Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 04/06 – Clubhouse Turns On The Money Spigot Quickly

Episode Date: April 6, 2021

Clubhouse isn’t messing around when it comes to flipping the monetization switch. TikTok translation might make that platform even more global. Yahoo Answers circles the drain. Are NFT prices already dropping? And with the new digital Yuan, would the Chinese government be able to literally turn off the money in your wallet? Sponsors: Today In Digital Marketing Podcast Kraken.com/techmeme Links: Clubhouse’s new direct payments let you toss a coin to creators, and they get 100 percent (The Verge) TikTok adds automatic captions to videos in accessibility push (The Verge) Yahoo Answers will be shut down forever on May 4th (The Verge) The NFT bubble might be bursting already (CNN Business) China Creates Its Own Digital Currency, a First for Major Economy (WSJ) E3 2021 Will Take Place as a Free Virtual Conference, In-Person L.A. Event Targeted for Next Year (Variety) Streaming Services Have Finally Run Out of New Shows. Kind of. (Bloomberg) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Tuesday, April 6, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Clubhouse isn't messing around when it comes to flipping the monetization switch. TikTok translation might make that platform even more global. Yahoo Answers is circling the drain. Are NFT prices already collapsing? And with the new digital yuan, would the Chinese government be able to literally turn off the money in your wallet? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Well, true to their word, Clubhouse is doing what social networks tended to wait to do, at least wait a few years. Clubhouse swore they were going to focus on creating a monetization platform for creators even as they were scaling up their platform.

Usually the scaling up comes first and then figuring out how to monetize things comes years down the road. But Clubhouse has just announced a partnership with Stripe to let users send payments to other users without even taking a cut. Quoting the verge. Social audio app Clubhouse will let all users pay other creators starting Monday. It's the first monetization tool built right into the app. Clubhouse says it won't take a cut of payments, meaning that creators get the entirety of what somebody sends them. Not everyone will be able to receive payments just yet, though.

That will be rolling out in waves, quote, starting with a small test group, Clubhouse says. To pay a Clubhouse creator who can receive payments, tap on their profile, then tap on the Send Money button, and then choose how much you send them. You'll also have to pay a small card processing fee that goes to Stripe, which is Clubhouse's payments processing partner. The first time you try to pay someone, Clubhouse will ask you to add a credit or debit card, end quote. So this is soups interesting that this generation of social networks is immediately going the Patreon slash Onlyfans route,

though I did want to flag this tweet I saw last night from Benedict Evans, quote, This is great, but paying for content with Stripe inside an iOS app is exactly what Apple has banned since 2011, and why Spotify is suing Apple. I think Spotify will win, but what happens before then? Does the WeChat exemption apply here, or is this another test case? I guess the other catalysts for this generation of social sites moving quickly is TikTok, which you'll recall put the pedal to the metal with monetization. early on as well. And get this, TikTok says creators will soon be able to add automatic captions to videos in U.S. English and Japanese with support for other languages coming soon, quoting the verge. The option to add auto captions will appear in the editing page after a video has been uploaded or recorded. The platform is adding the feature to make TikTok videos easier to watch for

deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. However, a TikTok dialog box also says the feature is useful for anyone watching videos, quote, when it's difficult or inconvenient for them to listen to audio, end quote. Creators can edit their captions after they've been automatically generated to fix any mistakes, and viewers can turn captions off via the captions button on the share panel. As automatic transcription has gotten better over the years, services have increasingly been adding it to their software to make content more accessible. Last month, Google built the feature into Chrome, allowing it to generate captions for audio played through the browser. The company's live caption system is also available as a system-wide feature for select Android devices.

Video chat services like Zoom and Google Meet can auto-generate captions during calls, and Instagram also seems to be testing a similar feature for its videos, end quote. So yes, this is all great for accessibility, but if this transcription tech really does get as good as people think, as fast as people think, think about what this could do. Social media has long been a global phenomenon, but very often it has been to a degree or another geographically siloed. Something might go viral on, say, Argentinian Instagram, but then it doesn't spread much beyond Spanish-speaking social media circles for simple language barrier reasons. TikTok as a medium is more visual and music-based, and they say that music and dance can be universal.

So imagine if things on TikTok could reverberate soon around the entire world with no language barriers because when you post something, suddenly it can be translated into whatever language the viewer can understand. Yahoo Answers, one of the internet's oldest and most storied question and answer websites will be shut down on May 4th. So pour one out for Yahoo Answers and get your final questions in now, I guess. Quoting the Verge. The platform has been operating since 2005, and in the years since, its relevance as a meme haven has remained intact, while its practicality as a forum has waned during the rise of Reddit, Quora, and other competing Internet hangouts. Yahoo, which is now part of Verizon Media Group, following the company's sale to the telecom for nearly $5 billion in 2017,

announced the change at the top of the Yahoo Answers homepage, the message links to an FAQ, which details the timeline of the shutdown. Starting April 20th, the platform will no longer accept new submissions, the FAQ explains. Users will also have until June 30th to request their data or it'll be inaccessible after that. That includes, quote, all user-generated content including your questions list, questions, answers list, answers, and any images, Yahoo says, but, quote, you won't be able to download other users content questions or answers, end quote. On this news, lots of people made jokes along the lines of how we might now never know how baby is formed. But quoting Dieter Bone, I'm here for Yahoo answers jokes, but I'm mostly really bummed that Verizon is being a terrible steward of internet history.

This site should be archived for the future, end quote. If the crypto economy moves even faster than the internet economy, you can have an entire bull and bear market cycle in crypto in what, 18 months, six months, less than that, then it might follow that the whole NFT economic cycle might be even faster. Fresh data from non-fundgible.com shows that the average price of an NFT has dropped significantly from its highs of checking notes a few weeks ago, quoting CNN business. Non-fundable tokens or NFTs are all the rage, but their popularity may have already peaked. Prices of NFTs, the digital certificates that have taken the art and collectibles world

by storm this year, have plunged about 70% from their high point in February. The average price for an NFT on April 5th was about $1,256, down from more than $4,000 in late February, according to market research site, non-fundable.com. Data from the block, another crypto research firm shows a similarly large decline for both prices and NFT sales as well. The sharp sudden rise in the value of NFTs and more recent pullback is reminding some of other similar historic market bubbles, such as Tulip Mania in the 1600s, the dot com slash tech crash of 2000 and bank stocks and housing prices in 2008. NFTs may be here to stay, but they just may not be worth the staggering sums of money

that some people have shelled out for them in the past few weeks. even Beeple, aka Michael Joseph Winkleman, joked with CNN's Julia Chatterley in March that he might be the biggest winner of what could it turn out to be an NFT bubble, end quote. Yes, do you remember the whole alt-coin craze from just a couple years ago? Tons of money went into a ton of projects, and a lot of those are dead in the water at this point. Although one could argue that it was the rise of alt projects that laid the very groundwork for the current NFT boom, so who knows. We've known that China was working on developing its own official cryptocurrency for a while now, a digital yuan. But this interesting new piece in the Wall Street Journal has some pretty eye-opening new details about these efforts, as China has apparently accelerated development of the cryptocurrency as a way to soften the power of U.S. sanctions.

Quote, a thousand years ago when money meant coins, China invented paper currency. Now the Chinese government is minting cash digital. in a reimagination of money that could shake a pillar of American power. It might seem money is already virtual as credit cards and payment apps such as Apple Pay in the U.S. and WeChat in China eliminate the need for coins or bills. But those are just ways to move money electronically. China is turning legal tender itself into computer code. China's version of a digital currency is controlled by its central bank, which will issue the new electronic money. It is expected to give China's government vast new tools to monitor both its economy and its people. By design, the digital

yuan will negate one of Bitcoin's major draws, anonymity for the user. Beijing is also positioning the digital yuan for international use and designing it to be untethered to the global financial system where the U.S. dollar has been king since World War II. China is embracing digitization in many forms, including money, in a bid to gain more centralized control while getting a head start on technologies of the future that it regards as up for grabs. That an authoritarian state and U.S. rival has taken the lead to introduce a national digital currency is propelling what was once a wonky topic for cryptocurrency theorists into a point of anxiety in Washington. Asked in recent weeks how digitized national currencies such as China's might affect the dollar. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen

and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell have said the issue is being studied in earnest, including whether a digital dollar makes sense someday. In tests in recent months, more than 100,000 people in China have downloaded a mobile phone app from the central bank enabling them to spend small government handouts of digital cash with merchants, including Chinese outlets of Starbucks and McDonald's. Digitized money looks like a potential macroeconomic dream tool for the issuing government usable to track people spending in real time, speed relief to disaster victims or flag criminal activity. With it, Beijing stands to gain vast new powers to tighten President Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule.

The money itself is programmable. Beijing has tested expiration dates to encourage users to spend it quickly for times when the economy needs a jumpstart. It's also trackable, adding another tool to China's heavy state surveillance. The government deploys hundreds of millions of facial recognition cameras to monitor its population, sometimes using them to levy fines for activities such as jaywalking. a digital currency would make it possible to both meet out and collect fines as soon as an infraction was detected, end quote. Yeah, and then think about things like collecting taxes. You know, lots has been written about how the Internet itself was supposed to be this glorious flowering of democracy and openness and utopianism,

and somehow a lot of folks feel that it has been warped into something, shall we say, less than that. So, I mean, imagine the think pieces that will be written if the promise of cryptocurrency that it was designed from the ground up to be this almost anarchic space that rested the sovereign power of money away from governments. Imagine if instead it turns out that crypto in practice turns out to be the ultimate tool of authoritarian government control. Worrying about governments making the money printers go burr seems a petty concern when the government might have the power to just make the money in your wallet actually disappear. On the R-things returning to normal and how soon front, have you noticed that a lot of the events and conferences are starting to come back,

but they're only doing so halfway. We just got the news on WWDC, which again will be virtual this year and again free. And now this, E3 will take place as a free virtual conference this year, June 12th through 15th, and organizers say they only expect an in-person event to happen in L.A. in 2022, quoting variety. ESA said it has early commitments for participation from Nintendo, Microsoft Xbox, Capcom, Konami, Ubisoft, Take 2 Interactive, Warner Brothers Games, and Coke Media. Notably silent from the lineup is Sony, which had sat out E3 2019 and was going to skip it last year. The ESA plans to bring E3 back as an in-person event in 2022 in Los Angeles, until last year the confab had taken place annually at the Los Angeles Convention Center since 1995, end quote. I've started taking the subway into the office for the first time in almost exactly 400 days, and they have these little stickers on the ground showing you where to stand on the platform so you can be six feet apart from other people.

And I've been tempted to tweet a photo of those stickers and be like, we'll know officially that the pandemic is truly over when the MTA finally peels up those stickers. Like, will it be six months from now, three years from now? I guess in a similar way, we'll know the pandemic is truly over when all of the conventions and events are fully back in person. Or is the event industrial complex one of those things that might never come back as it once was? Finally today, one more COVID-Times trend piece and a reminder that COVID-

ain't over yet. A sign of this is the fact that new television and movie production is nowhere near back to full strength yet. And the problem here is that as that backlog of content that especially the streaming services had to run through over COVID times starts to run out, might we be facing a cupboard's bare situation for especially the streaming services? reportedly the number of Netflix originals released thus far in 2021 is down 12% year over year, as an example, quoting Lucas Shaw in Bloomberg. This data is backed up by conversations I've had with people who work at Netflix, who've said since last year that the first and second quarter of 2021 would be the most affected by COVID. Netflix shoots most of its TV shows and movies several months before it plans to release them, which you have to do when you are dropping every episode all at once. As a result, it had shot most of its 2020 material, but we're now a year into the pandemic,

which means we're seeing the effects of production stoppages from last March, April and May. Streaming seems to be growing like a weed right now, but every service is in a slightly different position when it comes to content available. Disney Plus only releases one show every couple months and had two Marvel programs to start the year. Hulu's output in the first quarter was slight, but at least it has the Handmaid's Tale, coming back at the end of April. HBO Max has benefited from all those new Warner Brothers movies, and Amazon subscriber base has little to do with its programming. Netflix's top priority is growing outside the U.S., so a steady supply of new product may be all it needs, but investors tend to react strongly to any sign of a real slowdown at home, too, end quote. So what if, even after we're

all vaccinated, we face, I don't know, like six months or so of a new content, sort of winter, but then maybe we'll be so busy visiting each other and, you know, doing things out in the real world that we might not even notice. Not a lot to share with you again today, because as soon as I can get this show out the door, I'm taking my wife to get her first vaccine shot. So again, here's hoping that all of you listening will have similar vaccine celebration days coming soon. Talk to you tomorrow.