- Cash Nut
- Posts
- YouTube's war on ad blockers continues
Sponsor By
Publish Your Book With Fast Company, The World’s Leading Business Media Brand
Fast Company Press is the official book publishing imprint of Fast Company magazine. We publish award-winning books by visionary business leaders. Let us help you turn your insights into a lasting legacy that will inspire and lead the next generation of innovators. Submit your book idea today.
In Today’s Edition
Record High Secondary Market
Amazon Paid Almost $1 Billion for Twitch in 2014. It's Still Losing Money
McDonald’s saw same-store sales drop 1%
Apple releases iOS 18.1 developer beta with the first ‘Apple Intelligence' iPhone features
LG and Samsung demonstrated transparent television screens
Solid-state batteries are finally making their way out of the lab
🚀Startups Nuts
The secondary market has experienced a surge in deal value, reaching a record high as investors seek liquidity due to slow distributions from private market funds. This trend is driven by higher valuations for secondary assets and a growing demand for liquidity, with many investors turning to the secondary market to trade secondhand fund stakes. As a result, dealmakers expect this year's secondary transaction volume to set a new annual record, fueled by a significant amount of available capital from secondary buyers.
Other News
Flo Health, a U.K. women's health app, raised more than $200m in Series C funding at a $1b valuation
Rapido, an Indian motorcycle taxi ride booking app, raised $120m in Series E funding at a $1b valuation
Gradient AI, a Boston insurance software startup, raised $56.1m in Series C funding
Unspun, an Oakland 3D weaving technology company, raised $32m in Series B funding
Faye, a Newark, Del., travel insurance startup, raised $31.5m in Series B funding
🏭Business Nuts
Twitch remains unprofitable despite periods of explosive popularity. Its biggest users are paying less and growth in new users and engagement has slowed. Staff are concerned about potential upcoming layoffs this fall following an annual operational review. Investors are worried that Twitch is at risk of becoming a 'zombie brand'. Amazon remains confident in Twitch's potential.
Other News
McDonald’s saw same-store sales drop 1%, its first decline since 2020. The chain, which introduced a $5 meal deal to lure back diners, reported a Q2 net income of $2.02B, down from $2.31B last year.
Spirit Airlines, known for its discount fares and fees for add-ons like cabin baggage, is introducing new classes of service next month. The carrier plans to bundle services like Wi-Fi, cabin baggage, snacks and drinks for its highest classes.
JetBlue Airways posted a surprise profit for the second quarter. The carrier said it would defer another $3 billion in aircraft spending through 2029 to improve cash flow.
Pfizer reported second-quarter revenue and adjusted earnings that blew past expectations and raised its full-year outlook as the drugmaker works to slash costs.The results come as Pfizer scrambles to stabilize its business and win back Wall Street’s favor following the rapid decline in demand for its Covid products.
Merck reported second-quarter revenue and adjusted earnings that topped estimates as it saw strong sales from its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda as well as other treatments in its oncology and vaccines portfolios and a new cardiovascular drug.
📱Tech Nuts
Apple's newly released developer betas for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 contain the company's first set of AI features, including a Siri with an updated design and ability to maintain context across multiple requests, new Mail features like smart replay and email summaries, and natural language search in Photos. The features will likely not be rolled out to general users until well into 2025. They will only work on the iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max or on iPads and Macs with Apple Silicon chips. Beta testers will need to join a waitlist for access to the features.
Multiple YouTube users are reporting that the site is serving them with blank ads or black screens before a video when they are using an ad-blocker extension. The change makes users wait for their content, partially defeating the purpose of using an ad blocker. YouTube began testing server-side ad injection last month to further render ad blockers obsolete. The solution inserts ads directly into the main YouTube video feed so that ad blockers can no longer distinguish the two pieces of media.
Other News
Apple detailed its reasons for using Google's homegrown Tensor Processing Unit for training in a recent technical paper.
LG and Samsung demonstrated transparent television screens at CES 2024. The companies have very different approaches to the technology - Samsung is betting on microLED screens while LG is pursuing OLED displays. Neither technology is ready yet. This article takes a deep dive into each of these display technologies.
Meta is launching an AI Studio. You can create custom AI characters for Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp (US only). No tech skills are needed to build these characters—just prompting. Example: AIs for cooking tips, meme generation, or creator clones that answer fan questions.
OpenAI is starting an alpha program with an experimental version of GPT-4o with a maximum of 64K output tokens. It’ll cost 20% more than the regular GPT-4o in the API.
Google Workspace had an authentication weakness that allowed hackers to impersonate other companies and log into third-party services using the "Sign in with Google" option, as discovered by security experts.
🎁Miscellaneous
This article takes a look at the history of batteries, the latest breakthroughs, and the trends that suggest that solid-state batteries could soon overtake lithium-ion ones. Battery design hasn't changed much since the first battery in 1799 - solid-state batteries have been the major exception. Their development has been held back by cost, manufacturing challenges, and a tendency for them to short-circuit. Solid-state batteries seem to finally be ready to deliver on their promise, with several companies getting ready to or already releasing products containing the technology.
💡What else are we reading and seeing?
The Documentation Tradeoff
Running One-man SaaS, 9 Years In
GPT-5: Everything You Need to Know
What are the threats to the $1T AI boom?
A Few Blockbuster Podcasts Are Making All the Money
😎Fun Fact
On this day: Automobile pioneer Henry Ford born (1863)
🔥 Few tools many people are finding useful
Beloga - Your personal AI knowledge amplifier.
Excel Dashboard - Turn Excel data into 10-page reports in seconds
Documentor - Improve technical documentation with the power of AI
Topview - Turn your links or media assets into viral videos in one click
AMA by Adsby - AI marketing assistant to handle every aspect of your marketing effortlessly
🐦Joke of the Day
Enjoy The Cash Nut? Consider forwarding it to a co-worker, colleague, classmate, or whoever you think might be interested.