In the past, taste was scouted from hip kids and sold to the masses. But in the great river of content, what does cool even mean?
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In the past, taste was scouted from hip kids and sold to the masses. But in the great river of content, what does cool even mean?
Bloomberg business reporter Shelly Banjo explains how a goofy Chinese app took over the world.
Your shopping habits, your family members’ names, even your salary is out there for anyone to see. But you can take back control.
An oral history of the subscription service that changed online shopping forever.
On average, employees at large companies are each sending more than 200 Slack messages per week, according to Time Is Ltd., a productivity-analytics company that taps into workplace programs — including Slack, calendar apps, and the Office Suite — in order to give companies recommendations on how to be more productive. Power users sending out more than 1,000 messages per day are “not an exception.” Keeping up with these conversations can seem like a full-time job. After a while, the software goes from helping you work to making it impossible to get work done. Also, workplace software doesn’t seem to have supplanted the very thing it was supposed to fix: email. Most people use both. “Productivity software should be something you use less than the thing you used before,” Sarah Lacy, founder of tech site Pando and Chairman Mom (a members-only community for working women) told Recode. That hasn’t been the case.
Pornhub has 90 million daily users and more pornographic videos than any other site in the history of the internet, and now it wants to be Playboy. More specifically, what Playboy was in the ’90s. “A lifestyle brand, a fashion brand,” explains Alex Katz, co-founder of the Madrid-based creative agency Officer & Gentleman, which has been leading the brand strategy for Pornhub for the past four years. Co-founder Javi Iñiguez jumps in: “The girls were wearing sweatshirts and purses with the Playboy bunny even though they might not have seen a Playboy magazine in their lives.” Fair enough. Who doesn’t want the cultural clout of Hugh Hefner, literally everything else about Hugh Hefner aside? It may be a small shock to discover that Pornhub even has a brand strategy, but it makes sense. The company has spent the past several years doing what anybody would do once they become superrich: buying their way to coolness. And, by extension, buying their way to women, whom the company has historically had a hard time appealing to. I mean, who doesn’t see the connection between lifestyle brands and chicks? Pornhub’s first website launched in 2007 and was acquired by the MindGeek conglomerate in 2010, at which time it merged with YouPorn, RedTube, and Xtube to become the Pornhub network. From there, it easily consolidated power to become the biggest porn distribution platform ever, but its new challenge was to become a brand that anyone would talk about out loud, and just maybe, someday, wear on a T-shirt.
Millions of people have watched a video of a woman whispering into a camera. She doesn't do anything particularly interesting. She just whispers in a melodic voice and makes seemingly random hand movements. Yet millions of people are mesmerized by it. For someone who’s unfamiliar with this phenomenon, this might trigger one question: What the hell is going on? This is the world of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response). In this corner of the internet, dozens of video makers record themselves doing something as simple as whispering to elaborate sci-fi role-plays and developing storylines about time travel and demons, and millions of viewers gobble it all up. As one of those regular viewers, let me explain what’s going on.
We haven't had a major new technology company in more than 10 years.
