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HBO Max plans to release a Batman podcast, Batman: The Audio Adventures, as an in-app exclusive, despite the app lacking standard audio player features — Batman: The Audio Adventures comes out this fall — The HBO Max team wants its app to not just be the place people find big movie premieres but podcasts, too.
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HBO Max is offering a selection of 13 free pilot episodes in-app to attract new subscribers — Lovecraft Country, Harley Quinn, and Game of Thrones included — HBO Max is offering free episodes to potential new subscribers in-app and free of charge so they can take its more popular series …
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HBO Max is no longer available on Amazon Prime Video as WarnerMedia seeks a direct relationship with users — HBO Max continues to assert its independence from its old streaming partners. If you look for the service on Amazon Prime Video, you won't find it anymore. — We knew this was coming.
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NYT beats Q2 expectations with $93M adjusted operating profit on $499M revenue; 8M subscribers, 142K new digital subscribers; online revenue up 41% YoY to $261M — The company expects to end the year with about 8.5 million. In its quarterly results, it reported holding nearly $1 billion in cash.
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Subscription digital outlet Puck debuts its site puck.news, will formally launch in Sept., has hired Dylan Byers, Matt Belloni, and others as founding partners — Puck, a splashy new digital media company, is coming out of stealth mode, Axios has learned. The company debuted its landing page …

Roku beats with Q2 total net revenue of $645M, up 81% YoY, reaching 55.1M active accounts, up 1.5M QoQ, and 17.4B streaming hours, down 1B QoQ; stock drops 8%+ — Roku easily beat Wall Street forecasts for second-quarter 2021 earnings — posting record 81% revenue growth …

Podcast network Acast says 14M Americans listen to its shows per month, it's home to 28K shows total, of which 25% are US-based, and it's paid $110M to creators — How Acast became the global independent power source of podcasting — Acast opened up for business in the US just over four years ago.

Facebook says it has disabled the accounts, apps, Pages, and access to its APIs for researchers running NYU's Ad Observatory Project, citing TOS violations — - Company says researchers of political ads were scraping data — NYU's Ad Observatory got cease-and-desist letter last October
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A look at nine-person pan-African outlet The Continent, which sends out a free weekly PDF to 11,000 subscribers on WhatsApp and Signal — In Africa and much of the global South, the spread of rumors, hoaxes, and calculated “fake news” primarily happens on WhatsApp, whose closed network …
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Sources: Politico employees are mounting an effort to unionize with NewsGuild — Members of Politico's newsroom are actively mounting an effort to unionize with the NewsGuild, sources tell Axios. — Why it matters: Politico's newsroom is one of the largest newsrooms to have resisted organizing efforts in the past.
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Jezebel EIC Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is resigning later this month to write a book; her departure follows several other recent exits by top staff at G/O Media — The women-focused site is losing its top editor—yet another exit in a months-long series of departures.
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Examples from California's AG for Consumer Privacy Act enforcement seem to indicate companies can't rely solely on ad trade groups' blanket opt-out tools — For more than a year advertisers and publishers had few clues for detecting how California regulators would enforce the state's privacy law.