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Twitter is over $13 billion in debt. Many advertisers like Chipotle and United Airlines have fled. But CEO Elon Musk said the social media company has a shot at hitting profitability and becoming cash-flow positive within a few months.
Here’s why Musk is optimistic about the company’s revenue comeback, and how his purchase contributed to Twitter’s cash problem.
Earlier this year Facebook parent Meta quietly formed a team to deal with an uncomfortable reality: the most popular posts on its platform were trash.
WSJ tech reporter Jeff Horwitz joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss the war room Meta convened to deal with the problem and why fixing it was so critical to the platform’s future plans.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has completed his $44bn (£38.1bn) takeover of Twitter, according to US media and an investor in the firm.
He tweeted “the bird is freed,” in an apparent reference to the deal closing.
A number of top executives, including the boss, Parag Agrawal, have reportedly been fired.
It brings to a close a saga that saw Twitter go to court to hold the multi-billionaire to the terms of a takeover deal that he had tried to escape.
Twitter has not yet confirmed the takeover, but an early investor in the company said that the deal had been completed.
Instagram’s short-form video feature Reels is far behind its biggest rival, TikTok. Internal research reviewed by The Wall Street Journal shows Reels is struggling to get people to watch and create content for the platform.
Substack co-founder and CEO Chris Best joins “TechCheck” to discuss the company’s valuation and disruption of the media landscape.
Musk, whose offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion was accepted by the company’s board in April, said the takeover deal was “temporarily on hold” amid concerns over the number of fake and spam accounts on the site.
Around two hours from his first tweet, Musk added he was “still committed to acquisition.”
Knocking down the wall of Web2 is going to take a Herculean effort. Everybody is aware of the problems when it comes to Web2, like the creepiness of data trackers such as cookies and the inordinate amount of knowledge that they provide about us. Despite these hesitations, consumers still like the convenience of the products. All that runs on advertising, and those advertising dollars are driven by sophisticated algorithms that track user activity on the site and elsewhere to feed ads to the user at the precise time that they are ready to buy.
Odysee is a platform that organizes video content on the LBRY content in a way that rivals Youtube.
Brendan Blumer, CEO of Block One, which started 2-1/2 years ago, introduces Dan Larimer, CTO, who outlines the past and introduces “Voice,” their new social media platform.
A year ago they released the EOSIO open source protocol, which Larimer describes as the “fastest, most scalable and most active blockchain software in the world.”
Balaji Srinvasan and Tim Wagner from Coinbase announce that EOS is now available to trade on their platform and that visitors can earn EOS by completing some lessons on EOSIO.
Wagner also notes that Coinbase is the only major crypto exchange that has not been breached.
Larimer announced EOSIO 2 with a “WebAssembly engine designed for blockchain,” which is 12x faster than what it was a year ago when launched.
He also announced WebAuthn to support blockchain private key safety, which was elaborated by Guido Appenzeller, of Yubico. He describes their hardware key as vastly more secure than any passwords.
Blumer comes back to note that “Social media has not been a good friend to us.” He further states, “Our content. Our data. Our attention. These are all extraordinarily valuable things. But right now it’s the companies, not the users, that reaps the reward. By design, they run by auctioning our information to advertisers, pocketing the profit, and flooding our feeds with hidden agendas dictated by the highest bidder.”
He states they are building a transparent social media platform on EOS where what’s good for the platform is good for people, too, with built-in accountability.
They call it VOICE.
Larimer returns to introduce the Voice token. It rewards users via contention creation and discovery. The rewards are then used to magnify your voice on their platform.
The platform authenticates real people as users, eliminating bot armies and anonymous controls.
The authentication of all users on the platform also establishes an EOS-based blockchain identity that can be integrated into other applications in the future.
Howdoo.io introduces itself thusly: “Imagine a single application that combines all the best features of existing social media apps, but with a radical new approach to putting users, communities, content creators, and advertisers together in complete harmony and control – alongside a whole new way of incentivizing and rewarding contributions. “
It will be launching in December 2018. Of course like every type of social media platform that has come and gone over the years, user adoption will be the key to its value.
It intends to be a full-featured social media platform, analogous to Facebook. However, users will be able to establish their environment and earn money for their activity.
Users could disable advertising if that would be their preference. Alternatively, users will earn a fair percentage of the advertising revenue they generate if they do allow it.
For more info on income opportunity by using Howdoo, visit 7 Reasons Creators Earn More on Howdoo.
The good news about blockchain hype is that the technology is becoming more known in society. The bad news is that there is plenty of misinformation and unflattering news.
If you’re reading this, it’s likely you already know blockchain is not synonymous with Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. But many conflate these together. So that’s a fundamental point of misinformation. Continue reading “Blockchain Social Media on the Rise”