YouTube, Amazon Healthcare, and Snack Food Stores

YouTube is getting serious about ad-blockers (and triggering a record number of ad-blocker uninstalls).

American homes are getting bigger:

The New York Times has been killing it, hitting 10 million paid subscribers, in part on the back of non-news offerings (like games).

Spotify is offering audiobooks (in a few countries).

Amazon is offering healthcare services (in the US, and at a reduced price for Prime members).

Clothing-makers in Bangladesh (where a lot of fast-fashion garments are made) have been protesting bad working conditions and low pay.

Taylor Swift’s “Taylor’s Version” songs are collapsing the original songs’ listens and purchases:

“On-demand audio streams for the original 1989 declined 56.4% while track sales — a smaller component of 1989’s total consumption — fell 67.8%. Video streams declined 56.4% and programmed streams (from non-interactive internet radio services such as Pandora) dropped 23.6%. At the same time, 1989 (Taylor’s Version) amassed over 375.49 million on-demand streams — compared with just 27.8 million total on-demand streams for the original over the same period.”

Amazon sales are now occurring natively within Meta products.

The band Wilco is offering a custom font as merch.

How Netflix conquered Hollywood, and then broke it.

The rise of China’s snack food stores.

Tipping has gotten complicated in the US, following the height of the pandemic when all sorts of norms were upended, and it’s leading to a pushback against tipping and the interfaces that encourage tips for services that weren’t previously seen as tip-worthy:

Biometric payments have been slow to take off.