Author: azeeadmin

Everyone and their dog seems to have an email newsletter today, but what happens if and when yours takes off? Some have gone down the paid route, but another credible alternative is to turn it into a subscription media business.

That’s a route that The Juggernaut, a new pay-to-play publication targeted at the Indian diaspora, is going down now.

The company is part of the current Y Combinator cohort and it is looking to make a mark by giving a voice (and insight) to the South Asia diaspora without relying on advertising.

There are already a collection of member-based media services that go after the tech audience — think The Information, Stratechery, The Ken in India… even TechCrunch’s own Extra Crunch — which The Juggernaut is drawing inspiration from, but its play is more akin to The Athletic, the sports-focused publication that graduated the YC program nearly three years ago.

“Our goal is to tell the untold stories of the South Asian diaspora,” founder Snigdha Sur, an American of South Asian parentage who is based in New York, told TechCrunch in an interview. “When China came on to the world stage, everyone wanted to get smart about China but now there are many in the diaspora who are looking to get more smart about South Asia. We’re second- or third-generation Americans trying to find our voices.”

A subscription to the Juggernaut costs $4.99 per month, with a discounted $3.99 option for those who commit to a year. Students are eligible for a $2.49 rate.

Here’s the mission courtesy of an FAQ for the publication:

Why now?

Because South Asians are juggernauts. We’re an unstoppable force. People are getting off Facebook, and yet, whole groups dedicated to South Asian memes and other South Asian communities are booming. There has been a rise in South Asian-led brands. And we’re taking a cue from other targeted media companies: The Athletic with sports, Blavity for black millennials, and The Infatuation for restaurants. South Asians deserve the same sort of representation.

Sur’s journey into media, and The Juggernaut, started with her InkMango newsletter last September. After racking up “thousands” of subscribers in a few months, she decided that there was enough potential in her storytelling niche to expand into a full-blown publication. The newsletter remains and it is free.

“As we curated third-party South Asian news, we noticed the need for smart, nuanced, inclusive analysis,” Sur explained.

The focus is initially on culture, with the primary audience U.S-based readers with a connection to South Asia, however, that’s likely to expand as the publication grows, Sur said.

A graduate of Yale (undergraduate) and Havard (masters), Sur spent time in India in 2014 and 2015 when, among many things, she worked as a third-party consultant to BuzzFeed media companies Scroll.in and Spuul. That experience, she said, taught her that “people were looking at content and media in India, having previously said it wasn’t monetizable.”

After returning and spending a year with McKinsey in New York, she jumped back into media by starting The Juggernaut in October 2018. The publication went online proper in February of this year.

Like The Ken — which TechCrunch has written about a number of times — The Juggernaut produces one story per day and it uses a team of freelance reports to do so. There’s no immediate plan to expand that editorial flow, but Sur plans to use funds raised from YC — and its famous demo day — to bring writers on full-time.

“We want to hire another editor to expand and that might mean that we expand that output, but we still believe that content can be overwhelming so we’re not actively trying to do that. We’re trying to tell untold stories, and that could be many mediums so we’re figuring out other formats we should be in,” she explained.

You can find out more about The Juggernaut at its website (here). The publication offers a one-week free trial although that does require credit/debit card details up front.

If nothing else, last week’s Fitbit event showed the world that the company had learned two key lessons in the past year. One: price is possibly the largest driver in the company’s recent smartwatch success — so it went even lower with the $160 Versa Lite. Two: there are just too damn many Fitbit models.

The release of the Inspire represents a culling as much as it does something new. The line includes two devices (the Inspire and the heart rate-monitoring Inspire HR), which are effectively replacing five: the Alta, Alta HR, Zip, One and Flex 2.

It’s a welcome thinning of the herd. There were enough different Fitbit models to render the company’s product line confusing for experts, let alone casual consumers who have no interest in reading the fine print. The argument can be made that there are still too many Fitbits on the market, but let’s just accept that it’s a step in the right direction.

So, why a new name? When we spoke last week, CEO James Park told me it was because the device was new enough to warrant some rebranding. I don’t entirely agree with the sentiment here, but perhaps it was, indeed, time for a fresh start.

The device is more a distillation of lessons learned from the products it’s replacing. It’s an acknowledgment that simplicity is one of the biggest appeals of the company’s trackers — it’s certainly what separates them from their smartwatches.

“Trackers are a pretty mature category at this stage,” Park told me, “so I think we’ve been able to figure out what the minimum number of SKUs is to hit all of the price points and demographics.”

Among other things, that means a device that can effectively double as a wrist-worn tracker or an old-school clip-on pedometer, depending on the accessory you choose. With a starting price of $70, it’s pretty reasonable for either option — and doubly so for those who like to switch things up.

Again, as with the Versa Lite, pricing is key here. After all, among the company’s other woes in recent years is the increasing presence of extremely cheap trackers coming from places like China. Fitbit may never be able to compete on pricing with Xiaomi’s $15 Mi Band, but, among other things, what the company brings to the table is years of focus on the space it’s help defined. That includes the result of generations of product design and app refining.

Like the Versa Lite, the Inspire is less about bringing new features to the table than it is streamlining existing offerings. I gave the device to our video producer Veanne, as my own wrists were occupied with the Versa Lite and Apple Watch 4 to A/B test the new product. Even for me there’s a limit for the number of trackers I will wear on my wrist at any given time for testing. Turns out that limit is two.

She’s been using the Inspire HR for several days now. When I asked her for feedback, she said, “I don’t have extensive notes, it’s a Fitbit.” Fair enough. That, in and of itself, is actually a pretty decent summary of what we’re dealing with here. There’s nothing groundbreaking — or really even exciting — here. But Fitbit knows how to make good trackers, and this is one.

The industrial design is, as ever, solid. The device doesn’t stray far its fellow Fitbits, which is fine. At this point in the fitness tracker lifecycle, it appears most people want a device that can blend in as much as anything. The Inspire accomplishes this with a nice line of swappable straps and a relatively small profile. Though Veanne is quick to note her “child size” wrists. “I’m the one the kids used to target during red rover.” Consider that a hot tip, in the off-chance you ever find yourself competing against the TechCrunch stuff in any school yard games.

As such, she’s taken to wearing the device upside down, with the screen facing inward. It should be noted that among the devices that the Inspire replaces devices that are, in fact, skinnier, which could ultimately prove an issue for those with smaller wrists.The ability to wear it as a clip on addresses that to some degree, but ultimately you won’t be getting the same sort of detailed feedback, including things like heart rate monitor (only available on the $100 Inspire HR, mind) won’t be measured.

It’s telling, I think, that the Inspire began life as part of the company’s newfound healthcare focus. By distilling the product to its essence, the company has made the line inherently utilitarian. The era of excitement around fitness trackers as consumer electronics may have come to a close, as companies like Fitbit see more financial windfall in teaming with corporations and healthcare provides.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing — in fact, Fitbit in banking on exactly that as for its future.

PayPal, a longtime alternative to directly using payment cards, cash and bank transfers to make payments for goods online and in stores with 267 million individual customer accounts and 21 million merchant accounts, is today adding in a new feature to help it tap into a wider range of customers such as gig economy workers and use cases — in competition not just against banks, but also younger upstarts like Stripe, Square and others chasing the same business. PayPal is launching Instant Transfer to bank, which will let those receiving money via PayPal instantly move that into their bank accounts to access as cash or however else they would like to use it.

The service is now being rolled out to consumers in the US, and will be extended to businesses in the country in coming weeks. Bill Ready, PayPal’s president, said in an interview that the company is working on how to extend it to other countries.

Instant transfers to a bank account is coming to PayPal by way of a partnership in the US it has with JPMorgan chase, which has access to the real-time payments network built by The Clearing House, a platform established by the major banks to work on creating faster payment networks. PayPal is the first company to implement this feature, Ready told me.

PayPal, like other purveyors of digital wallets, may ideally wish for you to keep your funds in its own wallet to continue making transactions on its network (because this is how it makes money). But realistically, the company — like others in the payments space — has been working on bringing in more choice and flexibility for customers, to improve its wider usefulness as a service.

In that vein, transferring money out of PayPal has actually been a big area of development for the company in recent years to better compete with the likes of Square and Stripe, and it has proved to be a popular hit with customers.

Last year, it launched “Funds Now“, aimed at sellers who wanted to instantly access money from transactions without waiting the days it would normally take for a payment to properly clear and get deposited into their account. This was, however, mainly aimed at sellers on the platform.

Another instant transfer service was launched even earlier, in 2017, which allowed PayPal and Venmo users to transfer to debit cards. That has seen billions of transactions to date, Ready told me. The catch, however, is that not everyone has a Visa or MasterCard debit card, or wants that to be where their money is cashed out.

“For small businesses and individuals, this really matters,” he said. “It’s a significant expansion of our addressable customer base since many don’t have debit cards. Now they can withdraw the funds from their bank accounts.”

Before the launch of today’s service, you could actually transfer to your bank account, but it would take days or even longer to complete the transactions, Ready said. That’s because it relied on using the legacy ACH network, which batched up transactions and simply worked on slower rails.

Ready highlighted one specific segment that he thinks will be especially helped by today’s news, so-called gig economy workers, who get paid for the work that they do in delivery or other areas by the job, rather than by a weekly, fixed salary, and may be in more need to accessing and organising those funds in a better way. Having an effective way of transferring the money out of PayPal and into one’s bank account makes it much more likely that those workers will use PayPal to accept payments for work in the first place, which long term will benefit PayPal’s wider transaction scale.

“This is part of a broader initiative to increase the speed of access for funds on our platform, but it’s also an acknowledgement of the changing nature of global workforce,” Ready said. “Ninety percent of all new job growth is in alternative workforce. It’s a big and growing segment of the population. The gig econony really depends on speed of access to funds,” he said of the company’s efforts.

The plan will be to add in more features to cater to this demographic of individuals-as-businesses in the future. “The is part of the broader effort we’re making,” he said. “We want to set a new expectation in the industry that matches the aspirational profile of these workers.”

Hulu and Spotify today announced an expansion of their partnership on discounted streaming bundles, which lowers the price of Hulu’s ad-supported service to, well… nothing. Starting today, Spotify Premium subscribers can basically tack on a Hulu subscription for free on top of their existing $9.99 per month streaming music plan. In other words, for the same price you’re currently paying for Spotify Premium, you can now opt in to Hulu.

The deal is open to both new and current subscribers, including those who previously took advantage of last year’s $12.99 per month bundle deal, says Hulu.

New subscribers also will be able to get the first month of Hulu for free, as part of a trial period, before the $9.99 per month bundle pricing kicks in. Meanwhile, existing Spotify Premium subscribers can add Hulu by visiting their Spotify account’s Services Page and activating Hulu’s ad-supported plan as part of their account.

The two companies have been working together since 2017, when they first realized the potential in making both their services available as a single, affordable subscription.

Initially, Spotify and Hulu offered a discounted bundle aimed at students, which brought the cost down to $4.99 per month for both services — the same price as Spotify’s student plan. Last year, Spotify expanded the student bundle to include Showtime, and rolled out a low-cost $12.99 per month bundle for all other users.

Hulu more recently has been focused on bringing the cost down for its entry-level, ad-supported service for everyone. In January, it lowered its pricing to $6 per month, while simultaneously raising the prices for its Live TV add-on. The thinking here is that the ad-supported version of Hulu can serve as a loss leader for Hulu’s more expensive plans, including its commercial-free service and the increasingly popular Live TV plan, which includes a cloud DVR and access to local channels.

According to a report this month from Bloomberg, Hulu’s Live TV service has grown to 2 million users and adds hundreds of thousands of new users per quarter. Hulu believes it can better attract those new users if it can promote its available upgrades to current subscribers — which is where this Spotify bundle comes in.

Hulu says this discounted bundle is being offered to Spotify customers, new and existing, through June 10, 2019 or “while supplies last.” That implies there’s a cap on how many discounted bundles will be sold through this promotion.

It’s also worth noting the timing of the joint announcement is coming just days before Apple’s big March 25 “special event,” where it’s likely planning to unveil its own video streaming service for the first time. Some reports said Apple could be selling its service as a bundle with Apple Music; Spotify and Hulu’s preemptive move here seem to give more weight to those rumors. The two companies appear to be ready to challenge whatever Apple announces with an almost no-brainer alternative: Spotify with free Hulu instead.

In reality, this new bundle doesn’t mean Hulu is giving away its service for free — that’s just what it feels like for consumers. It’s actually a revenue-sharing agreement between Hulu and Spotify that benefits both parties’ user acquisition efforts. And both are choosing to take the hit on pricing as part of this agreement.

As part of their collaboration, Hulu is also promoting some of its original shows on Spotify, with official playlists for The Handmaid’s Tale and Pen15.

It’s not only SoftBank that’s eyeing up the opportunity to tap into the quickly expanding market for e-commerce in Latin America. MercadoLibre, a marketplace and financial services powerhouse based out of Argentina and serving 18 countries across the region, has announced that PayPal is investing $750 million, and VC Dragoneer another $100 million, as part of a $1.8 billion equity offering to grow its business — specifically to expand the functionality of its e-commerce platform; improve its logistics infrastructure; and invest in financial technologies “that further solidify the company’s position as a powerful provider of inclusive end-to-end financial technology and payments solutions.”

The remaining $1 billion of the equity offering will be offered as common stock, the company said. PayPal and Dragoneer’s investments are contingent on the company raising the remainder publicly, although judging by the company’s track record as a public stock, and the fact that PayPal also announced this news on its own site, it doesn’t appear the parties are in great doubt about the deal’s completion.

MercadoLibre is traded on Nasdaq and currently has a market cap of $21.75 billion.

The investment is both a financial and strategic one for both MercadoLibre and PayPal.

After getting spun out from eBay several years ago, PayPal has been on a mission to diversify its customer base to include a wider variety use cases, and partnerships to power payments for different marketplaces.

“Digital commerce in Latin America is experiencing tremendous growth and MercadoLibre is well-positioned for continued leadership,” said Dan Schulman, President and CEO, PayPal, in a statement. “We’ve been impressed with the digital commerce and payments ecosystem Marcos and his team have built. We see great opportunities to integrate our respective capabilities to create unique and valuable payment experiences for our combined 500 million customers throughout the region and around the world.”

The two have already worked together and the financial commitment PayPal is making here not only will help it reap dividends from MercadoLibre’s business growth, but also ensure that it integrates ever more of its features in prominent ways to drive more transactions on its own rails. And given how payments is actually more localised than many people might assume, it also gives the company a direct pipeline into tracking and catering to consumer and merchant tastes and preferences when it comes to buying and selling goods and related financial services.

“Over the past 20 years, we have heavily invested in developing the preeminent e-commerce and FinTech ecosystem in Latin America,” said Marcos Galperin, CEO of Mercado Libre, in a statement. “We are excited to welcome these investments which will allow us to significantly accelerate our growth. We look forward to accelerating our leadership in ecommerce and payments and foster financial inclusion in Latin America as a result of our alliance with a global leader in the industry such as PayPal.”

At a time when more mature markets like the US and Western Europe are slowing down in their e-commerce growth (while still remaining huge markets in their own right), the opportunity in developing markets like Latin America is a big one.

As SoftBank revealed last week when it unveiled its own $2 billion fund to back tech startups in the region, more than 50 million people in the region are now categorised as “middle class,” with increased disposable income. The region accounts for 10 percent of the world’s population and 8 percent of the world’s GDP, two times the GDP of India and half that of China. There are some 375 million internet users and 250 million smartphone users, putting it ahead of the U.S. in terms of sheer numbers.

Moreover, retail e-commerce has nearly doubled in the last three years, going to $54 billion in 2018 from $29.8 billion in 2015, figures that have definitely fuelled MercadoLibre’s own growth. In 2018, the company sold more than 334 million items, amounting to over $12 billion of gross merchandise volume. Payment transactions on MercadoPago, its payments business unit, increased by 70 percent during 2018, totalling 389 million transactions and $18 billion of total payment volume, the company said.

At the same time, these are nascent numbers: some 400 million people are still without bank accounts or credit histories in the region.

In terms of the other big investor being announced in this round, Dragoneer is a legendary and very experienced investor when it comes to interesting opportunities in e-commerce. The company has stakes in other giant regional e-commerce marketplaces like Alibaba and Flipkart; disruptive ‘gig economy’ leaders like Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash and Instacart, as well as a plethora of other huge startup names like Slack and Snap. It seems MercadoLibre as currently the top bet for not only competing against the likes of Amazon, but a range of smaller local players that are also looking to tap into this quickly expanding economy — in other words, the same opportunity SoftBank is chasing, but from the other end of the field.

“Through its investments in FinTech, logistics, and customer experience, MercadoLibre is solidifying its leading market position in e-commerce and digital payments across Latin America, and we believe we are witnessing a major tipping point in the region,” said Marc Stad, founder and managing partner of Dragoneer Investment Group, in a statement.

“We’ve known Marcos and his team for over a decade and are thrilled to partner with them through this high growth and transformative period.” Goldman Sachs is acting as sole financial advisor to MercadoLibre on the PayPal and Dragoneer investments, and Cleary Gottlieb is serving as MercadoLibre’s legal advisor. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley are acting as joint bookrunners on the public equity offering.

As a side note, it’s interesting to consider the approach that MercadoLibre is taking with this round. PayPal’s investment is coming in the form of a purchase of common stock, while Dragoneer’s is coming by way of an affiliate that has agreed to purchase $100 million of Series A perpetual convertible preferred stock, with the rest to be raised publicly. When you consider how Lyft, and likely Uber, and many other very highly valued, high-profile scaled startups are likely also to list publicly, this could end up being a route that we see getting used more often when these companies, which are all still operating at a loss and will need to raise capital, might opt to take, too,

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has published an open letter to mark the 30th anniversary of the day — March 12, 1989 — when he submitted his original proposal for an information management system that went on to underpin the birth of online services.

The proposal, dubbed “vague but exciting” by his boss at the time, married hypertext with Internet TCP and domain name system ideas. Berners-Lee also had to design and build a web browser and put together the first web server. The first website was put up a couple of years later, running on a NeXT computer at CERN, where Berners-Lee had worked.

The rest, as they say, is Internet history.

Thirty years on from the free and open online information playground Berners-Lee had envisaged it’s fair to say today’s web isn’t quite the academic, egalitarian paradise he dreamt of.

In recent years Berners-Lee has made a series of public interventions, warning especially about corporate capture of the online sphere. He’s also working on new decentralization technologies to try to break the grip of dominant digital walled gardens.

The academic turned entrepreneur certainly cannot be accused of shying away from the societal challenges his invention now poses.

But his anniversary letter urges people not to give up on the web. “If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web,” he suggests.

The letter, which can be read in full here on the Web Foundation’s site, boils the problem of web misuse into three distinct categories:

1. Deliberate, malicious intent, such as state-sponsored hacking and attacks, criminal behaviour, and online harassment.
2. System design that creates perverse incentives where user value is sacrificed, such as ad-based revenue models that commercially reward clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation.
3. Unintended negative consequences of benevolent design, such as the outraged and polarised tone and quality of online discourse.

“While the first category is impossible to eradicate completely, we can create both laws and code to minimize this behaviour, just as we have always done offline,” Berners-Lee continues, setting out an action plan for tackling disinformation and web misuse. “The second category requires us to redesign systems in a way that change incentives. And the final category calls for research to understand existing systems and model possible new ones or tweak those we already have.”

He also warns against reacting to online problems with “simplistic narratives”.

“You can’t just blame one government, one social network or the human spirit. Simplistic narratives risk exhausting our energy as we chase the symptoms of these problems instead of focusing on their root causes. To get this right, we will need to come together as a global web community,” he suggests.

Though that argument elides the problem of digital information being maliciously and deliberately weaponized in order to sew social division — which works against the kind of collaboration and compromise he’s saying is essential to successfully manage and maintain a healthy online space and thus society.

Last year Berners-Lee’s Web Foundation launched a set of core principles — billed as a “Contract for the Web” — seeking to loop in governments, the private sector and citizens to work together on tackling problems of online abuse and misuse by collaborating on contributions that drive “equality, opportunity and creativity”.

The letter points again to this initiative, with Berners-Lee writing: “Governments, companies and citizens are all contributing, and we aim to have a result later this year.”

Albeit, it’s difficult to read his plan for action without thinking of the old adage that “falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it“.

“The Contract for the Web must not be a list of quick fixes but a process that signals a shift in how we understand our relationship with our online community,” Berners-Lee suggests. “It must be clear enough to act as a guiding star for the way forward but flexible enough to adapt to the rapid pace of change in technology. It’s our journey from digital adolescence to a more mature, responsible and inclusive future.

“The web is for everyone and collectively we hold the power to change it. It won’t be easy. But if we dream a little and work a lot, we can get the web we want.”

While you wouldn’t expect the ‘father’ of the World Wide Web to give up on his now adult-aged child, however wayward in habits it’s become, the letter is still striking on account of the breadth of societal problems being linked to the Web — from competitively distorted markets; to human rights infringements and threats to democracy, privacy, diversity and security; to the undermining of science fact and public safety; and even a conduit for further increasing inequality via digital divides.

Equally, nothing on that list of negatives is surprising anymore.

Though that’s to concentrate the negatives, of course.

Berners-Lee also writes positively that the web has become “a public square, a library, a doctor’s office, a shop, a school, a design studio, an office, a cinema, a bank, and so much more”.

And in another upbeat moment he had praise for tech workers who have taken individual ethical stances against tech-misusing employers — “to demand better business practices”.

“We need to encourage that spirit,” he writes, calling for more ethical activism from tech workers.

Instacart has expanded its alcohol delivery to now be available in 14 states and Washington D.C. from nearly 100 different retailers.

With the roll-out, Instacart alcohol delivery is currently available to 40 million homes in the U.S. and the number of alcohol deliveries on the platform has more than doubled since the same time last year.

Partners who participate in alcohol delivery on Instacart include Albertsons, Kroger, Publix, Schnucks, and Stater Bros, alongside wine and liquor stores such as BevMo!, Binny’s Beverage Depot, and Total Wine & More.

The list of states where Instacart offers alcohol delivery include California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Washington, D.C..

Instacart started rolling out alcohol delivery a year ago, and has quickly become a competitive player in the space. Postmates introduced alcohol delivery in 2017, whereas strictly alcohol delivery services like Drizly, Minibar and Saucey have been around for a while now.

Here is what Instacart’s Chief Business Officer, Nilam Ganenthiran, had to say:

Part of grocery shopping for many people goes beyond getting fresh produce, meats and pantry staples, and includes picking up the perfect bottle of wine for a dinner party or their favorite beer to sip while watching the big game. By working alongside our retail partners to add alcohol to the marketplace, we’re offering customers more choice and making it easier for Instacart to be their ‘one-stop-shop’ to get the groceries they need – including beer, wine and spirits – from the retailers they love.

When Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, some speculated that Instacart might be hit hard. But the deal also represented the digitization of a massive, traditional industry. Considering Instacart’s retail partner growth over the past year, it seems that the Whole Foods acquisition might have made Instacart an attractive platform for some retailers.

The company now serves more than 80 percent of U.S. households, which was Instacart’s stated goal for the end of 2018. Across its 300 retail partners, Instacart now delivers from 20,000 different grocery stores across 5,500 cities in North America.

Chinese startup Bytedance is finding itself surrounded by challengers as its empire of new media products, including global video app TikTok and Chinese news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, gather steam. Tencent tried to play catch-up with a handful of new short-video services, and a Facebook clone of TikTok was reportedly in the making.

Less famous players also tried to take on Bytedance, but the costs of keeping up with the world’s most valuable startup are high. One company that’s made its mark is Qutoutiao, which is pronounced “chew-tow-ti-ow” and means “fun headlines” in Chinese.

Like ByteDance, the Shanghai-based company began as a news aggregator banking on personalized content often characterized by gossipy news and viral videos. By the time Qutoutiao debuted in 2016, Jinri Toutiao had more than 40 million daily users and was fast growing by feeding people what they wanted. Qutoutiao needed something more than just clickbaits and the solution was a costly scheme that rewards users with cash prizes for consuming more content and getting their friends to sign up.

The startup was able to play the expensive game on account of sizable fundings. Before pushing ahead with an $84 million initial public offering in the U.S. last September, the firm had secured $242 million from backers including Tencent. All that capital arrived within two years since its launch, and much of the money went to acquiring and retaining users.

In its fourth quarter, sales and marketing expenses soared 463 percent to almost $200 million. Revenues climbed 484 percent to $440 million in 2018, but the increase was tempered by the firm’s skyrocketing net loss, which widened to $283 million compared with $14.3 million just a year ago.

So far the spending spree appears to be paying off. In the three months ended December 31, monthly active users nearly tripled to 93.8 million, the company claims in its latest financial results. People spent an average of 63 minutes on the firm’s services each day over the quarter, doubling from about 30 minutes in the year-earlier period.

Bytedance’s Jinri Toutiao is still ahead by a large margin with 2.4 billion MAUs in 2018, although that’s the result of six years in operation. TikTok, on the other hand, has collected over 1 billion downloads worldwide. But Bytedance, too, is hemorrhaging money over its ambitious global vision. It lost a staggering $1.2 billion last year, The Information reported earlier citing sources.

Small-town base

In the long run, Qutoutiao vows to improve its margins by “controlling user engagement expenses,” chief executive and founder Tan Siliang, who previously worked at Yahoo China and games publisher Shanda as a senior engineer, told analysts last week on a conference call. “As our user base continues to expand, our user acquisition expenses as a percentage of revenues will decline.”

The company is also aiming high. Last week, Tan said in an internal meeting that he believes “Qutoutiao will quickly rise to become a Top 10 internet company in China by 2019,” multiple Chinese outlets reported. To that end, the boss plans to double the company size by adding 2,000 staff this year, a move that contrasts with large-scale layoffs that have recently shaken up Chinese tech heavyweights like NetEase.

We’ve reached out to Qutoutiao for comments on the reports and will update the story when we hear back.

What’s also notable about Qutoutiao is its overwhelmingly small-town base, areas that China’s tech giants increasingly covet as markets in large urban centers reach saturation. The company says 70 percent of its users live in cities that are Tier 3 and below, far and remote from megacities Beijing, Shanghai and the likes.

“[Small-town residents] used to rely predominantly on TV for news. Now with Qutoutiao, they could obtain much more timely, personalized and diverse news and information and, as a result, become frequent readers,” said Tan on the call. “The Qutoutiao app has total installations of about 300 million so far, which still has considerable further penetration potential given a 1 billion population that live in Tier 3 and below cities.”

Like Bytedance, Qutoutiao has branched out to other media forms. It also runs Midu, an e-book app that has collected 5 million users by providing a more thoughtful alternative to its clickbait-filled news app. More recently, the company trailed Bytedance’s to test out a short video service, which hasn’t officially launch but will make a big push in the second quarter. And the startup is ready to splurge if the app grows large enough to face off TikTok.

“On the short video side, it is hard to give an estimated budget on the marketing side because it really depends on how popular or what kind of traction it receives with users,” said chief financial executive Wang Jingbo during last week’s conference call. “In case it has very strong traction with users such as TikTok, we will definitely be spending much more on the marketing side.”

137 Ventures walks and talks like your run-of-the-mill venture capital fund, but a quick look under the hood exposes a different style of investing.

The San Francisco-based growth-stage firm, which is today announcing its fourth fund with $210 million in committed capital, provides liquidity to founders and early employees of “sustainable, fast-growing, private companies.” In essence, 137 Ventures buys shares directly from employees at unicorn tech companies, like Palantir, Flexport and Airbnb .

Founded by Justin Fishner-Wolfson and S. Alexander Jacobson, a pair of former investors at Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, 137 Ventures also owns a significant stake in Elon Musk’s SpaceX, according to the pair.

Fishner-Wolfson tells TechCrunch he decided to pursue raising his own fund in 2011 after observing the extending startup timeline. Companies were going public later and later, and employees were crying out for opportunities to liquify their stock. He was unsure the experiment would succeed; fast-forward eight years and his limited partners are satisfied enough to increase their bets. 137 Ventures third fund closed on $200 million in 2016. The latest vehicle is the firm’s largest yet.

“We are riding a trend that sees high-growth technology companies stay private longer and longer,” Fishner-Wolfson said in a statement. “As such, founders are looking for innovative ways to realize liquidity that offer more benefits than traditional secondary sales. We help early employees get the liquidity they need to buy a home or pay for their kid’s college tuition while retaining more equity upside, keeping their voting rights, deferring tax payments, and abiding by all their company compliance and transfer restrictions.”

137 Ventures invests between $10 million to $20 million in five to 10 businesses per year, typically at the post-Series-C stage.

In addition to today’s funding news, 137 Ventures has hired Ching Wu from Canvas Ventures as an operating partner and head of investor relations, and promoted Andrew Hansen to operating partner, chief operating officer and chief financial officer. Hansen is also a Founders Fund alum.

French premium TV channel Canal+ is facing increased competition from Netflix in France. The company is trying to reinvent itself with a new over-the-top offering called Canal+ Séries. The new service is launching today.

As the name suggests, Canal+ Séries is focused on TV series — you won’t find any movie on the streaming service. In addition to original content, Canal+ has already signed distribution deals with American networks to distribute their shows in France (Showtime, FX, etc.) — those shows will also be part of the streaming service. Overall, there are around 150 series at launch, from Hippocrate and Engrenages to Killing Eve and Twin Peaks.

When it comes to prices, the company wants to undercut Netflix with aggressive pricing. You can subscribe for €7 per month ($7.90) to stream in HD and 4K on one screen at a time. For €10 and €12 per month ($11.20 and $13.50), you can stream on two and four screens at once, respectively. In France, Netflix currently costs €8 for the basic package, €11 for HD and two screens, €14 for 4K and four screens ($9.10, $12.50, $15.90).

Canal+ has been working an an OTT streaming service for years called myCanal. It’s one of the best OTT services in France with Molotov. Canal+ is taking advantage of myCanal to let you stream Canal+ Séries content in the myCanal app on your phone, tablet, computer, Apple TV or Android TV device.

This is an interesting offer for Canal+. The company still relies heavily on expensive subscription contracts with 12 months or 24 months of commitment — a throwback to the golden age of cable TV. The company can’t lose all those valuable subscribers and cannibalize its own offering.

By focusing on TV series, Canal+ can let users stream content right after they air. French law is restrictive when it comes to movie streaming, but not TV series. Most movies on Netflix in France are at least 2 or 3 years old for instance.

Netflix recently announced that it has 5 million subscribers in France, a tiny bit more than Canal+. With Netflix’s recent price hikes and Canal+ cheap tier, let’s see if it can boost Canal+’s bottom line and shake things up in the French TV landscape.