This Week in GAFAnomics #35

Amazon Prime: subscribe or pay more / Alphabet invested in Snap Inc. / Facebook vetoes British insurance company using data

“This week in GAFAnomics” features top articles from FABERNOVEL’s internal Slack discussions on the Network Economy. Subscribe to our “Inside GAFAnomics” publication for your weekly dose of curated news about the Network Economy.

Amazon’s physical bookstores used to offer the same discounted prices as what you can find on the website, to everyone. But recently, they started charging more for people who don’t subscribe to Prime (up to 40%). It is obvious that Amazon is inciting its customers to join the program. With this strategy, the subscription model has evolved from incentives to taxes.

Amazon is making non-Prime members pay higher prices at its brick-and-mortar bookstores

CapitalG, Google’s equity investment fund, added Snapchat to its portfolio. In 2013, rumors said Google had tried to acquire the Stanford students’ firm after Facebook failure. Snapchat actually is the biggest and most prominent public customer of Google’s cloud services. After announcing an IPO in 2017, Snapchat strengthen in the competition against Instagram.

Google’s investment arm has quietly invested in Snapchat

Firstcarquote, a new insurance product designed by Admiral aiming at using Facebook posts to analyse the personalities of car owners and set the price of their insurance, has been removed by the social media company. Despite Facebook’s intervention, the company has a mixed record on privacy: remember its initiative for sharing data between the social network and WhatsApp…

Facebook blocks Admiral from using profiles to price car insurance

That’s all for this week, but follow us for more news about GAFAnomics next week! In the meantime, you can check our new study about the 2nd Space Revolution.