| | Why Disney+, Paramount+ and Legacy Media Streamers Can’t Escape the Past | By Andrew A. Rosen | PARQOR is part of The Information’s newsletter network. To receive it in your inbox every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, sign up here. Cultural criticism is not investment advice. But investors with emerging concerns about the future of streaming business models will find their echo in a criticism of streaming services’ vast content libraries from journalist and author Chuck Klosterman. Klosterman gave a must-listen interview to the “Longform” podcast on his recently released book, “The Nineties,” in which he mused on “the slow cancellation of the future.” Movies in the 1980s looked dramatically different from movies in the 1960s, he claimed, whereas movies today are all but indistinguishable from movies in the aughts. The same goes for music. “Maybe there’s nothing inherently bad about it,” Klosterman said. But the consequence is that “because we have such immediate access to the entire history of all art, all political thought, all literature, all of that, it’s very difficult to come up with something that is sort of a move beyond what is already there.” And the culprit? “It’s got to be the internet. That’s the only explanation.” Culture has become “a very shallow ocean,” vast but eminently searchable. While the internet originally “seemed like the ultimate accelerant of culture,” when it became ubiquitous, “it made it so difficult to get beyond the present moment in a creative way,” he said. |
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his outline for a new corporate culture — including the new motto "Meta, Metamates, Me" — in an employee memo he posted on Facebook on Tuesday. The update follows Meta's rebranding from Facebook in December and its $240B plummet in market cap earlier this month, the largest single-day wipeout in U.S. corporate history. More: - In the memo, Zuckerberg said Meta is now "a distributed company" and expressed plans to "continue hiring around the world."
- "Meta, Metamates, Me" is meant to reflect the "sense of responsibility" that Meta workers have to the company's success and to each other, he wrote.
- The saying is inspired by the naval adage of "ship, shipmates, self," which Instagram has used internally.
- The "Metamates" part was coined by Douglas Hofstadter, a cognitive science professor and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid."
Related: - Zuckerberg also announced that Meta's value of "Move Fast" will be updated to "Move Fast Together." The company's other mottos include "Build Awesome Things," "Live in the Future," "Focus on Long-Term Impact," and "Be Direct and Respect Your Colleagues."
- Facebook will also change the name of its “News Feed” feature to “Feed.”
- The company is shifting its business model and corporate values as it rebrands from a social media-centric company toward the metaverse, a potential successor to the mobile internet.
- Meta's shares fell precipitously following its Q4 results in early February, wiping over $200B from its market cap. Meta reported fast-growing costs and expenses as well as a lower-than-expected revenue outlook for the current quarter.
Just when it looked like Wall Street’s shellacking of Meta Platforms’ stock had ended, we got more news today that reinforced anxieties about the company formerly known as Facebook. Yes, Google’s announcement that it will follow Apple in curtailing ad tracking can only make life harder for Meta’s ad business. (For more on Google’s plans, see our analysis.) And as Google was relatively unaffected by Apple's changes, you would think Google's advertiser advantage over Meta should improve further as a result of Google's own changes. Certainly that appears to be how Wall Street sees things. Meta stock fell 2% today, bringing its year-to-date decline to about 36%. Shares of Google parent Alphabet, meanwhile, inched up fractionally and are down only about 5% for the year to date. On a price-earnings multiple basis, Alphabet now trades at a significantly greater premium to Meta than has been true, on average, since 2018, according to data from Koyfin. But is the future path for the two companies really as different as the stocks imply? Let’s assume the bears are right and Meta’s ad business has peaked. The real question is whether Google can continue to increase its dominance of digital advertising for that long. Already there are multiple antitrust lawsuits filed against the company, including a very detailed one from the states attacking its stranglehold on the digital ad tech market. Congress is also targeting it. It seems doubtful that Alphabet will extricate itself from the antitrust morass without some restructuring that weakens its ad tech business. Then there is the matter of the market. Any user of Google search has probably noticed how ads have slowly consumed more of the list of search results, a point made compellingly in this web post on Tuesday, memorably headlined “Google Search Is Dying.” It argues that Reddit has become a better place to search than Google, at least on certain subjects. Google’s search engine may very well be alienating users, which at some point will hurt its ad business. It’s conceivable that we’ll look back on this moment and realize that Meta’s ad engine was not the only one that had peaked. As WEST 2022 opened, current and former Navy leaders were looking over the horizon, to China's modernization and Russia's buildup around Ukraine. Closer to home, they asked product makers and program managers to consider various supporting elements of their new weapons and gear—things that look great on paper won't work if training, maintainability, and even user interfaces aren't considered near the beginning of the design process. And the CNO adds: we need a 2022 appropriations bill, and soon. Watch, here: Read more » | The money will come from the almost $7 billion earmarked for battery infrastructure in last year's infrastructure package. |
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 | | | Tiger Global, D1 Capital Signal Pullback From Big Private Tech Deals Amid Market Rout | By Berber Jin | Responding to a steep sell-off in technology stocks, some hedge funds and other investment firms with large public stock portfolios have been turning away from investing in the most mature startups, reducing what’s been a crucial source of funding for the better part of two years. Instead they are focusing on buying beaten-down public tech stocks or investing in younger startups. Tiger Global Management told its investors in a webinar earlier this month that it would no longer focus on backing large, late-stage startups preparing to go public, said a person with direct knowledge of the discussion. Instead, partner Scott Shleifer said the New York hedge fund would focus on investing in younger firms in Series A and B rounds, the person added. Shleifer did not elaborate on the reason behind the shift in strategy, but it followed the sharp decline in tech stocks over the past three months. Other hedge funds including D1 Capital Partners, which invested in dozens of startup deals in the past couple of years, and smaller firms such as Octahedron Capital also have slowed down the pace of new late-stage private investments, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. These firms, also known as crossover funds, are instead focusing on buying shares of public tech companies that have sunk in value compared to the all-time highs they traded at last year. | |
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Cost of cover in the US more than doubled in the fourth quarter and is set to carry on rising FEBRUARY 14, 2022 by Oliver Ralph  | | | What’s Driving Amazon and Walmart’s Ad Prices in Different Directions | By Mark Di Stefano | While the cost to buy ads on Amazon’s main marketplace has surged in the past year, prices at Walmart and Instacart have dropped as these retail rivals have added more ad space. The divergence suggests the companies eager to copy Amazon, which has created a $31 billion ad powerhouse, may have success luring merchants by touting cheaper ad prices. Brands and third-party sellers saw the cost per click of a sponsored product ad on Amazon rise 14% last year to $1.36 by the fourth quarter, according to proprietary data from Pacvue, which places ads for big brands like Duracell and Unilever. But the average cost per click fell more than 31% for Walmart and 28% for Instacart, according to Pacvue’s data. |
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The proliferation of new financial technologies calls for better cross-border regulation and supervision FEBRUARY 14, 2022 by Eswar Prasad
| | | Tiger Global, D1 Capital Signal Pullback From Big Private Tech Deals Amid Market Rout | By Berber Jin | Responding to a steep sell-off in technology stocks, some hedge funds and other investment firms with large public stock portfolios have been turning away from investing in the most mature startups, reducing what’s been a crucial source of funding for the better part of two years. Instead they are focusing on buying beaten-down public tech stocks or investing in younger startups. Tiger Global Management told its investors in a webinar earlier this month that it would no longer focus on backing large, late-stage startups preparing to go public, said a person with direct knowledge of the discussion. Instead, partner Scott Shleifer said the New York hedge fund would focus on investing in younger firms in Series A and B rounds, the person added. Shleifer did not elaborate on the reason behind the shift in strategy, but it followed the sharp decline in tech stocks over the past three months. Other hedge funds including D1 Capital Partners, which invested in dozens of startup deals in the past couple of years, and smaller firms such as Octahedron Capital also have slowed down the pace of new late-stage private investments, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. These firms, also known as crossover funds, are instead focusing on buying shares of public tech companies that have sunk in value compared to the all-time highs they traded at last year. |
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