Top News:
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
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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Catie Keck / The Verge:
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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How-To Geek, FierceVideo, Pressroom and ResetEra
Ben Bowman / The Streamable:
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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Variety, Ad Age, @richlightshed, Adweek, /Film, MediaPost and Too Much TV Newsletter
Edmund Lee / New York Times:
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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Sara Fischer / Axios:
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 …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
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 …
Oskar Serrander / Acast:
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.
Bloomberg:
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
Discussion:
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Christine Mungai / Nieman Lab:
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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@chris_mungai, @simonallison, @baraaruglibrary, @thatboykhalifax, @risj_oxford, @siphokings, @janelytv and @chris_mungai
Sara Fischer / Axios:
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.
Discussion:
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The Daily Beast:
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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@megreenwell, @hexpositive, @timmarchman, @offbeatorbit, @bubbaprog, @mehpatrol, @ballaban, @jawnita, @annamerlan, @ellieshechet, @stephentotilo and @lea
Kate Kaye / Digiday:
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.
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