Federal Trade Commission took the unusual step of issuing a public statement saying it had referred a complaint involving TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, to the US Department of Justice,...
Musk’s X lost nearly half a billion dollars in the first quarter of 2023
Elon Musk’s plans to make X to be the " biggest financial institution in the world " look a lot like Venmo, the popular mobile payments app, Bloomberg reports , citing documents submitted to state reg...
Social media should get warning labels for teens, per Surgeon General
Doctor’s orders Just over a year ago, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy recommended that legislators, parents, and tech companies take steps to make social media safer for children in light of the y...
Streaming is still growing, but users are also cancelling subscriptions in record numbers
A record number of Americans were hitting the “cancel” buttons — or going through the often more convoluted channels to do so — on their streaming service subscriptions in the first quarter of 2024, a...
BeReal, the hottest app of summer 2022, is being acquired for ~$537M
The social media app which gives users a random notification once per day telling them that it’s “⚠️ Time to BeReal. ⚠️” once looked like the poster child of a new generation of stripped-back social m...
MrBeast's No. 1 YouTube spot is a springboard for his sprawling empire
MrBeast, aka 26-year-old Jimmy Donaldson, broke YouTube’s record to become the platform’s most-subscribed-to channel over the weekend. Since surpassing T-Series , a Bollywood-video channel that’s held...
Instagram tests unskippable ads but users and brands may not want it
Instagram made $32.4 billion in ad revenue in 2021, about 30% of Meta's total and about 12% more than YouTube did. Now it's looking to make a little more. The app confirmed it's testing out unskippabl...
Facebook is trying to win the youth in attempt to stay relevant
Facebook told Axios it’s starting to make progress luring back the young users who’ve seemingly vacated the platform . The company shared that it had 40 million daily active users aged 18-29 in the US...
Elon Musk participates in the election year
In case you’re still wondering which side Twitter owner Elon Musk is on, the New York Times is on it, tallying up his tweets. On his influential social media site, the billionaire is tweeting negative...
3 theories on why Vivek Ramaswamy is buying up BuzzFeed
If you asked me, like, eight months ago, what would be the funniest activist investment into a struggling public company, I think “Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy making a strategic ...
Trump Media is losing a ton of money
, the parent company of MAGA-centric social media site Truth Social, is incinerating a remarkable amount of money. The company lost $328 million in the first quarter, on revenue of just $771,000. Kee...
Lucrative beauty trends are very good for the skin-care industry, but very bad for teens’ skin
Nearly half of US tween girls use skin care and makeup, and many are getting advice from influencers on social media. That viral video influence has given rise to culty skin-care brands like Drunk Ele...
Your favorite social media guru is probably a bad stock picker
One of my favorite parts of 2020 and 2021 was the emergence of the “finfluencer” (finance influencer) on social media sites like Twitter, Reddit, and StockTwits. These influencers ranged from anonymou...
OpenAI teams up with Reddit for data licensing
OpenAI announced that it’ll license data from Reddit, and investors upvoted Reddit’s shares on the news. (Fun fact: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman owns nearly 9% of Reddit’s stock.) For , the deal’s an expansi...
Here’s what Elon Musk’s X.com domain used to look like
Twitter, or what Elon Musk calls X, now uses the URL X.com. A year and a half after he took the social media company private, its rebrand as X is complete. For what it’s worth, Twitter.com still takes...
Profits up more than 3X at Korean noodle maker... thanks to TikTok
Marketing used to be a slow affair. You’d set a budget, make an ad, show it to potential customers, and hope they buy your product. Today, all of that effort is often bested by simply going viral on T...
The majority of Reddit’s user growth came from logged out users
At one point yesterday, Reddit shares were up over 15% (before fading in later trading) as the social media platform posted its first set of results since going public in March. The TL;DR breakdown? D...
SNAP shares soar, as international users continue to drive growth
Sometimes, it helps to see the bigger picture. Shares of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat, are up more than 30% in the last last week after posting better-than-expected results for the most rece...