With commercial flights grounded, the well-connected rely on these planes to move their precious cargo — from PPE to gold bullion — Around the world, air traffic has nearly ground to a halt. Commercial planes sit lined up on the tarmac, grounded by canceled routes and closed borders. The airline industry is forecasting slow business for the coming year, and some companies may not survive the downturn at all.

Keeping the internet running smoothly during the coronavirus crisis isn’t business as usual — Jamie Goate first started setting up phone connections and broadband links 20 years ago, when he troubleshot dial-up internet connections and routed copper phone wires back to junction boxes. But he didn’t get his biggest job until about a month ago. The U.K. National Health Service (NHS) had called his…

‘It’s a land grab for worker surveillance’ — Just about every office worker who still has a job is now working from home, growing weary of Zoom, and in many cases struggling to juggle childcare with remote meetings and deadlines. But there’s a deeper worry bubbling under: Working from home — and the hodgepodge of sticky-tape solutions set…

Advertising rates on the platform have dropped significantly during the coronavirus pandemic — Newspapers, websites, and TV channels have all been decimated by the coronavirus. And YouTubers are also feeling the pinch. While boredom-inducing stay-at-home orders may be good for YouTube channel traffic, increasing by 15%, according to the New York Times, YouTubers say that the rates companies pay to advertise on their…

To prevent the spread of misinformation, the platform has been prioritizing traditional news sources — YouTube, like other social networks, has sent home its contractor-staffed human moderation teams in order to prevent the spread of coronavirus. That means moderation decisions are increasingly left to an automated system that no one is really sure is up to the job. …

As studios pump out the type of content the site originally intended to subvert, the barrier to success rises — When T-Series surpassed celebrity influencer PewDiePie in YouTube subscribers last year, most people in the West hadn’t yet heard of the Bollywood movie and music studio. An outspoken and controversial independent creator based in the U.K. had been displaced by a media monolith based in India.

YouTube has made more than 50 policy changes in the last 24 months — Fifteen years ago, Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steve Chen registered the domain name YouTube.com. The premise of the platform, the co-founders explained at the time, was “giving you a glimpse into other people’s lives.” …

It’s not just about throwing massive contracts at top streaming talent — When Facebook launched its gaming creator program in January 2018, the reaction was muted. Facebook Watch, the company’s attempt to take on YouTube, had largely flopped, even in spite of increasingly desperate attempts to get users to click on the tab (the company eventually allowed users to turn off the…

It’s not about how many users you have. It’s about how long a half-life your videos have off the platform — So Byte happened this weekend. Dom Hofmann’s shortform video sharing app, the successor to the long-lamented Vine, launched with a flurry of excitement on social media as people wondered if it would recapture the success of the original app. Of course, it’s been three years since Hofmann’s previous app had…