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📈 News and economics of the biggest technology companies traded on Nasdaq and NYSE

👀 Keeping an eye on tech IPOs, M&A, AI, EV/AV, VR/AR, crypto, robots, metaverse and space travel

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🤝 Facebook has reached an agreement with the Australian government and will restore news pages in the country days after restricting them.

The decision follows negotiations between the tech giant and the Australian government, which is set to pass a new media law that will require digital platforms to pay for news.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government introduced last-minute changes to the proposed news media bargaining code that is in parliament and is expected to be voted into law soon.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/23/facebook-to-restore-news-pages-for-australian-users-in-coming-days.html
💵 At a virtual event for investors Thursday, Twitter announced that it’s planning to debut a pay-for-posts feature, called Super Follows, in which users will be able to pay the people they follow for their best tweets.

With Super Follows, Twitter will allow users to make money from content that they make exclusive to particular followers.

Basically, the premise seems to be that this pay-for-post feature will help build more specific communities around specific topics.

Thursday’s announcement is a sign that Twitter wants to be more than an incredibly public online discussion space and that the company is leaning into the smaller “micro-communities” that organically form on its platform.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/2/25/22301741/twitter-super-follows-subscription-communities-fleets
✍️ Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase on Thursday filed to become a public company and revealed that its revenue more than doubled last year.

According to the filing, Coinbase had net revenue of $1.14 billion in 2020, up from $483 million the previous year.

The company said it has 43 million verified users as of the end of 2020, with 2.8 million making monthly transactions. Trading in bitcoin and ethereum made up 56% of users’ trading volume, Coinbase said.

The company will use a direct listing to offer its shares instead of a traditional initial public offering. A direct listing is an alternative to an IPO, and it involves investors and employees converting their ownership stakes into stock that’s listed on an exchange.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/25/coinbase-files-for-direct-listing-after-revenue-more-than-doubles-in-2020.html
🇦🇺 Australia’s parliament passed a law on Thursday to make Google and Facebook pay media companies for content on their platforms in reforms that countries such as Britain and Canada are looking to replicate.

After robust negotiations in which Facebook blocked all news content in the 13th-largest economy, the vote makes Australia the first nation where a government arbitrator can set the price tech giants pay domestic media if private talks fail.

Facebook’s news ban, which also blacked out many nonprofit and government pages, would be lifted the following day, eight days after the measure took effect.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-media-idUSKBN2AO2ZL