Year: 2020

Singapore-based Igloo, formerly known as Axinan, has raised $8.2 million as the insurance-tech startup looks to broaden its foothold in half a dozen Southeast Asian markets and Australia.

InVent, a corporate venture capital arm of telecommunications firm Intouch Holdings, led Igloo’s extended Series A round, the startup told TechCrunch. Existing investors Openspace Ventures, a venture capital fund that invests in Southeast Asia, and Linear Capital, a Shanghai-based early-stage venture capital firm focusing on tech-driven startups, participated in this round, which makes four-year-old Igloo’s to-date raise to $16 million. It raised about $1 million in its Seed financing round.

Igloo — founded by Wei Zhu, who previously served as Chief Technology Officer at Grab — works with e-commerce and travel firms such as Lazada, RedDoorz, and Shopee in Southeast Asia to offer their customers insurance products that provide protection on electronics, and coverage on accidents and travel.

The startup, which also operates in Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, said more than 15 million users have benefitted from its insurance products to date, and in the last one year it has processed more than 50 million transactions.

Igloo, which rebranded from Axinan this month, said insurance products are proving especially useful to — and popular among — people during the coronavirus outbreak.

Raunak Mehta, Chief Commercial Officer at Igloo, told TechCrunch that the startup has seen a surge in transactions and customer acquisitions in the last 45 days. “While some travel related business have seen a dip, the larger e-commerce business continues to see a surge,” he added.

“With COVID-19 impacting every facet of personal life and business, digitisation can help the world adjust to the new normal. This is especially apparent in insurance, where we can tap on digital channels for distribution and also for creating awareness,” said Zhu.

“We see that digital insurance is on the rise in Southeast Asia, and we believe that Igloo, with our digital-first approach and expansion of our product portfolio into personal health, accident and other related products can help fill those gaps and address consumers’ needs for personal well-being,” he added.

He said the digital insurance penetration remains low in Southeast Asia, and Igloo sees massive opportunity in the space. According to one estimate (PDF), Southeast Asia’s digital insurance market is currently valued at $2 billion and is expected to grow to $8 billion by 2025.

The startup, which competes with a handful of startups including Singapore Life and Saphron, will use the fresh capital to expand its business development and engineering teams and broaden its presence in the half-dozen markets. It is already engaging with telecom operators, banks, non-banking financial firms, and travel agencies, it said.

Trying to raise money for a startup is never a walk in the park. Still, there are good times, there are bad times, and there is right now, a moment of uncertainty unlike anything that most of us have experienced in our lifetimes.

Even if a startup breezed through a fundraise before the world was disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s a good chance that for the sake of business continuity, it needs more money now, particularly as revenue across so many sectors plunges.

Lowered or flat valuations are all but certain. Meanwhile, a separate question begged is what kinds of terms founders will  face when they set up those Zoom calls, and numerous industry players suggest these could be more onerous than imagined.

“There are three categories of company at the moment,” offers Derek Colla, a Washington, D.C.-based startup attorney with Cooley. “Going back two months, you saw companies that were doing well and had investors asking to take their money; you had companies doing okay — close to plan — but not great; and companies that were kind of struggling, with investors who might bridge them.”

Now, says Colla, everyone has slipped a rung. “A good company might see a slight increase in price [when it closes on more funding], or just opening up that last round is pretty typical, partly because insiders don’t want the company to fail and partly they don’t want someone to come in and get a great deal and make them look stupid.”

Meanwhile, the company that was doing so-so is being asked to accept “not great terms.” Among these is taking a lower valuation or, if the company want to avoid one of these so-called down rounds, providing more stock warrants to its investors — contractual rights that enable the investors to increase their position in the future at today’s lower price.

Colla says he’s also seeing more companies in this second camp being asked to onerous terms on a more temporary basis, including year-long full-ratchet clauses that ensure that an investor’s shares aren’t diluted in later rounds if the valuation of a company drops.

Anecdotally, this is a small subset of a small subset for now. As lawyer Mike Sullivan, a partner and head of the corporate group in Orrick’s San Francisco office, notes, there simply aren’t a lot of deals being closed right now to draw any sweeping conclusions. “I haven’t seen investors try to take advantage of companies as a result of the crisis,” says Sullivan,” but I don’t have a lot of data points. I think it’s still too early to tell whether we’ll see the terms that we saw in the nuclear winter of 2001 and 2002,” after the dot-com boom ended.

One New York-based startup attorney with whom we spoke says that for now, the harshest terms are appearing in term sheets offered by mostly East Coast-based growth stage investors — firms that have always been more interested in metrics than a founder’s storytelling abilities.

Indeed, the terms don’t seen to be impacting Bay Area startups yet, where exceedingly free information flow may help ensure that venture investors don’t turn unreservedly predatory.

Earlier this week, for example, Fenwick & West published a report about the first quarter of this year in which it noted the slowdown in new deals due to the pandemic but said it isn’t yet witnessing an increase in terms like the senior or multiple liquidation preferences, ratchet anti-dilution or pay-to-play provisions that typically pop up in a significant downturn. (Pay-to-play provisions mean if a company needs to raise money and resorts to insiders for it, those who can’t or don’t want to contribute their pro rata share will see their preferred shares reduced to either common stock or some other subset of equity with fewer rights.)

The terms will never again make a widespread reappearance, says one longtime investor who asked not to be named. “The notion that people who need to be in this business for another 20 years could become gleefully predacious is largely a fiction.”

Entrepreneur and angel investor Jason Calacanis echoes the sentiment, saying that he has “heard about some folks wanting warrants and rounds being flat, but I haven’t heard about the 2x or 3x liquidation preferences from the dot-com bust era. [Founders] should only see this nonsense from the predatory VCs, and if [they agree to these] crazy terms, the problem is it can start the death spiral for the company.”

Only time will tell if they’re right. In the meantime, founders should absorb quickly that the game has changed, suggests Semil Shah, founder of the seed-stage firm Haystack.

While “optimizing” a funding round was something management teams could do not long ago, right now, “having the certainty of a close is more important. If someone offers fair or reasonable terms, you might not wait around and ask a bunch of people to try and get a better bid,” he notes.

Gogoro, the Taiwanese company known for its electric scooters, announced a new ebike brand that will go on sale in the United States first. Details about the ebike, called Eeyo, haven’t been released yet, but it is noteworthy because it marks Gogoro’s first product launch in the U.S.

Eeyo be available for purchase in the U.S. in May, before launching in Europe and Taiwan this summer.

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A new ebike from @gogoro_taiwan. Coming to the US in May. Prepare for liftoff.

A post shared by Gogoro Eeyo (@eeyobike) on Apr 22, 2020 at 1:07pm PDT

Founded in 2015 by former HTC executives Horace Luke and Matt Taylor, Gogoro says its Smartscooters are now the best-selling brand of electric two-wheel vehicles in Taiwan. The company also licenses its technology, including swappable, rechargeable batteries, to manufacturers like Yamaha, Aeon and PGO.

In Europe, Gogoro provided the fleet for Coup, the scooter-sharing service owned by Bosch, before it shut down last year.

Despite being best known for its Smartscooters, and the upcoming launch of Eeyo, Gogoro doesn’t just see itself as an electric vehicle maker. In an interview last year with Extra Crunch, Luke, Gogoro’s CEO, said the startup’s future lies in providing a platform for energy-efficient vehicles.

Last year it launched GoShare, a vehicle-sharing platform that will be available to other mobility companies as a turnkey solution for “any form factor” of vehicle.

On Thursday, the House passed the newest federal stimulus package aimed at providing financial relief for businesses and institutions hit hard by the COVID-19 crisis.

The bill lingered in the Senate for two weeks of debates, with Republicans seeking to pass a less comprehensive version of the legislation and Democrats working to weave other funding into the package. In the end, the interim legislation will allocate $310 billion to replenish the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), $75 billion for hospitals and $25 billion for COVID-19 testing. The bill also includes an additional funds for the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program.

The funding for tests comes with specific requirements for the Trump administration to formulate a “strategic plan” in coordination with states to expand national testing capacity—a key effort that public health experts say is necessary before states begin to reopen for business.

For small businesses around the country, many devastated by the ongoing crisis, the SBA program for forgivable loans began with hope but quickly descended into frustration. The loans are intended for small businesses to put toward payroll and if used to retain employees, they turn into grants. Many small business owners, scrambling to find banks handling PPP loans, were shut out of the program shortly after applications went live. Others never heard back about the loans and still remain in limbo. Within days, the funds had dried up.

Large banks are accused of eschewing a first-come-first-served system, instead doling the loans out preferentially based on their potential to make money. Some relatively large businesses also used gaping loopholes in the program to soak up the free funds. In one example, the restaurant chain Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse secured $20 million, which the company now says it will repay.

Democrats fought to include new carve-outs that could address some of these problems, and the final bill allocates $30 billion in loans for banks and credit unions with $10 to $50 billion in assets and another $30 billion for banks with under $10 billion in assets.

The president previously expressed his approval of the bill and his intention to sign it and make the funds available as quickly as possible.

Prompted by Jeff Bezos’s plans to test all Amazon employees for the virus that causes COVID-19, we wondered whether employers can mandate employee testing, regardless of symptoms. The issue pits public safety against personal privacy, but limited testing availability has rendered the question somewhat moot.

But as the World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have noted, asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers can spread the virus without realizing they’re infected. To learn more about workers’ rights in this arena, we spoke to Tricia Bozyk Sherno, counsel at Debevoise & Plimpton, who focuses on employment and general commercial litigation.

The answer, for now, is not entirely straightforward, though updates from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could make the situation clearer going forward as more tests are made available and state governments begin pushing to reopen businesses.

Sherno offered a fair amount of insight into the EEOC’s updated guidance and made some predictions about how things may look for both employers and workers going forward.

TechCrunch: Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, what sorts of laws governed an employer’s ability to test employees for infectious diseases?

Tricia Bozyk Sherno: Covered employers (employers with 15 or more employees) must comply with the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which limits an employer’s ability to make disability-related inquiries or require medical examinations. (Note that certain states may also have similar statutes in place.) Generally, disability-related inquiries and medical examinations are prohibited by the ADA except in limited circumstances. A “medical examination” is a procedure or test that seeks information about an individual’s physical or mental impairments or health — so infectious disease testing would fall into this category.

Prompted by Jeff Bezos’s plans to test all Amazon employees for the virus that causes COVID-19, we wondered whether employers can mandate employee testing, regardless of symptoms. The issue pits public safety against personal privacy, but limited testing availability has rendered the question somewhat moot.

But as the World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have noted, asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers can spread the virus without realizing they’re infected. To learn more about workers’ rights in this arena, we spoke to Tricia Bozyk Sherno, counsel at Debevoise & Plimpton, who focuses on employment and general commercial litigation.

The answer, for now, is not entirely straightforward, though updates from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could make the situation clearer going forward as more tests are made available and state governments begin pushing to reopen businesses.

Sherno offered a fair amount of insight into the EEOC’s updated guidance and made some predictions about how things may look for both employers and workers going forward.

TechCrunch: Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, what sorts of laws governed an employer’s ability to test employees for infectious diseases?

Tricia Bozyk Sherno: Covered employers (employers with 15 or more employees) must comply with the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which limits an employer’s ability to make disability-related inquiries or require medical examinations. (Note that certain states may also have similar statutes in place.) Generally, disability-related inquiries and medical examinations are prohibited by the ADA except in limited circumstances. A “medical examination” is a procedure or test that seeks information about an individual’s physical or mental impairments or health — so infectious disease testing would fall into this category.

Tesla has added Hiromichi Mizuno as a new member to its board of directors and audit committee — the former chief investment officer of Japan’s $1.5 trillion pension fund and a longtime opponent of common market practices like short selling.

With Mizuno’s appointment the Tesla board now has 10 members, including Oracle founder, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison and Walgreens executive Kathleen Wilson-Thompson. Mizuno will also sit on the board’s audit committee.

Hiro has a long career in finance and investment that included a stint as executive managing director and chief investment officer of Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), the largest in the world with about $1.5 trillion in assets under management. Hiro left his position in late March.

During his time at GPIF, Hiro promoted environmental, social and governance practices. He was also known for challenging short selling — a practice that has plagued Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk . During his tenure, the GPIF suspended stock lending, which caught many by surprise. Hiro’s opposition to short selling is at odds with some market purists who believe the investment strategy — which speculates on the decline in a stock — actually provides greater price transparency. Hiro has said in previous interviews with media outlets like the Financial Times that it conflicts with his long-term perspective.

Hiro is on a number of government advisory boards, including the board of the PRI, the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council and the Japanese government’s strategic fund integrated advisory board.

He also challenged many established market practices, including short-selling, to promote long-term value creation by corporations.

As a director, Mizuno will get an initial award of an option to purchase 2,778 shares of Tesla’s common stock, vesting and exercisable on June 18, 2020. For serving on the audit committee, he will get an initial award of an option to purchase 4,000 shares of Tesla’s common stock, vesting in 12 equal monthly tranches assuming continued service on each vesting date, according to a regulator filing Thursday.

Tesla’s board had sat unchanged for years until late 2018 when Ellison and Wilson-Thompson joined the board as independent directors as part of a settlement with U.S. securities regulators over CEO Elon Musk’s infamous tweets about taking the company private. Under the settlement, Tesla agreed to add two independent directors and Musk would step down as chairman for three years. Robyn Denholm, the former chief operations officer of Telstra Corporation Limited, a telecommunications company, was named chairman in November 2018.

In April 2019, the company said it would cut its board down by more than one-third, to seven directors, by 2020, a move that included the loss of some of Musk’s  early advisers and allies.

Longtime board members Brad Buss and Linda Johnson Rice, who joined two years ago as an independent director, did not seek re-election in 2019 and their terms expired at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in June. The board said in the proxy filing at the time that it didn’t plan to fill their seats.

Antonio Gracias,  whose term ends in 2020, and venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson will leave the board in 2020, according to a regulatory filing last year.

Is “Too Hot to Handle” the dumbest show on Netflix … or the most diabolically brilliant?

The reality TV series brings a group of twentysomethings together on a secluded tropical retreat, then — after a brief getting-to-know-you period — warns them that anything even coming close to sex will result in a reduction of the $100,000 prize. Not only does this force the contestants to wrestle with their own physical desires — it also encourages them to point fingers and police each other’s behavior.

The show is obviously ridiculous (we haven’t even mentioned Lana, the virtual assistant who explains the rules and supposedly monitors everyone’s behavior) and hypocritical. It simultaneously invites you to ogle the hardbodied cast members as they dance around in swimsuits and to judge them for indulging in “meaningless” hookups.

But as we discussed the show on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, another thought occurred to us: Maybe these aren’t just hedonistic morons showcasing the worst parts of their personalities at the encouragement of reality TV producers. Maybe instead, this is a brutally honest documentary capturing how all human beings would behave if we could get away with it.

As you ponder that possibility, you can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:27 Netflix earnings
18:27 “Too Hot to Handle” review
40:48 “Too Hot to Handle” spoiler discussion

Representatives from the government and the utility managing the power of Los Angeles are proposing a sweeping infrastructure package worth roughly $150 billion centered on the broad electrification of transportation and industry.

Drafted by the Los Angeles-based public-private Transportation Electrification Partnership, a collaboration between the Office of Mayor Eric Garcetti, Southern California Edison, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, the proposal lays out a number of initiatives based on work that’s already being done in Los Angeles to electrify the city’s infrastructure.

As the nation’s second-largest metropolitan area, boasting an over $1 trillion economy, decisions made in the city can have broad economic and social implications that ripple far beyond the Southern California region. Alongside New York, Los Angeles has set some of the nation’s most aggressive targets for the rollout of renewable and sustainable industries.

The proposal sets out four big initiatives, including zero-emissions vehicle manufacturing, assembly and adoption; zero-emissions infrastructure investments; commitments to public transit investments; workforce development; and job training. There’s also a relatively modest request (of only $4 billion) for funding devoted to pilot projects, startup companies, and public clean technology investment initiatives (like LACI).

The initiative reserves the largest cash pile for the development of electric charging infrastructure around the country, according to the proposal seen by TechCrunch and sent to House and Senate leadership including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Of the $85 billion set aside for the deployment of zero-emission vehicle infrastructure, the TEP proposal reserves roughly one-fourth for upgrades to the electricity grid. The funding would include $20 billion for utility upgrades. Of that, $10 billion will go toward solar and energy storage projects designed to make grids more resistant to climate-related catastrophes like extreme weather events, wildfires and other disasters. The remaining $10 billion would support commercial and residential vehicle charging, solar energy development and energy storage projects.

Another $15 billion is dedicated to medium- and heavy-duty vehicle charging that would be administered by state governments, transit agencies or regional agencies. New developments could be added to truck yards, truck stops and plazas, as well as strategic locations, such as ports and airports.

“Funding of the scale proposed here could enable a transformation not only in the LA metropolitan area, but across the country, as well as provide opportunities where possible for local hire through community benefit agreements, which are an effective mechanism to ensure charging infrastructure projects include workers living local to a project, as well as other targeted hiring policies, such as US Veteran hiring, are achieved,” writes LACI chief executive, Matt Peterson.  

Light-duty charging infrastructure occupies another $10 billion of the suggested stimulus measures. The goal, is to get local, shovel-ready projects the financing they’d need to start the process of hiring workers immediately. One project that’s already being rolled out in Los Angeles is the development of curbside charging infrastructure on streetlight poles to serve drivers who don’t have access to charging infrastructure at home.

Finally under the infrastructure bucket, the proposal recommends that Congress set aside $11 billion for transit and school bus charging to be administered via states, transit agencies and school districts;  $5 billion for state and local government fleets; and $4 billion to support the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

The LIHEAP money is critical for the over 12 million Americans who have recently lost their job, the consortium argues and could also help finance the Department of Energy’s Weatherization program.

Popular programs like Opportunity Zones, New Market Tax Credits and Community Development Finance Institutions could be used to boost the government’s commitment with private capital, the plan’s authors argue.

All of that charging infrastructure and grid upgrades are in part designed to help meet the increased power demands that the proposal expects to bring onto the grid through another $25 billion in government funding for electric vehicles of all types. The funds could be allocated through existing programs including the extension of the electric vehicle tax credit for automakers and new programs that would allow consumers to trade in older model vehicles for newer, preferably electric, vehicles.

An additional way the government could juice the auto industry — and specifically electric vehicles — is by providing point of sale rebates for all vehicles that could be issued through car dealerships, according to the proposal. “This will also help dealerships increase sales and bring needed sales tax revenues to local and state governments,” Peterson writes.

There’s $25 billion in money set aside for public transit and $12.5 billion set aside for workforce retraining and education.

For startups, the programs that could have the most impact — aside from the broad infrastructure package that could mean additional demand for new technologies — is a far smaller and more targeted proposal for roughly $4 billion that would allocate money directly to small and medium sized businesses and local incubation and corporate development programs.

“Startups and small businesses are the engine of every local and regional economy,” writes Peterson. “Targeting resources to this sector is critical to help entrepreneurs continue America’s leadership in technology innovation, restart small businesses, and help put people back to work.”

TEP is proposing a $1 billion grant for early stage research and development of cleantech and zero-emission mobility innovations and $1 billion for shovel ready pilot projects deployed by startups and small businesses via local governments.

Still more money would include $500 million in emergency loans and grants for cleantech startups and small businesses that are involved in solar installations, energy storage, and electric vehicle technology development. Revenues for these companies have dropped precipitously as consumer-facing demand has fallen off a cliff.

There’s also a $500 million pot targeted for startups and small businesses founded by women and people of color and $500 million for nonprofit cleantech and innovation incubators.

Alongside LACI, there are a few of these nonprofit investment programs which have cropped up across the Midwest that could be a boon to budding entrepreneurs.

Finally, the proposal advocates for at least $500 million in funding to train unemployed or underemployed would-be laborers along with veterans and the formerly incarcerated.

Some of these initiatives have been tried in the past, and despite partisan complaints, proved effective. The Obama-era loan program established to boost clean energy companies generated revenues for the government despite the much-publicized flameout of the solar startup, Solyndra. Even Tesla benefited from the program, paying back a $460 million loan from the program a decade ahead of schedule.

With increasing volatility in oil prices, the move to an increasingly electric infrastructure makes sense because it offers more stability for energy buyers, including consumers and businesses.

Leaked images obtained by TechCrunch reveal that Google considered and designed a feature that would let people donate money to websites to help support news publishers, bloggers, and musicians. But Google scrapped the idea and chose not to build out the product, despite these kinds of businesses and creators often struggling to earn revenue.

Last year, Google explored tipping as a new wing of Google Contributor, a service that lets people pay around 1 cent per page view to remove ads from partnered websites. Screenshots of the tipping feature showed the ability to make one-time donations of $0.20 to $5 to help support sites. “Want to see more content like this on our site? Support with a contribution” one version explained. It’s unclear if Google would have taken the same 10% cut of tips as it does from Contributor ad removal fees. Google mocked up designs for tipping on the sites of the New York Times, Wired, “Tech Crunch” [sic], and more.

If Google had launched the tipping feature, it could have provided a valuable tool to sites battered by the declining display ad market. And now amidst coronavirus lockdowns that have cancelled events and reduced podcast listenership that media publishers rely on for revenue, the ability to accept donations could have helped sites avoid laying off staff. Perhaps Google should consider resurrecting tipping as a more sustainable form of assistance alongside its new Journalism Emergency Relief Fund.

TechCrunch obtained these screenshots from a source that provided evidence that they came directly from Google. When asked, Google confirmed that the designs were of internal idea it explored last year but decided not to pursue as part of Contributor and Google Funding Choices, which lets sites ask visitors to disable ad blockers, or instead buy a subscription or pay a per page fee to remove ads. Google shared the idea with under a handful of publishers in a request for feedback. The company decided to prioritize other products, including a way for sites to request consent to personalize ads using their data amidst strengthened regulations like GDPR.

A Google spokesperson provided TechCrunch with a statement that “We recognize that there isn’t a single business model that works for all publishers today and think it’s critical to explore new technologies that can help publishers make more money. Funding Choices is a great example of a product we have invested in significantly and will continue to evolve to support publishers and their monetization strategies.”

In fact, few business models work for publishers at all. With layoffs common across local news, national papers, and digital outlets, publishers could use have used all the help they could get, even if long-term subscriptions would be more lucrative than one-off tips.

Google’s Unlaunched Patronage Feature

Designs for Google’s tipping feature show a floating “Support New York Times” button overlaid at the bottom of the screen as you scroll. Tapping it reveals instructions to “Select an amount below using Google Contributor to help fund this site” with options like $1, $3, or $5.

After choosing one, users log into their Google account if they aren’t already, and then “By clicking ‘Pay now’ you agree that: You will use your Google Payments account to make this one-time payment.” You’re then returned to the page you were viewing, with the button saying “Thank you for your support!” before shrinking to just the Contributor logo.

Google also designed a micropayments version of the feature where users could make smaller donations, such as $0.20. This call to action could be inserted into a static position inside a website. When a user’s contributions totaled $1 or more, they would be billed. They’d also have the option to save their contribution and make it later.

To drive home the emotional satisfaction of making a donation, this design shows a profile photo of you and tip recipient with a heart in between. Afterwards, a cute cat photo illustration shows a messaging saying “Thanks for the support. Your contribution is saved and we will send a confirmation email” with a cheeky “Purrrrrfect, thanks!” before returning you to the site.

Beyond traditional news sites, Google mocked up the tipping feature for The Points Guy travel advice site, the Spiritual Boss Babe blog, the Miranda Sings musician site, and the Forest Research UK government site. TechCrunch was not aware that Google was using our site in mockups for the tipping feature. Other sites included in the mockups did not respond to inquiries about if they were asked for feedback.

Publishers In Need

Google got into the publisher funding space with Google One Pass in 2011, helping users buy subscriptions to sites before it was shut down a year later. In 2014, Google Contributor launched to let people pay a monthly fee in exchange for ad removal on partnered sites, but that program concluded around the end of 2016.

In 2017, Google relaunched the program with users paying up front to fund a per page view fee for removal, and that program remains active with some publishers. The tech giant also operates Subscribe With Google, which lets people buy and manage publisher subscriptions or fan club entry from their Google account, and then surfaces that site’s content atop related Google searches.

If Google ever chose to revive the tipping feature and taxed it 10% like Contributor, it could create a modest new revenue stream. But more importantly, it could help fuel the creation of the content that fills its News and Search results. It would also allow Google to double-dip, potentially earning money from tips and from the ads users see on those sites.

A tipping feature could be especially helpful for websites that haven’t figured out a premium subscription strategy and mostly rely on ads. The fall of display ad prices, worsened by the COVID-19 recession, could put these publishers in danger of closing. BuzzFeed and Vox have cut staff pay or furloughed team members while tons of newspaper and sites like Protocol have suffered layoffs.

Tips might not replace other revenue streams, but could extend sites’ runway. A voluntary option to accept tips without having to build all the payments infrastructure could be a lifeline for the news business, if Google would ordain it a priority.