Testing out solutions is a core part of the design process, and on the web, that often happens in the form of A/B testing: Designers show one group of users design A, another group of users design B, and measure which gets closer to a desired outcome. And it’s not just layouts that get A/B tested–these experiments determine everything from the headlines we read to the colors we see. But as a new paper discusses, there can be ethical issues with A/B testing.
Google paid Apple $9.4 billion in 2018 to be the default search engine on the iPhone, according to a new Goldman Sachs estimate.This makes Google’s payment to Apple worth as much as 23% of Apple’s services business, which the company has highlighted as its growth engine as iPhone sales slow.Google could pay Apple as much as $12.2 billion next year, according to Goldman’s model.Still, Apple’s services business may see slowing growth in the near future if it does not release a new content bundle, the Goldman analysts argue.
Right now, it looks like the near future will see every major dating app ending up in the same hands, just one of the many stories of industry consolidation we’re witnessing in what antitrust expert Tim Wu has called the second Gilded Age, which is maybe abstractly scary — but more tangibly so when you think about Facebook as the only company that could possibly stop it.
Cashierless stores, like Amazon Go, have great potential to shake up the brick-and-mortar landscape. According to GPShopper, 48% of US internet users believe scan-and-go technology would make shopping easier. And 43% would rather try scan-and-go than wait in a checkout line. Respondents said they’d be most interested in scanning groceries, home goods and fashion items.
Artificial intelligence has made major strides in the past few years, but those rapid advances are now raising some big ethical conundrums. Chief among them is the way machine learning can identify people’s faces in photos and video footage with great accuracy. This might let you unlock your phone with a smile, but it also means that governments and big corporations have been given a powerful new surveillance tool. A new report from the AINow Institute (large PDF), an influential think tank based in New York, has just identified facial recognition as a key challenge for society and policymakers.
The biggest takeaway by far is that YouTube’s Content ID shows a whopping 48% of all streams and only 7% of revenue. Read that again. This is your value gap. Nearly 50% of all recorded music streams only generate 7% of revenue. Apple Music and Spotify combined account for just short of 40% of all streams and 74% of all revenue.
Apple is not just a giant of technology; it has also grown into one of the biggest American retailers. But the shine of its signature stores has dimmed.
The Wild West era may be drawing to a close for tech corporations like Facebook and Google. New scrutiny from regulators abroad — and some closer to home — is resulting in fines that portend more substantial changes on the horizon. Soon, your data may rest a bit more squarely in your control.
Since its founding in 2006, Spotify’s business model has been simple. It takes music owned by musicians and record labels and lets people listen to it for free interspersed with ads or without interruptions for a monthly fee. It passes along most of these revenues to the owners of the music, keeping a cut for themselves.
As Netflix and other content platforms have learned, this middle-man model is not particularly lucrative or sustainable. In Spotify’s case, the record labels have a lot of leverage because if they choose to block their content from the platform, Spotify would basically die. As a result, labels are able to extract about 75% of Spotify’s revenue.
After many years stuck on the side lines, podcasts are now becoming sought after by everyone from radio companies, streaming services, newspaper publishers to TV companies and many, many more. Media brands of all forms see podcasts as a part of their future, a way to increase and diversify listening time (streaming services); fight back against streaming (radio); reach new audiences (news); and extend audience engagement (TV). To some degree podcasts can probably deliver on all those expectations, and while the creative possibilities are clear, the path ahead is not so straight forward:
Younger consumers, typically Millennials, are always on the go—from visiting family to working out to connecting with colleagues at happy hour. While they live busy lifestyles, they also like to stay connected to what’s happening with their favorite sports teams. And that means these highly engaged viewers look for ways to stay connected to the latest scores and catch a game regardless of where they are.
According to the latest Nielsen Category Shopping Fundamentals study, as detailed in our recent Millennials on Millennials report, 60% of U.S. consumers’ FMCG decisions are still made at the shelf. This is a key insight for retailers, but so is understanding the influence that digital has on influencing consumers on their way to the shelf. Not surprisingly, Millennials are more active on social media than older generations, and this affects the way they look for information as they shop. For example, Millennials are significantly more likely than the broader population to conduct online research for common items like food and cleaning products.
