The company struck a deal with activist investors at Elliott Management and Silver Lake.
As part of that deal, Silver Lake will make a $1 billion investment in Twitter. Twitter's board has also authorized a $2 billion stock repurchase program.
The money comes with strings attached: Egon Durban, co-CEO and managing partner of Silver Lake, and Jesse Cohn, a partner at Elliott, will join Twitter's board.
Issie Lapowsky ( @issielapowsky) is Protocol's chief correspondent, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. She also oversees Protocol's fellowship program. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University's Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing.
Robinhood missed earning expectations on a 78% drop in crypto trading revenue, and shares dropped after hours.
Robinhood reported $365 million in net revenue compared to expectations of $431.5 million.
While crypto trading boosted Robinhood's revenue in the second quarter as the memestock frenzy cooled, crypto trading revenue dropped in the third quarter.
Crypto trading was $51 million in the third quarter, down 78% from the $233 million earned in the second quarter.
Options trading was $164 million or 29% of transaction revenue in the third quarter and equities trading made up $50 million or just 27%.
Shares were down 9.5% after hours.
Stripe and Klarna are taking on demand for "buy now, pay later" services together through a new partnership deal.
"Buy now, pay later" is currently a hot area within ecommerce and payments, and the two companies just agreed to make Klarna's "buy now, pay later" offering available to Stripe merchants.
This may be a case of "your enemy's enemy is your friend." Stripe and Klarna's competitors have been moving quickly in this sector signing deals: Square has agreed to acquire Afterpay, while Affirm have signed up Shopify and Amazon, and PayPal has its own Pay in 4 product.
Facebook has gone through the wringer in recent weeks. Luckily Mark Zuckerberg sees a billion-dollar opportunity at the end of the tunnel: digital clothes in the metaverse.
Zuckerberg said in the Q3 2021 earnings call Monday: "If you're in the metaverse every day, then you'll need digital clothes, digital tools, and different experiences. Our goal is to help the metaverse reach a billion people and hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce this decade."
He also referred to the metaverse as the "holy grail of online social experiences" and said it's something he's "wanted to build since even before I started Facebook."
The idea of making billions of dollars from virtual outfits isn't without precedent. Epic Games, for instance, has generated more than $9 billion in annual revenue from Fortnite, a free-to-play game that makes money in part by selling character "skins" to players for virtual tokens. Roblox employs a similar business model and generated $454 million in revenue for Q2 2021, up 127% year-over-year.
But both Fortnite and Roblox target younger audiences who have already become accustomed to the idea of paying money (often from their parents) for virtual outfits. Facebook wants to target a much larger segment of the population. Zuckerberg referred to the metaverse in the earnings call as "the next computing platform." He said it could help Facebook reduce its "dependence on delivering our services through competitors," which suggests it would be more akin to a mobile operating system than a video game.
Facebook might have a more difficult time convincing this broader user segment to join the metaverse, much less pay for outfits within it. Roblox and Fortnite users are typically in those virtual environments to play games first and foremost. Those games happen to be fun, enticing users to spend hours a day in these "metaverses." It isn't yet clear how Facebook will attract users to its metaverse, and without that key component, planning for the billion-dollar digital clothing economy feels premature.
A consortium of blockchain companies, NFT gaming firms and the nonprofit Fight for the Future are calling on Valve to reverse its blockchain ban in an open letter published Tuesday.
Valve quietly instituted its Steam ban on blockchain-based games earlier this month with a change to its terms, adding to list of content that shouldn't be published on Steam "applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs." It created a bit of an uproar, and led Epic Games to say it was open to such games so long as they follow the "follow the relevant laws, disclose their terms, and are age-rated by an appropriate group."
While many PC games in the past have spawned both legitimate and underground in-game economies, including Valve-made titles like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress, it appears the company is not interested in dealing with all the potential headaches that might arise from dealing with the crypto market, such as scams, fraud and volatile currency valuations.
However, Fight for the Future, a nonprofit focused on digital rights and privacy, and its partners are arguing against the ban, saying technologies like NFTs can "create new economic opportunities for users and creators":
Games that utilize blockchain technology and web3 token-based technologies like DAOs and NFTs can positively enhance the user experience of games, and create new economic opportunities for users and creators. Tokens, in particular, open up vast possibilities for users to interact, collaborate, and create tangible digital worlds and items that were previously impossible. These enhancements make games more decentralized, democratic, interactive, player focused systems. They also present an opportunity to streamline and modernize intellectual property rights in ways that would greatly benefit both independent creators and established corporations. These innovations would bring with them enhancements to music distribution, book publishing, collectables, and more.
Valve is recognized for their willingness to experiment and innovate, not only with their games, but with the Steam platform itself. Considered as pioneers for changing how gamers sell and trade digital game items over a decade ago, Valve likely understands the impact that a more concrete medium would facilitate. In the spirit of that pioneering vision, we ask that you take a chance on this rapidly growing technology: remember your roots, let the industry prove itself as a positive contributor to the overall gaming ecosystem, and reverse your decision to prohibit an entire category of software from the Steam platform.
Valve did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Executives from Snap and TikTok testified for the first time before Congress on Tuesday during a hearing on keeping kids safe online. As part of the hearing, both companies, as well as YouTube, agreed to share internal research with Congress about their platforms' impact on kids.
In the wake of whistleblower Frances Haugen's Facebook Papers leaks, Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal asked policy executives from Snap, TikTok and YouTube whether they have conducted internal research on their platforms' impact on kids' mental health, similar to the research Facebook conducted.
Jen Stout, Snap's head of global policy, said the company has conducted research, which has found "95% of users say that Snapchat makes them happy." She committed to sharing that research with the committee. Michael Beckerman, TikTok's head of public policy, also said the company works with external researchers to study the platform and nodded when asked whether he'd commit to sharing that research. And Leslie Miller, YouTube's vice president of government affairs, said the company has shared research and will continue to do so.
"We'll look forward to receiving it within days or weeks, not months," Blumenthal said.
The problem, of course, is that Congress will have to take these companies' word on the fact that the research they're sharing is complete. Facebook has repeatedly shared stats on its impact on kids — but it wasn't until after the Wall Street Journal got its hands on Haugen's documents that it became clear there were other stats they weren't sharing.
As long as companies are determining what data to release and how, the picture will always be incomplete.
President Joe Biden has nominated Jessica Rosenworcel, the acting chair of the Federal Communications Commission, to serve as the official head of the agency, and former FCC official Gigi Sohn for the open commission slot, the White House announced Tuesday.
Biden's nomination of the two Democrats came after months of delay, during which two Republicans and two Democrats served on the commission, rendering it politically hamstrung in many cases.
In addition, because Rosenworcel's term has ended, she will have to exit by year's end if the Senate does not confirm her first, raising the prospect of a Republican-majority commission, which could hamper the Biden administration's goals to expand broadband service and potentially revisit the fight over net neutrality.
Rosenworcel has been steering the commission as it rolled out subsidies for internet access during the pandemic. Sohn, a onetime top aide to former FCC chair Tom Wheeler, was an architect of the Obama-era net neutrality rules.
"Great to see the FCC will soon have a Democratic majority," Democratic Sen. Ed Markey tweeted in response to reports of the nominations. "The first order of business: revive net neutrality."
Biden also nominated Alan Davidson, a policy official at Mozilla who previously founded Google's Washington office in the mid-2000s, to serve as head of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
This article was updated to reflect the official announcement of the nominations.
Amazon is the latest company to set its sights on the live audio market, following in the footsteps of last year's breakout startup Clubhouse. The new product is a multi-platform app known right now as "Project Mic," according to a new report from The Verge.
The goal, it seems, is to combine various audio and music components from across Amazon's vast ecosystem — including Audible, the Alexa assistant, its Amazon Music platform and Twitch — into a unified service that can distribute live online radio shows. According to documents The Verge has reviewed, Amazon envisions the product as a very radio-centric take on live audio, with licensed music and in-car integrations for listening while you're driving.
That would set it apart from Clubhouse and the many Clubhouse clones, like Twitter Spaces, that have popped up in the last year and a half. Many of those apps model themselves more like a cross between a podcast and a live stream with social media layers on top.
Amazon's approach looks like a more traditional take on radio with a heavy music focus. That puts it more in competition with Spotify, which has been investing heavily in the podcast space of late and modeling many of its shows and in-app features to be more radio-like. Spotify even has a in-car gadget, aptly called Car Thing, designed to replace your radio.
It's not clear why Amazon would invest in the live audio market now; the central narrative around Clubhouse these past few months is that its popularity has waned significantly now that people are spending less time in their homes. But live audio, and radio in particular, is obviously a lucrative and resilient market and it's not going anywhere any time soon. So perhaps Amazon thinks it can come up with the right recipe to bring it back in style in a way maybe Clubhouse can't.
Facebook expects to spend more than $10 billion on AR, VR and related hardware as well as the development of metaverse apps and services this year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors during the company's Q3 earnings call Monday that the company will ramp up investment in the area, and warned that it won't see a return on that investment any time soon.
"I recognize the magnitude of this bet," Zuckerberg said. "This is not an investment that will be profitable for us any time in the near future."
Zuckerberg argued that Facebook had to build out a lot of fundamental technology first before it can rake in any meaningful returns with AR and VR. "Our goal is to help the metaverse reach a billion people," he said, adding that he hoped to reach that goal by the end of the decade. That's when it could also become "a real business story," Zuckerberg said.
"The metaverse will be a successor to the mobile internet," Zuckerberg said. "It will unlock a massively larger creative economy [...] than what exists today."
Facebook disclosed its massive spending on AR/VR hardware and related software and services in its Q3 earnings release: "We expect our investment in Facebook Reality Labs to reduce our overall operating profit in 2021 by approximately $10 billion," the company stated. "We are committed to bringing this long-term vision to life and we expect to increase our investments for the next several years."
Starting with Q4, Facebook will break out Facebook Reality Labs as a separate reporting segment in its quarterly earnings reports.
"As we have discussed, we are dedicating significant resources toward our augmented and virtual reality products and services, which are an important part of our work to develop the next generation of online social experiences," the company wrote Monday.
Altogether, Facebook generated $29 billion in revenue in Q3, compared to $21.5 billion during the same quarter last year. Earnings per share came in at $3.22, compared to $2.40 in Q3 of 2020. Analysts had expected earnings of $3.17 per share.
In addition to their focus on the metaverse, Facebook executives also highlighted a renewed effort to win back younger people with features like Reels, which has been heavily inspired by TikTok — a service that Zuckerberg called out as "one of the most effective competitors we have ever faced."
Update: This story was updated Oct. 25 with more details from the earnings call.
Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin wants to build a private space station in low-earth orbit in the next decade, intended for research, commerce, space tourism or as a leasable "address for orbit."
The Orbital Reef project will be built in partnership with the Sierra Space company and is now asking for people or companies that would like to reserve their space on the planned station. The announcement of the plan called the space station a "business park" for space, where companies will share the infrastructure provided by Blue Origin and Sierra Space while renting or owning modules or spaces within the planned station for different purposes.
The announcement did not specify whether any particular federal or international approvals are needed for the space station to become a reality, the cost of renting space on the station, whether there is sustained private interest to fill the planned space, or many other logistical details.
The International Space Station is the only fully operational and inhabitable space station currently in orbit, which is managed through an international agreement that segments the station into a Russian section and a U.S. section. Axiom Space, which plans to offer tourism to the ISS, has secured permits to attach its own modules to the current space station within the coming decade. The Chinese government is also currently building a space station, while India and Russia have both proposed such projects in the past.
Blue Origin has faced allegations that it has fostered a sexist and toxic work environment and created a culture that struggles to compete with the speed and prowess of SpaceX; Protocol has spoken to two anonymous former Blue Origin internal leaders who confirmed their own experiences of those allegations. Blue Origin and Bezos have been embroiled in a feud with Elon Musk and SpaceX over federal contracts for the planned return to the moon; the company has sued the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for granting the contracts to SpaceX.
Tesla became a $1 trillion company Monday when its share price soared above $1000, ending at $1,024 when the market closed Monday.
Tesla's stock price on Yahoo FinanceYahoo Finance
Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon are the only companies to have remained worth more than $1 trillion as publicly listed U.S. companies. Facebook slipped below the market cap mark earlier this year. Just today, rental car company Hertz announced that it had ordered 100,000 Teslas in the largest order ever for the electric vehicle company.
The State Department has decided to create a bureau of cyberspace and digital policy, as well as a new point person or group for issues of emerging or critical technologies, in order to address international concerns with hacking, ransomware and internet freedom, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
The changes should be announced later this week by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to the WSJ.
The Biden State Department has found itself battling with international powerhouses such as Russia and China over questions of state-sponsored hacking, persecution of activists online and internet surveillance. Just today, Microsoft said despite the Biden administration's sanctions and warnings, Russian-sponsored hackers have successfully breached more than 10 U.S. tech companies and tried attacking more than 100 more.
Spotify, Dell and SAP topped this year's "America's Most Loved Workplaces" rankings from Newsweek.
The first-ever rankings from Newsweek took into account several criteria for inclusion for the 100 companies that made the cut, including collaboration and teamwork, opportunities for advancement, doing good and a "practice-what-you-preach" culture, as well as how employees feel about the organization.
Regarding Spotify, which nabbed the first-place ranking, the report cited the company's six months of parental leave, as well as its Passion Tour, a day the company devoted to workshopping and discussing its mission and values. Newsweek also mentioned the fact that execs will answer emails from employees "up and down the food chain."
Dell took the No. 2 spot for its internal growth opportunities, complete with "formal mentoring, networking [and] individualized development programs," as well as stretch assignments. SAP rounded out No. 3 with a nod to its "culture of kindness" and pandemic mental health day.
Other tech companies that made the list: Instacart, Cadence, FanDuel, Microchip Technologies, IBM, Box, GitLab, Zebra Technologies and Twitter, among others.
Newsweek put together the rankings in partnership with the Best Practices Institute, a leadership development center and think tank. They surveyed more than 800,000 employees at American companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. 35% of the score was based on employee survey responses, 25% on analysis of sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, and 40% on direct interviews with company officials.
Global memory prices may rise after a magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck early Sunday in Taiwan and impacted production at a Micron Technology facility responsible for nearly 10% of the world's memory supply.
Micron operates a memory chip fabrication plant at Taoyuan, Taiwan that is responsible for roughly a third of Micron's total capacity to manufacture memory, or 8% of global memory, according to a research note from Evercore ISI analyst C.J. Muse. A "meaningful production hit" would likely lead to higher memory prices, Muse wrote.
In a statement to Bloomberg News, Micron acknowledged that there was an impact on production at the Taoyuan facility, and said the company was still ascertaining the impact on production.
Memory is a commodity business, and fluctuations in the available supply directly affect prices. Production problems that limit the supply of memory likely mean Micron will be able to fetch a higher price for the memory it does make.
Faze Clan, the gaming company known best for its roster of social media personalities and esports teams, is going public through a SPAC merger next year in a deal valuing the company at $1 billion.
The deal marks one of the first of its kind for the esports industry, which remains a young and fast-growing sector that has nonetheless struggled in recent years to attain the level of viewership and crossover success needed to rise into the mainstream.
Yet Faze, which started more than a decade ago as a collective of YouTube creators in the then-burgeoning Call of Duty scene, fashions itself as much more than an esports firm. The company also runs a successful apparel business and makes most of its revenue through brand sponsorships and partnerships pushed mainly through social platforms and its non-competitive content creators. Faze was also featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated earlier this year, marking a level of fame and popularity enjoyed by very few other game organizations and indicative of Faze's youth-centered crossover appeal.
Faze is merging with B. Riley Principal 150 Merger Corp. and plans to raise about $290 million. The company projects sales of about $50 million this year and intends to grow its business with more brand deals, which right now include companies like McDonald's and Doritos.
Much of Faze's future business will depend on its ability to nurture upcoming talent in both the competitive gaming and creator scenes. Each side of the company's business helps sustain the other by creating talent pipelines and ensuring Faze is also staying on top of both competitive and casual trends in gaming.
Mastercard providers will be able to issue crypto debit and credit cards and offer crypto rewards thanks to a new partnership with digital assets exchange Bakkt announced today.
The new partnership will allow consumers to trade cryptocurrencies through Bakkt digital wallets, use branded crypto cards and spend card loyalty points in cryptocurrency instead of dollars or airline miles, for example. Users can also convert their crypto holdings to pay for purchases, according to Monday's announcement.
Current crypto rewards cards are limited mostly to offerings from cryptocurrency companies like Sofi, Blockfi and Gemini, though Venmo also allows user to buy crypto using loyalty points and cash-back rewards.
Guessing poor passwords and basic email phishing attacks really seem to work, according to a report out from Microsoft today that the Russian hackers behind the SolarWinds attack have been using this basic technique to successfully breach as many as 14 U.S.-based companies.
The SolarWinds hackers, known as Nobelium and previously identified as part of Russia's foreign intelligence service, have been actively trying to attack more than 140 U.S.-based companies since May, according to the release. Microsoft believes it has identified the successful breaches early enough to help the companies prevent the hackers from being more successful. The Biden administration tried to punish the Russian government when the hackers were linked to the SolarWinds attack in 2020, but the Microsoft report shows those warnings have gone unheeded.
"This recent activity is another indicator that Russia is trying to gain long-term, systematic access to a variety of points in the technology supply chain and establish a mechanism for surveilling – now or in the future – targets of interest to the Russian government," Tom Burt, the corporate vice president for customer security and trust at Microsoft, wrote in today's announcement.
The company also released guidance for tech and IT companies to protect themselves from further attacks, and most of the advice reminds these companies that multi-factor authentication, removing old administrator and user accounts and other basic security protocols can help protect against the fairly low-level hacking attempts that Microsoft has witnessed succeed.
A Twitter account promoting the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency did not get what it was hoping for when it asked Elon Musk how much $Shib he owns. "None," was Musk's one-word response.
Then Musk followed up: "Out of curiosity, I acquired some ascii hash strings called 'Bitcoin, Ethereum & Doge'. That's it." Two of those make logical sense, of course: Bitcoin and ethereum are two of the biggest names in crypto. Dogecoin, for anyone else, would seem like a crazy bet, but when you're Elon Musk and can juice the price by posting a single meme on Twitter? It might be as good an investment as any.
As tends to happen when Musk promotes a coin, the price of bitcoin, ethereum and dogecoin have all jumped in the hours since Musk's tweet. As for Shiba Inu? It dipped after Musk's tweet, but has still been on an upward tear over the last few weeks.
But Musk did add some investment advice to his tweet. "As I've said before, don't bet the farm on crypto! True value is building products & providing services to your fellow human beings, not money in any form."
Out of curiosity, I acquired some ascii hash strings called “Bitcoin, Ethereum & Doge". That's it.
As I've said before, don't bet the farm on crypto! True value is building products & providing services to your fellow human beings, not money in any form.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 24, 2021
Hertz has purchased 100,000 Tesla vehicles for its rental offerings in the U.S. and in parts of Europe, as the company pushes to try to electrify its fleet of rental cars, the company announced today.
The order will make 20% of Hertz's cars electric, and is part of a broader push by the company to electrify most of its fleet, according to a Bloomberg report. Tesla car renters will be able to access the current Tesla charging stations across the U.S., and Hertz plans to help install thousands of additional chargers throughout its network.
The deal was worth more than $4 billion revenue to Tesla and is the largest order ever placed to the company, according to the Bloomberg report. It's one of the largest purchases of electric vehicles ever, along with Amazon's agreement to buy 100,000 electric trucks from Rivian. Rivian is still ramping up production, though, while Tesla is ready to go: Hertz expects that the first section of its order will arrive in November of this year, though the company warned that its plans over the next few years could be delayed by semiconductor chip shortages or other supply chain issues. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in late September that he believes the semiconductor chip shortage is a "short-term problem" that should be over by the end of 2021.
Responding to rumors from last week, PayPal said Sunday that it was "not pursuing an acquisition of Pinterest at this time."
Bloomberg News reported last week that the payments company had approached Pinterest about a possible acquisition in a deal that could have been worth $45 billion. Pinterest's share price soared on that news, while PayPal's dropped. CNBC later reported that the companies were in late-stage talks.
PayPal's statement, published late Sunday, amounted to just a single sentence denying an impending purchase. In pre-market trading Monday, the share price trend reversed, with PayPal's shares up and Pinterest's down.
Adobe said it will place employees on unpaid leave if they're not vaccinated by Dec. 8, CNBC reported Friday. The company cited President Joe Biden's executive order on vaccines as rationale for the new rule, according to a notice the company sent to employees.
Over 90% of Adobe employees have told the company that they're vaccinated against COVID-19 or in the process of getting vaccinated. As for those who haven't yet gotten the vaccine, the company said it'll weigh religious or medical exemptions.
Earlier this month IBM also said that unvaccinated workers will be suspended without pay. On the contrary, companies like Apple and Amazon rolled out incentives for its employees to get vaccinated, but they haven't set an outright mandate.
Epic Games will no longer give employees every other Friday off, Bloomberg reported Friday.
The policy began during the pandemic and was always meant to be temporary, according to Epic Games, which didn't immediately return a request for comment from Protocol.
"Right now, we are seeing lots of Fridays off for deep work, and lots of people who must work Fridays anyways," Chief Operating Officer Daniel Vogel told employees in an email, according to Bloomberg. "This meant that many people were not benefiting from this policy equally."
A number of employees have posted to the company's Slack asking Epic to keep the policy, and an internal survey of 581 employees found that almost 90% of workers wanted Epic Games to keep letting them take Fridays off, Bloomberg reported.
A new Facebook whistleblower is accusing Facebook of prioritizing money over the fight against hate speech and misinformation, The Washington Post reported Friday. The whistleblower, who is a former member of the platform's Integrity team and spoke under the condition of anonymity to The Post, made those claims to the SEC as well.
The allegations are similar to those of whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has made her own SEC complaint and said earlier this month that Facebook prioritizes profit over safety. The person's remarks add to a pile of allegations made against the company over the past few weeks, which Facebook has consistently denied or defended itself against.
In the latest complaint, the former employee also claimed that Facebook communications official Tucker Bounds said, in reference to controversy around Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, that lawmakers would get upset, then move on, while Facebook kept making money. "It will be a flash in the pan. Some legislators will get pissy. And then in a few weeks they will move onto something else. Meanwhile we are printing money in the basement, and we are fine," the complaint quotes Bounds as saying.
Bounds, who is now a vice president of communications, told The Post that being asked about the alleged remarks "with a faceless person, with no other sourcing than the empty accusation itself, is a first for me." Facebook spokesperson Erin McPike told The Post that its reporting on the matter "is beneath The Washington Post."
According to the Post, the whistleblower's affidavit is dated Oct. 13. Haugen testified just a week before.
Walmart will now let customers buy bitcoin. And it's not a hoax this time.
The company is testing a program that lets customers buy the digital currency at certain Coinstar kiosks. The pilot program is rolling out at a select few locations; just 200 of the kiosks are installed in Walmart stores. Once people exchange cash for Bitcoin and pay a hefty transaction fee, they'll receive a paper voucher confirming their new coins.
Coinstar is leading the charge on the project, working with the exchange Coinme to offer bitcoin at 8,000 of its kiosks. The company is best known as the machine to dump your loose change into and get paper bills and gift cards in return, but now you can turn the cash in your couch cushions into cold, hard crypto.
Unlike the last time Walmart appeared to be getting into cryptocurrencies, this announcement is real. Last month, a false announcement that Walmart and Litecoin were partnering sent the value of the coin soaring for a bit before Walmart confirmed the news was fake. But the company did say it was interested in cryptocurrency in general. This is just a small toe in the water, placing a few bitcoin ATMs in a few stores, but it could be a signal of crypto's further movement into the mainstream.
Snap shares fell around 22% as the market opened Friday morning, the day after Snap announcing Apple's ad-tracking changes is presenting more of a challenge than it thought. "We grappled with industry changes to the way advertising is targeted, optimized, and measured on iOS that created a more significant impact on our business than we had expected," Snap's Chief Business Officer Jeremi Gorman said on the company's earnings call Thursday.
Snap continues to grow quickly, reaching 306 million daily active users during the most recent quarter and growing its revenue 57% year over year. But the company still missed its Q3 earnings target. Snap said the setback was brought on by a few different issues, namely supply and workforce problems, but seemed to pin the majority of the issues on Apple's new privacy rules that require apps to ask users if they want to be tracked. "While we anticipated some degree of business disruption," Evan Spiegel said on the earnings call, "the new Apple-provided measurement solution did not scale as we had expected, making it more difficult for our advertising partners to measure and manage their ad campaigns for iOS."
Facebook has also expressed concerns about the privacy change, saying the rule makes it harder to track ad performance. Lots of users have opted out of ad-tracking on Facebook's app since the change. Spiegel said that going forward, Snap is investing in building better "first-party tooling and measurement solutions" to better work with advertisers now that the third-party connects are increasingly untenable. Spiegel projected confidence for Snap's long-term future, but its investors are clearly nervous about where things go from here. And Snap's performance doesn't bode well for the other companies affected by Apple's policy change.
Correction: This story was updated to correct the number of Snap's daily active users. This update was made Oct. 22, 2021.
Lyft users reported over 4,000 instances of sexual assault between 2017 and 2019, according to the ride-hailing app's first community safety report released Thursday. The report comes two years after Uber released a similar report on its own platform.
The number of sexual assault cases climbed over the three-year period, as Lyft's total ridership grew as well. The report showed 1,096 reports of sexual assault in 2017, 1,255 reports in 2018, and 1,807 in 2019. Of those, 360 were reports of rape. The report also includes information on fatal physical assaults and motor vehicle fatalities.
"We recognize that sexual assault is chronically underreported, and it can sometimes be months or years before a survivor is ready to come forward and report what happened – if they choose to do so at all," the company wrote in the report. "Knowing this, Lyft included any incident reported in 2017, 2018 and 2019, regardless of when the incident was reported to have occurred."
Uber released a similar report at the end of 2019, revealing around 6,000 instances of sexual assault between 2017 and 2018. Lyft said it would release similar data shortly after Uber, but its report was just released Thursday. Both companies have faced criticism for their handling of sexual misconduct on the apps, having both faced a handful of sexual assault allegations in court.
