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‘AOL and Yahoo still exist?’ Private-equity firm Apollo agrees to buy two relics of early internet days for $5 billion

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Apollo Global Management, the private-equity firm co-founded by disgraced Wall Street tycoon Leon Black, agreed to buy two of the top has-been names from the early days of consumer internet firms – Yahoo and AOL – for $5 billion.

The deal to buy Verizon’s media unit, including Yahoo and AOL, was quickly met with mockery after it was announced on Monday. “This is interesting news,” podcast host Mark Eastman said. “Also, they are offloading pet rocks and a disco ball manufacturer.”

Indeed, Yahoo and AOL have fallen a long way since being ubiquitous players back when the internet mushroomed up as a gigantic consumer marketplace and public square in the 1990s and early 2000s. The companies had combined market values exceeding $300 billion around the turn of the millennium, before they were overtaken by today’s Big Tech giants.

CNET News editor Stephen Shankland pointed out that today’s purchase price for Verizon’s entire media business is about equivalent to the difference between what Microsoft was willing to pay in negotiations to buy Yahoo for nearly $45 billion and the price that Yahoo’s management was demanding.

Yahoo and AOL were long past their peaks when Verizon bought them for a combined $9 billion in 2015 and 2016, respectively. Traffic has further eroded since then. For instance, Yahoo lost 34% of its audience between 2017 and 2019, and suspension of its popular comments section on news articles last year may have led to more losses.

Verizon will receive $4.25 billion in cash for Yahoo, AOL and its other media assets. It will retain a 10%, $750 million stake in the business, which will be renamed simply Yahoo, Apollo said. Yahoo’s Guru Gowrappan will stay on as chief executive.

Verizon to slash over 2K jobs after acquiring Yahoo for $4.5B – reports

Private-equity firms typically carve up acquired companies and slash costs, at least partly through job cuts, to make them profitable before selling them off – sometimes in pieces – for big gains. But Gowrappan said the takeover by Apollo, which is scheduled to close in this year’s second half, will help Yahoo accelerate its growth.

“We are big believers in the growth prospects of Yahoo and the macro tailwinds driving growth in digital media, advertising technology and consumer internet platforms,” said David Sambur, a senior partner at Apollo.

Social-media users were largely unconvinced. “Apollo out here striking while the iron is cold and the blacksmith is in bed,” one Twitter commenter said.

Apollo was co-founded by Leon Black, who stepped down as CEO in March, though he retained a 23% ownership interest in the firm. It came to light earlier this year that Black paid the late financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein $158 million, allegedly for financial advice.

People trust algorithms more than other human beings, study finds. Who do they think programs those computers?

It’s not clear what advice the 69-year-old Black, a veteran Wall Street dealmaker, might have needed from Epstein. Black’s fortune is estimated by Forbes at more than $9 billion. Apollo’s other co-founders, billionaires Mark Rowan and Joshua Harris, remain with the firm.

“Yahoo and AOL are going to be bought by the moneyed friends of Epstein,” artist Kay Zed said on Twitter. “Great.”

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TECHNOLOGY

How much YouTube pays for 1 million views, according to creators

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  • YouTube creators earn money from Google-placed ads on their videos.
  • A number of factors determine how much money they make, including video views.
  • Creators said how much YouTube pays for 1 million views ranged from $3,400 to $30,000.

While many factors — content niche and country, among them — determine how much money a YouTuber earns on any particular video, the number of views it gets is perhaps the most significant.

When a YouTube video hits 1 million views, there’s almost a guaranteed big payday for its creator. In some cases, creators can make five-figures from a single video if it accrues that many views.

Three creators explained how much money YouTube had paid them. YouTube pays $3,400 to $30,000 for 1 million views, these creators said.

When tech creator Shelby Church spoke with Insider, she had earned $30,000 from a video about Amazon FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon). At the time, the video had accrued 1.8 million views.

Her RPM rate — or earnings per 1,000 views — are relatively high, she said, because of her content niche. Business, personal finance, and technology channels tend to earn more per view.

“YouTubers don’t always make a ton of money, and it really depends on what kind of videos you’re making,” she said.

Influencers can earn 55% of a video’s ad revenue if they are part of YouTube’s Partner Program, or YPP. To qualify for the program, they must have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time on their long-form videos.

They can also make money from shorts, YouTube’s short-form video offering. In order to qualify, creators need to reach 10 million views in 90 days and have 1,000 subscribers. YouTube pools ad revenue from shorts and pays an undisclosed amount to record labels for music licensing. Creators receive 45% of the remaining money based on their percentage of the total shorts views on the platform.

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Tesla employees shared sensitive images recorded by cars – Reuters

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Some pictures were turned into memes and distributed through internal chats, former workers told the agency

Tesla workers shared “highly invasive” images and videos recorded by customers’ electric cars, making fun of them on internal chat groups, several former employees of Elon Musk’s company have told Reuters.

The electric-car manufacturer obtains consent from its clients to collect data from vehicles in order to improve its self-driving technology. However, the company assures owners that the whole system is “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy,” the agency pointed out in its report on Thursday.

According to nine former workers who talked to the agency, groups of employees shared private footage of customers in Tesla’s internal one-on-one chats between 2019 and 2022.

One of the clips in question captured a man approaching his electric car while he was completely naked, one of the sources said.

Tesla recalls over 360,000 cars over self-driving threat

Others featured crashes and road-rage incidents. One particular video of a Tesla hitting a child on a bike in a residential area spread around the company’s office in San Mateo, California “like wildfire,” an ex-employee claimed.

“I’m bothered by it because the people who buy the car, I don’t think they know that their privacy is, like, not respected… We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids,” another former worker told the agency.

Seven former employees also told Reuters that the software they used at work allowed them to see the location where the photo or video was made, despite Tesla assuring its customers that “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.”

The agency noted that it could not obtain any of the pictures or clips described by its sources, who said they were all deleted. Some former employees also told the journalists that they had only seen private data being shared for legitimate purposes, such as seeking assistance for colleagues. Tesla did not respond when approached for comment on the issue by Reuters.

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Nordic nation’s military bans use of TikTok – media

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Sweden’s Defense Ministry has reportedly barred employees from using the Chinese-owned app on their work phones

Sweden’s military has reportedly cracked down on TikTok, decreeing that staff members are no longer allowed to use the Chinese-owned video-sharing application on their devices at work because of security concerns.

The Swedish Defense Ministry on Monday issued its decision, which was viewed by Agence-France Presse, banning the use of TikTok. Security concerns were raised based on “the reporting that has emerged through open sources regarding how the app handles user information and the actions of the owner company, ByteDance,” the ministry said.

The move follows similar restrictions imposed by other EU countries in recent weeks. For example, France banned government employees from downloading “recreational applications,” including TikTok, on their work phones. Norway barred use of the app on devices that can access its parliament’s computer network, while the UK and Belgium banned it on all government phones. Denmark’s Defense Ministry and Latvia’s Foreign Ministry imposed their TikTok bans earlier this month.

China responds to TikTok allegations

“Using mobile phones and tablets can in itself be a security risk, so therefore we don’t want TikTok on our work equipment,” Swedish Defense Ministry press secretary Guna Graufeldt told AFP.

The US, Canada and New Zealand previously banned their federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices, citing fears of ByteDance’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Members of Congress may try to ban the app from the US market altogether after testimony at a congressional hearing last week by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew failed to ease their security concerns. “They’ve actually united Republicans and Democrats out of the concern of allowing the CCP to control the most dominant media platform in America,” US Representative Mike Gallagher said on Sunday in an ABC News interview.

Chinese officials have denied claims that TikTok is used to collect the personal data of its American users. “The Chinese government has never asked and will never ask any company or individual to collect or provide data, information or intelligence located abroad against local laws,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters last week. She added that Washington has attacked TikTok without providing any evidence that it threatens US security.

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