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Greetings! You know what kids love? Videogames. And you know what they don't really love—at least if the small children in my life are any barometer? Advertisements. Yet Roblox, the eponymous company behind one of the most popular videogame platforms for kids, is pinning at least a portion of its hopes for more revenue growth on…advertisements. Roblox today said it would shortly debut a new form of video ads it promises will produce an "immersive" experience. Huh? Well, Bloomberg describes the move as a bid to "encourage player engagement," offering in-game rewards for watching the clips. C'mon! When have ads ever encouraged someone to engage more deeply with a game? Sure, some games do run off advertising revenue, but that's mostly the cheapie mobile games market, and many people perceive those brands as largely digital schlock. Surely that's not what Roblox aspires to become. Roblox brought in $3.6 billion in revenue last year from a mix of sources: the cut it takes from transactions using its in-game currency, Robux; monthly subscriptions to premium features that begin at $4.99; and some existing advertising efforts, mostly on digital billboards within its virtual realms. It may be a tall order for Roblox to include ads in its game without damaging the playing experience for users. Sure, plenty of companies lately have tried to increase sales from video ads, but such advertisements certainly seem to fit more naturally within, say, Netflix or Amazon Prime—two streaming-video services—than within Roblox. Newsmax, the conservative news outlet, made its public market debut yesterday, and its shares don't seem tethered to any sort of reality, shooting up from under $20 to nearly $200. Folks, we seem to have the latest meme stock on our hands! There's nothing special in Newsmax's underlying financials: Revenue inched up just 2% last year to $109 million, while its losses absolutely ballooned, nearly doubling to $72 million. So much has been said about how Donald Trump's reelection has seemed to shift American culture rightward. It'll be interesting to see whether this change buoys the business of conservative media, which, like much of the media world, has been in a rough place lately. Newsmax is waist deep in red ink. Just last week, we found out that The Daily Wire is reportedly close to bankruptcy. And Trump's own Truth Social saw sales decline 12% last year to just $3.6 million, while it managed to blow an extraordinary amount of money, with its operating loss widening by more than 1,000%—not a typo—to almost $200 million. - Andreessen Horowitz has joined the talks around the TikTok sale, the Financial Times reports.
- Meta Platforms' head of AI research is leaving, possibly complicating the company's push into artificial intelligence.
- Circle has filed publicly for an IPO.
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