“According to data from Similarweb, a third-party company that tracks social media analytics, daily traffic to Bluesky jumped above that of Threads on Nov. 6. Bluesky is currently the no. 1 free app on Apple’s App Store, directly ahead of Threads.”

“‘I get why people have concerns, but at the end of the day we’re a business and Threads needs to make enough money to pay for the people and servers that it takes to run the service and provide it to people for free,’ Mosseri said at the time.”

“The tools include newsroom workflow aides, consumer-facing Al services and internal data discovery tools. They are packaged together in an internal tool called Pulse Al so staff have a one-stop shop for the new services.”

“Traffic from the day before Election Day 2024 through Saturday had 20.9% less traffic to the top 50 websites when measured against the comparable six days in 2020, according to Similarweb data shared with Digiday.”

“Were discretion and caution the order of the day, or would trumpeting the injustice that had been meted out on our colleague accelerate his return? A phone call to a senior government official who knows this terrain provided the answer: ‘There are times to be quiet and there are times to be loud — and this is a time to be loud.'”

“The summaries appear as a ‘Key Points’ box with bullets summarizing the piece. The Verge spotted the test on a story about Trump’s plans for the Department of Education, and the Journal confirmed it’s trialing the feature to see how readers respond.”

“Prime-time viewership at MSNBC has fallen 53 percent from October, and jumped 21 percent on Fox News.”

“Spotify plans to start paying hosts who make popular videos and meet a certain viewing threshold, and will soon offer premium subscribers a way to watch shows such as ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ and ‘Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain’ without ads. It currently allows hosts to upload podcast videos, but doesn’t offer such payments.”

“During Trump’s first administration, he regularly plucked commentators from Fox’s airwaves to serve in his administration. But Hegseth’s appointment represented the first time that a full-time host had been picked as one of Trump’s Cabinet secretaries, suggesting that the network’s personalities will once again play a key role in his next presidency.”

“‘I don’t need 70 million subs to make this thing work,’ [John Matts, Hallmark Media’s chief operating officer], said. ‘I can do it in the single-digit millions of subs. This can be a really attractive business for us smaller guys, because we don’t need to spend tens of billions of dollars to program.'”

“Meta’s Threads is still outpacing Bluesky, having recently hit 275 million monthly users and growing at a rate of over a million signups per day. But Bluesky offers a very different experience. Both are ad-free (for now), but whereas Threads uses a single Meta-made algorithmic feed, Bluesky offers user-created algorithmic feeds in addition to its ‘Discover’ and ‘Popular With Friends’ ones.”

“Think about the difference when you open YouTube versus when you open TikTok. On YouTube, you see a screen full of titles and thumbnails. Some of them are likely from channels you subscribe to; others are things YouTube thinks you might like or videos you started but haven’t finished. Your job is to pick one and press play. On TikTok, though, something is already playing. If you like it, do nothing. If you don’t, swipe up and something else starts.”

“…it emerged that Oaktree will not be a partner, sparking speculation that the bid may fall apart, resulting in a third auction of the titles. Efune’s spokesperson insisted, however, that he has ‘high confidence’ he will secure the necessary financing, and that Oaktree did not offer a sufficiently competitive deal compared with other interested backers.”