Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 05/04 – How Many People Still Pay For AOL?

Episode Date: May 4, 2021

Twitter opens up Space more broadly, and buys the startup Scroll. So, what is the larger endgame here with their subscription play? Apple benefits from the turmoil in Google’s AI team. A breakdown of day one of the Apple/Epic Games trial. And how many people still pay a monthly subscription to AOL? Sponsors: Masterworks.io, promocode: ride Cybereason.com Links: Twitter expands Spaces to anyone with 600+ followers, details plans for tickets, reminders and more (Tech Crunch) Twitter is buying Scroll, the subscription service that removes ads from news sites (The Verge) Twitter makes all of its money from ads. It’s trying to change that. (Recode) Apple hires ex-Google AI scientist who resigned after colleagues' firings (Reuters) Ford backed Argo sees new sensor as key for self driving cars (Bloomberg) Apple and Epic go head-to-head in fiery opening remarks of highly-anticipated trial (9to5 Mac) About 1.5 million people still pay for AOL — but now they get tech support and identity theft services instead of dial-up internet (CNBC) 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, May 4th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Twitter opens up spaces more broadly and buys the startup scroll. So what is the larger end game here with their whole subscription play? Apple benefits from the turmoil in Google's AI team, a breakdown of day one of the Apple Epic Games trial, and how many people still pay a monthly subscription to AOL? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Twitter has opened up spaces. It's live audio feature to anyone with more than 600 followers. Also, we can now schedule spaces ahead of time, and you can sign up to get notifications when they happen, which we will make use of as soon as we can.

And Twitter has fleshed out more of its plans for things like ticketed spaces, co-hosting, accessibility, and more, quoting TechCrunch. Twitter says it decided on the 600-person follower figure as being the minimum to gain access to Twitter spaces based on its earlier testing. Accounts with 600 or more followers tend to have a, quote, good experience hosting live conversations because they have a larger existing audience who can tune in. However, Twitter says it's still planning to bring spaces to all users in the future. Twitter spaces will soon support multiple co-hosts, and creators will be able to better market and even charge for access to their live events on Twitter spaces.

One feature, arriving in the next few weeks, will allow users to discuss. schedule and set reminders about spaces they don't want to miss. This can also help creators who are marketing their event in advance, as part of the RSVP process could involve pushing users to set a reminder about the upcoming show. A limited group of testers will gain access to ticketed spaces in the coming months. Twitter says, unlike Clubhouse, which is yet to tap into creator revenue streams, Twitter will take a small cut from these ticket sales. However, it notes that the majority of the revenue will go to the creators themselves. Twitter also noted that it's improving its accessibility features, live captions, so they can be paused and customized, and is working to make them even more accurate, end quote.

And Twitter has announced it it is acquiring scroll, the $5 a month service that removes ads from specific partner news sites. Scroll's Nuzzle email service will shut down on May 6, but it will be interesting to see how Twitter might want to integrate the larger scroll product, quoting the Verge. Twitter is working on building out a new kind of subscription plan that will include Scroll, the recently acquired revenue newsletter service, and other homegrown Twitter services. In a blog post announcing the deal, Scroll CEO Tony Hale, says that one reason he sold his company is because, quote, Twitter's ambitions are larger than people suspect, end quote. The scroll service is an ingenious hack that uses third-party cookies or browser extensions to tell websites to not serve ads to you.

It's not quite an ad blocker per se, but instead, sends a portion of your subscription fee to the participating websites you visit. Now that it's being acquired by Twitter, it will no longer accept new sign-ups, though nothing is expected to change in the short term for existing customers. That's not the case for another squirrel service, Nuzzle, which is going to be, quote, winding down. Nuzzle sends daily emails of the top stories shared by people in your Twitter feed and was therefore beloved by a tiny set of very online news consumers. Twitter says it will, quote, bring the core elements of Nuzzle directly to Twitter over time, end quote. But the service will be shutting down on May 6th. It's a little difficult to

divine exactly what Twitter intends to do with scroll. Twitter is absolutely building a subscription service that will put together a bunch of services, but what exactly will be included, what it will cost, and who will share in the revenue, is only known to Twitter, assuming it has a long-term vision at all, which, until recently, was not a great bet, end quote. Yes, about those ambitions and subscription moves, quoting Peter Koppel. Kafka and Recode. You can see the contours of what Twitter is up to. It has already launched review, a substact clone that lets users create and sell their own newsletters. It takes a 5% cut of any revenue those subscriptions generate. Twitter has also said it plans to take a small

amount from any sales generated via spaces, a clubhouse clone that lets users set up their own audio rooms to host conversations. Right now, the service is free, but Twitter has announced plans to let users sell access to particular rooms. And now it's adding scroll, a service that launched in 2018 and gives users the ability to block ads when they visit sites from participating publishers. In exchange for stripping the ads off their sites, Scroll gives publishers the majority of the revenue it generates via $5 monthly subscriptions. Hale has said his service isn't supposed to replace internet advertising, but says publishers who work with his company can make more money that way than via ads. From the outside, though, it appears as though Scroll hasn't had the traction

Hale would have liked. While he initially launched with a network for about 300 sites, he hasn't been able to convince some major publishers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to join his network, even though they were investors in his company. And if Scroll had a substantial number of subscribers, he likely wouldn't have sold the company to Twitter. It will be interesting to see what happens to Scroll now. On the one hand, sinking up with Twitter's base of 200 million active users could give it a chance to find much wider distribution. On the other hand, I wonder if publishers will be wary of tying up with a big tech platform given past experiences with the likes of Facebook. The social network has changed its media strategy multiple times and left publishers scrambling

to catch up or worse, end quote. Remember how there was this sort of big shakeout at Google's AI team over various, I don't know, let's call them political issues recently, a bunch of big AI names left Google or were forced out, depending on your point of view. Well, this is apparently bouncing in Apple's favor. as they have apparently hired ex-Google AI scientist Sammy Benjiio, who left Google last month after his colleague's firings. Sources say Benjiro will lead a new AI unit under John Gianandra, who himself left Google a couple

years ago after spending eight years there, quoting Reuters. Benjiio, who left Google last week after about 14 years, said last month he was pursuing, quote, other exciting opportunities. His decision followed Google's firings in recent months of, fellow scientists Margaret Mitchell, after alleging she transferred electronic files out of the company, and Timit Gebrou, after she threatened to quit rather than retract a paper. Mitchell and Gebrou had co-led a team researching ethics issues in AI and had voiced concern about Google's workplace diversity and approach to reviewing research. Ben Geo had expressed

support for the pair. As one of the early leaders of the Google Brain research team, Bengeo advance the deep learning algorithms that underpin today's AI systems for analyzing images, speech, and other data, end quote. Argo AI, the self-driving startup backed by Ford most prominently, has announced what it is calling a breakthrough new sensor that it thinks will inch it ever closer to a potential breakthrough in autonomous driving, quoting Bloomberg. The Pittsburgh-based company, which plans to go public as soon as this year, unveiled a LiDAR sensor Tuesday, of, quote, seeing 400 meters or 437 yards down the road with almost photographic detail. LiDAR bounces light off of objects to create an image of the road ahead, providing

critical information to computers that pilot next generation technology in vehicles without human drivers. The new sensor will be at the heart of the self-driving system that will debut on Ford's ride hailing and delivery vehicles next year and on VW models in the middle of the decade. Arco's LiDar could remove some roadblocks holding back more widespread adoption of driverless technology, in part, by improving the visibility of other vehicles in low-light conditions. Quote, it really unlocks our ability to operate safely on highways and to then expand to entire metropolitan areas. Brian Seleski, Argo's chief executive officer and co-founder said in an interview. Argo is testing its technology in six U.S. cities with vehicles that shuttle both cargo and passengers,

Celeski said, quote, we're running multiple shifts in high-demand areas like surface streets and now also highways, end quote. The new LIDAR's range is about 100 meters greater than current technology, which could enable driverless vehicles to travel at speeds of 65 miles per hour or more, said Sam Abil Samad, principal analyst with researcher guidehouse insights, which just rated Argo among the leaders in self-driving development. It gives them potentially a very significant performance advantage over a lot of the competition, said Abel-Sameed, who reviewed the specifications of Argo's LiDar. The level of performance that they're potentially going to be getting from this gives them a lot richer information, end quote. Seeing dark things, such as cars with black paint jobs, also has stymied traditional

LIDAR, but Argo's system uses a technology known as Geiger mode capable of detecting as little as the smallest particle of light, a single photon. The company said that enables its LIDAR to identify dark objects four football fields away with near photographic accuracy, end quote. I haven't decided to what degree we will be covering the TikTok of the daily news from the Apple versus Epic Games trial. Obviously, if there is any big headline or testimony on a given day, we'll cover it, but I don't think we need to do every little daily sneeze. Though since yesterday was the first day of the trial, I will note how things kicked off, quoting 9 to 5 Mac.

Epic's opening slideshow included a slew of internal emails from Apple execs detailing how the company built its so-called Wald Garden. This included emails from Steve Jobs, Craig Federigi, Luca Mastery, Tim Cook, Eddie Q, and Scott Forstall. The emails chosen by Epic aimed to illustrate the early decision-making that went into the creation of the App Store with Epic accusing Apple of creating anti-competitive guidelines from the start. Epic also cited internal communication from Phil Schiller, where the Apple executive floated the possibility of reducing the App Store commission once the store reached $1 billion in profit. Epic also took a specific aim at Apple's claims that the App Store helps create a secure and trusted place for users to download apps. The company pointed to multiple examples of times Apple was internally aware of scam applications on the App Store, including one heated email from Phil Schiller about a Temple Run rip-off, making it to the top of the App Store charts. Epic's argument is that

Apple touts its app review process as a key benefit of the App Store ecosystem when, in actuality, the process fails to catch hundreds of thousands of scam and fishing apps each year. The company specifically points to a figure from 2017 when Apple said it removed more than 400,000 apps from the App Store. Quote, we submit that once the evidence is in, it will show unambiguously that Apple is a monopoly, it unlawfully maintains that monopoly, and that Epic has met its burden on all of the claims, the company concluded following its opening statement. Apple's lawyers were then given the opportunity to present their opening statement. Apple focused largely on the benefit provided to developers on its platforms. This includes access to Apple's intellectual

properties, such as its variety of APIs and developer resources. As we reported in April, Apple is also focusing heavily on Project Liberty, which is what Epic internally refers to as its strategy to publicly skirt the app store and portray Apple as, quote, the bad guy. Its opening statement today also highlighted that Epic CEO Tim Sweeney reached out privately to Microsoft to give that company a heads up about, quote, an extraordinary opportunity for consoles and PCs. Apple also argued in its opening statements that Epic is arguing that Apple should turn iOS into Android, giving up its own competitive advantage by allowing third-party app stores and payment processing solutions. Apple also pointed out that Epic asked for a special

side deal from the company before launching the Project Liberty campaign, end quote. Interesting little nugget revealed by Apple, who got Epic financial numbers during the discovery process apparently. Epic's total gross revenue in 2018 was $5.6 billion and in 2019 was $4.2 billion, with the vast majority of revenues coming from Fortnite. When I say vast majority, I mean Fortnite represented 97% of Epic's revenues in 2018 and 88% in 2019. But how this breaks down is sort of interesting, quoting The Verge. The game earned more than $700 million from iOS customers over the two years before it was pulled by Apple, according to court documents released ahead of Epic's trial against the iPhone maker. But even though iOS Fortnite players brought in a staggering amount

of money for Epic, iOS isn't the biggest platform in terms of revenue for the game. Apparently, it might even be among the smallest. Court documents revealed that PlayStation 4 generated 46.8% of Fortnite's total revenues from March 2018 through July 2020, while Xbox 1, the second highest platform generated 27.5%. iOS ranked fifth with just 7% of total revenue. The remaining 18.7% would have been split between Android, Nintendo Switch, and PCs. In 2020, iOS revenues were projected to be an even smaller piece of the pie, just 5.8% compared to 24% for Xbox 1 and almost 40% for PlayStation 4, end quote. So, does all that reveal the real motivations here? Are the console platform sort of saturated at this point for Fortnite, and so if Epic wants to grow revenues

for Fortnite beyond what it has now, it needed to break open the app stores and thus maybe the lawsuit. It also might explain why Epic is willing to pick this fight, because even if they alienate the big app stores, they still make most of their money elsewhere, so even if they cut off their arm to spite their face and this revenue stream goes away entirely, they're not going to starve. Finally today, the recent news that oath is going to be sold to a private equity firm has shaken loose another peek into everyone's favorite parlor game question, which is, how many people still pay an AOL subscription? Quoting CNBC. In 2015, 2.1 million people were still using AOL's

dial-up service. That revenue stream has apparently dried up. The number of dial-up users is now, quote, in the low thousands, according to a person familiar with the matter, but AOL still has a fairly lucrative base of customers who pay for technical support and identity theft services each month. There are about one and a half million monthly customers paying $9.99 or $14.99 per month for AOL Advantage, said another person who asked not to be named because the information is private. If average revenue per user is $10 per month, conservatively, that's $180 million of annual revenue. While AOL has largely faded from popular culture, Yahoo still has about 150 million daily active users and nearly 900 million monthly active users, end quote. That's all for today. Talk to

tomorrow.