Alphabet Finally Breaks Out YouTube Revenue
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| Alphabet Finally Breaks Out YouTube Revenue | |
| Number | 1040 |
| Broadcast Date | FEBRUARY 4, 2020 |
| Episode Length | 4:52 |
| Hosts | Sarah Lane |
The semiconductor industry slumps, Google says Takeout may have sent videos to strangers, Facebook gives parents more control in its Messenger Kids app.
Headlines
- Shadow, a company affiliated with and funded by Acronym, which is a Democratic digital nonprofit group, was responsible for building the Iowa caucus app that contributed to delays in reporting Monday night’s results in the first vote in the party’s presidential race, according to sources speaking with the Huffington Post. State campaign finance records show the Iowa Democratic Party paid Shadow more than $60,000 for “website development” late last year. A source says those payments were for the app that caucus site leaders were supposed to use to upload the results at their locales.
- In Alphabet's fourth quarter earnings report, the company revealed that YouTube generated nearly $5 billion in ad revenue in the last three months. This is Alphabet's first report with Sundar Pichai at the helm, who took over as CEO of the entire company late last year after co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped back from day-to-day duties. Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion, but this is the first time the company has broken out YouTube ad revenue numbers. Google says YouTube has more than 20 million subscribers across its Premium and Music Premium offerings, and more than 2 million subscribers to YouTube TV. Alphabet bundles those numbers into its “other” category, which made $5.3 billion last quarter and also includes Pixel phones and Google Home speakers.
- Twitter announced that it identified and shut down what it deemed “a large network of fake accounts,” as well as many others “located in a wide range of countries,” that were abusing a bug in Twitter’s Android app, letting people submit millions of phone numbers through an official API, which returned the associated user account. In the EU, connecting a phone number is an opt-in feature. But for the rest of the world it’s opt-out. In a statement, Twitter wrote, "We observed a particularly high volume of requests coming from individual IP addresses located within Iran, Israel, and Malaysia…It is possible that some of these IP addresses may have ties to state-sponsored actors."
- MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga says that the company pulled out of Facebook digital currency project Libra over concerns over compliance and the business model. Banga says the associated entities involved in Libra wouldn't vow to “not do anything that is not fully compliant with local law,” and says “all that . . . every time you talked to the main proponents of Libra, I said ‘Would you put that in writing?’ They wouldn’t.” He also says he took issue with Facebook positioning Libra as a financial inclusion tool but then proposing linking it to a proprietary digital wallet, Calibra.
- Facebook's Messenger Kids app now has new options for parents. Parents will now be able to see more details about who their children are messaging with, if there are video calls being made, and a history of anyone they’ve blocked. Parents will also see a log of recent images their child has sent and received (with the option to remove and report it if it’s inappropriate), and can log them out of devices remotely. Parents can also download all of their child’s information, like the data-download feature available in the main Facebook app.
- The semiconductor industry suffered its worst annual slump in almost two decades in 2019, the Semiconductor Industry Association said Monday in a statement. Revenue fell 12% to $412 billion in 2019, the biggest drop since 2001 with sales growing slightly in the fourth quarter from the preceding three-month period. Memory chip revenue dropped 33% from 2018 led by declines in computer memory. Sales in China fell 8.7%, according to the SIA, and sales in the Americas dropped the most of any region at 24%.
- Google is emailing users that its backup photo service, Google Takeout, may have sent files from November 21st to 25th, 2019 to other users by mistake, saying "some videos in Google Photos were incorrectly exported to unrelated users' archives." Google also says that backups made during that five-day period may be incomplete, but that the company has already resolved the issue and suggests deleting the export you made in November to make a new one. Google tells 9to5Google that 0.01 percent of Photos users were affected.
- Nvidia has begun letting users in North America and Europe sign up for its GeForce Now service, starting at $5 a month, while also offering unlimited one-hour free trials that don’t require a credit card. But unlike Google, Sony, and Microsoft’s similar offerings, Nvidia supports Steam, the Epic Games Store, Battle.net, and Uplay, all running in the cloud.
Links
| Preceded by: "West Virginia To Allow Mobile Voting for People with Disabilities" |
Alphabet Finally Breaks Out YouTube Revenue |
Followed by: "LG, ZTE Pull out of MWC" |