🤓 What are you doing, Google?
Noone seems to be happy with the cookie nor its replacements.
👋 Welcome to FWIW by David Tvrdon, your weekly tech, media & audio digest.
In this edition
Google seems to be having trouble replacing the cookie
Chinese trouble with the Olympic app, China will try to control the weather using new technology and the Chinese version of Fight Club has a happy end
News media startups are again getting lots of funding
Forget cookies, forget FLoC, Google wants you to like Topics
In 2019, Google announced its plan for a cookieless future. The search giant has been feeling the heat because of privacy concerns and the plan was to introduce an alternative that could please activists and regulators around the world.
The first attempt was Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC which was harshly criticized by many industry experts, maybe the most by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
This week Google said it is abandoning that idea and introduced Topics API. Here’s how they are describing it:
With Topics, your browser determines a handful of topics, like “Fitness” or “Travel & Transportation,” that represent your top interests for that week based on your browsing history. Topics are kept for only three weeks and old topics are deleted. Topics are selected entirely on your device without involving any external servers, including Google servers. When you visit a participating site, Topics picks just three topics, one topic from each of the past three weeks, to share with the site and its advertising partners. Topics enables browsers to give you meaningful transparency and control over this data, and in Chrome, we’re building user controls that let you see the topics, remove any you don’t like or disable the feature completely.
OK, now let’s look at what that means.
The Washington Post quoted Wayne Blodwell, founder and CEO of the Programmatic Advisory, an adtech consulting firm, saying the new system is “basically pointless” for advertisers that are used to buying highly targeted ads.
He also added that Google is essentially using one website’s data to help other websites advertise more accurately.
The Post frames the move, and I agree with this assessment, that the new systems would give more control to Google and less to the advertisers it says it is defending.
So, advertisers are not liking the move and publishers are another group not happy with killing the cookie.
The Financial Times wrote a story about German publishers opposing Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookies. Not just them, but the whole online publishing world is highly dependent on using cookies to analyze users’ preferences.
I said it before and I will say it again, we are moving to an online world where everyone is serious about knowing its visitors better collect first-party data via registration of users. Easier said than done.
Also, I keep coming back to the case of Swiss publishers including the public broadcaster that came together to create OneLog, a single sign-on solution used across a variety of news sites.
Think of it as a Google/Apple/Facebook… sign-on but controlled by an alliance of publishers and not a tech giant.
I think Topics aren’t a bad idea from the point of view of the user and privacy concerns. But the fact it will be controlled by a tech giant without oversight or regulation should be troubling.
TECH
🤓 Google is also building an AR headset. Internally codenamed as Project Iris with the hopes to ship in 2024, Google’s forthcoming headset is poised to pit the search giant against Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Snapchat in the upcoming battle for the metaverse. Meanwhile, Apple might be delaying its device for next year. [The Verge]
😕 Nvidia is quietly preparing to abandon its purchase of Arm from SoftBank. The news comes after making little to no progress in winning approval for the $40 billion chip deal, according to people familiar with the matter. [Bloomberg]
🇪🇺 The EU parliament voted in favor of the Digital Services Act. [Euractiv]
Wired’s take on DSA is all said in the headline: The EU Has a Plan to Fix Internet Privacy: Be More Like Apple
📲 Apple is planning a new service that will allow small businesses to accept payments directly on their iPhones without any extra hardware. [Bloomberg]
📊 Earnings:
Microsoft beats on earnings, the revenue was $51.7B (up 20% YoY), LinkedIn revenue up 37%, Surface revenue up 8%, Teams had270 million monthly active users.
Tesla beats on earnings and revenue, says supply chain issues were ‘main limiting factor’, Elon Musk said the company would not release any new model vehicles in 2022. The company ended this year with $5.5 billion in net income, compared to $721 million in 2020.
IBM shares jump after the company reports 6% revenue growth in the fourth quarter.
🤨 Out of all the industries, people trust the tech industry more than any other. In a new survey, part of the Edelman Trust Barometer report for 2022, the tech sector earned a trust score of 74%. Social media, on the other hand, earned a score of just 44%. [Quartz]
🛻 The AirCar, a concept car from manufacturer Klein Vision, has been given the greenlight to take flight in Slovakia. [CNN]
🇨🇳 Some news from and about China:
China is expected to deploy innovative — and troubling — technology to control the weather at new levels of scale to ensure the Olympics come off clean. [Washington Post]
Journalists covering the Winter Olympics next month say they’ll do their work in Beijing on brand-new cellphones and laptops. The reason: Reporters are concerned that any devices they use there could become infected with tracking software, enabling Chinese authorities to spy on their contents. [Washington Post]
A report, published by the University of Toronto’s research and strategic policy unit Citizen Lab, found that the My2022 app, which will be used to monitor athletes’ health and travel data, has a “devastating” encryption flaw that leaves users’ files and media vulnerable. [The Guardian]
China changes the‘ Fight Club’ ending. The movie was recently added to Tencent Video, but unlike the ending we all know (everything blowing up in flames), the Chinese version has a happy end with the police arresting Tyler Durden. [Bloomberg]
📉 Cryptocurrencies have lost more than $1 trillion in market value since November. [Bloomberg]
MEDIA
📈 BBC News crossed 20m followers on Instagram, will not join TikTok. It is the first news account in the world to do so. There are two main questions the team behind the account is looking for: whether a story has good pictures and how to write it in the most engaging way possible. The BBC News account is run by a ten-strong social media team and drives 700-thousand clicks daily. [PressGazette]
📺 A TV show about WeWork’s downfall is coming to Apple TV+. WeCrashed stars Jared Leto (with an accent!) and Anne Hathaway, premieres on March 18th. [Trailer]
👨💻 POLITICO Magazine envisions the next 15 years in media. Almost every media newsletter I read shared it, yeah, it’s worth your while. [Politico]
🕺 YouTube vs. TikTok. Popular Youtuber Hank Green published a video critical of TikTok and creator funds saying those appear to be a good idea but YouTube’s revenue share is better for creators. [Protocol]
🎥 Substack is testing native video. Creators can also put a video behind a paywall. [Substack]
🎞 Can CNN’s hiring spree get people to pay for streaming news? We shall know the answer with the launch of CNN+ in late March. Still, I think a joint streaming service - HBO Max + Discovery Plus + CNN Plus would be a winner and I would love to have it all in one app. [NYT]
🥢🌏 Anime and Asian series were the most in-demand categories in 2021, according to Parrot Analytics, the global audience demand analytics firm. Japan’s Attack on Titan named the most in-demand TV show in the world in 2021, Korea’s Squid Game most in-demand series debut. [PA]
💸 Venture capitalists cumulatively pumped $1.4 billion into publishing startups in the U.S. and Europe last year, more than twice the investment of any previous year, according to research from Pitchbook. The last round of investors spending so much money ended years later in a disaster IPO of Buzzfeed. So, we will have to wait a few years to see whether all-new news startups survive. [Bloomberg]
🤔 Bradley Cooper on future of movie business. Maybe the most interesting part of this podcast interview was Cooper admitting from the perspective of a moviemaker how he is already having to do things differently because of streaming platforms. [KCRW]
FROM THE FIX
1️⃣ Most news organisations are bad at this
2️⃣ Kyrgyz officials arrest journalist following investigation into security services
3️⃣ Reasons for optimism: Edwy Plenel and Mediapart in France
4️⃣ Publisher growth strategies for 2022: Reuters Institute
[ 📬 Get The Fix newsletter delivered to your inbox every week with the latest insights, news, and analysis about the European media market. Sign up here > ]
AUDIO
🎧 In the UK, 94% of people listen to podcasts alone and 30% of all listening happens while working or studying. That’s according to the latest research from UK’s Radio Joint Audience Research. Live radio is still king, followed by music and then podcasts. [RAJAR]
🤜🤛 Spotify began removing Neil Young’s music from the streaming service after he posted a public letter calling on Spotify to choose between him and Joe Rogan. Rogan has been accused of spreading misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines. [NYT]
🎙 Anchor suggests 4 ways to make podcast analytics part of your show’s growth strategy. Some suggestions: Revisit your greatest hits to plan future content, evaluate episode drop-off to increase average listen time.[Anchor]
GAMING
🎮 Pokémon Legends: Arceus review. If you like the world of Pokémon, you will most likely be very happy with this game. I guess it’s time to charge my Switch and dust it off. [The Verge]
💊 Not exactly gaming news, but let’s say it’s gaming-related: A Mexican cartel used Grand Theft Auto to recruit drug mules. At least one player agreed to drive across the US border with what turned out to be a shipment of methamphetamines. [Forbes]
OTHER
👁️ In case you are looking for work, LinkedIn prepared a helpful guide. [LinkedIn]
👔 More Americans than ever are starting their own businesses. In 2021, Americans applied for a record 5.4 million business ID numbers. While business applications have increased in almost every industry since the start of the pandemic, the highest jumps were in retail, especially for stores that only sell things online. [Vox]
✈️ This is fun: A 19-year-old built a flight-tracking Twitter bot, tracking also Elon Musk’s jet who tried to pay him to stop. He replied: ‘I’ve put a lot of work into it, and $5k is just really not enough.’ Demanded 50k, but Musk hasn't replied yet. [Protocol]
❓ Poll: How often do you use the incognito/private mode in your browser?
🙌 Thanks. I used HandyPolls to create this poll (instructions).
Last poll results: Would you buy a smart TV with video call capability? 21% answered No because of privacy concerns, 20% think it should be a norm at this point and 20% said they used smartphones for video calls.