Spotify is laying off 6 percent of its workforce as part of a company-wide restructuring, CEO Daniel Ek wrote in a message to employees. The precise number of people who will lose their jobs wasn't provided, but the company employs around 9,800 people, according to its last earnings report. In addition, chief content officer Dawn Ostroff is stepping down as part of the changes, Ek said.
Much like Google's Sundar Pichai, Ek said he takes "full accountability for the moves that got us here today." The company will provide 5 months of severance to employees on average, along with acrued and unused vacation time, healthcare during the severance period, immigration support and career support. The majority of Spotify's employees are based in the US, followed by Sweden and the UK.
The company is "fundamentally changing how we operate at the top," delegating its engineering and product work to the new chief product and chief business officers, Ek said. "These changes will allow me to get back to the part where I do my best work—spending more time working on the future of Spotify."
Like other tech firms, Spotify has expanded rapidly over the past couple of years, particularly in the area of podcasting. It spent over a billion dollars on podcast networks, hosting services and shows like The Joe Rogan Experience. Much of that effort was driven by chief content officer Dawn Ostroff, who grew podcast content by 40 times, according to Ek. As part of the changes, however, she'll be leaving the company.
Spotify joins other tech giants in making mass layoffs, partially due to a downturn in the economy and partially due to hiring sprees. Over the past few weeks, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Google laid off 51,000 employees combined. From 2020 to 2022, however, those companies hired many more employees than they let go. Spotify itself had 6,617 employees in 2021 and 9,800 a year later, prior to the layoffs.
Yelp is offering users a more refined way to keep tabs on communications with service professionals when they have a problem to fix or want to make some home improvements. Through the Projects tab in the Yelp app, you'll be able to create, manage and organize jobs. Yelp says that you'll be able to use the feature to request quotes from businesses, compare prices, message contractors and schedule consultations.
You'll start a new project when you select Request A Quote. The app will organize each project by the most recent quote requests and there'll be category-specific icons. It should be relatively easy for folks who have multiple projects on the go to see the status of each one at a glance. You'll be able to see if you're still awaiting quotes from some contractors and which businesses have yet to respond to a message or request.
Yelp
When you get an email notification after a business owner messages you, you'll be able to click a link in the email that will take you to the Yelp app and automatically log you in if you aren't already so you can respond. This should remove some of the friction and mitigate some of the stress that comes with managing home projects.
The Projects tab could come in especially handy when you're moving and are bringing in contractors for a bunch of different jobs. It should be useful for comparing quotes from different service professionals for a single job too.
Yelp is rolling out some changes for businesses as well. A revamped message center will show project titles, the location of the job, timing and message previews. Yelp suggests that this will help service professionals respond to quote and call requests more easily.
Elon Musk is changing Twitter’s remote work rules yet again amid deadline for employees to commit to his vision for a “hardcore” company. Musk, who previously banned remote work at Twitter, has now indicated that some remote work is possible, Bloombergand The Vergereport.
“Regarding remote work, all that is required for approval is that your manager takes responsibility for ensuring that you are making an excellent contribution,” Musk wrote in a new memo to Twitter staff. He added that teams should be meeting in person at least once a month though weekly meetings are “ideal.”
Musk’s latest comments on remote work come one day after Twitter employees were told they had to agree they “want to be part of the new Twitter” where the expectation will be “long hours at high intensity." Workers who wouldn’t check the “yes” box on the accompanying Google Form would be provided severance.
Now, it seems Musk is concerned that not enough employees are buying into his vision of an“extremely hardcore” Twitter. Bloomberg reports that Musk has been pitching “key employees” on his plans and that he has tapped other leaders “to convince employees to stay” on at the company.
But while the allowance of some remote work may seem like a victory for Twitter employees, who have enjoyed a “work from anywhere” policy for more than two years, Musk made it clear that he was more than willing to punish managers for remote employees who fall short of his expectations. “At risk of stating the obvious, any manager who falsely claims that someone reporting to them is doing excellent work or that a given role is essential, whether remote or not, will be exited from the company,” he wrote.
Since Musk took over Twitter, the employees who survived the initial job cuts have faced growing uncertainty and mounting pressure as the new CEO has prioritized features like paid verification. Esther Crawford, a Twitter manager who has been leading the revamped Twitter Blue, tweeted a photo of herself sleeping on the floor of a Twitter conference room in the days immediately after Musk’s takeover.
But not everyone has been as willing, or able, to adapt to Musk’s demands. And a Twitter lawyer recently told other employees that Musk’s requirement for workers to show up in the office or get fired might be illegal. Now, it seems at least one former employee is testing that notion, and has filed a lawsuit alleging that Musk’s new policies are discriminatory against workers with disabilities.
Elon Musk has banned Twitter employees from working remotely, saying they need to spend 40 hours a week in the office unless he gives his express permission otherwise. Bloomberg reported from the company’s first official all-hands communications from Musk since bought the platform. He said workers need to prepare for “difficult times ahead” for advertising-led business like Twitter, and that he wants to see subscription fees, account for half the company’s revenue.
Twitter fostered a remote work culture during the pandemic, allowing many employees to work from home. It also instituted regular additional rest days for employees, another initiative Musk has axed, saying that Twitter’s turnaround will require “intense work.” Musk ’s other companies, SpaceX and Tesla, also require mandatory in-office work unless management specifically approves it. When he wrote to both sets of workers, he said that visibility was key for senior leadership, who should be seen to be working alongside their subordinates.
Musk added in his remarks that the company’s first priority — after completing the rollout of Twitter Blue — is to address his concern around automated accounts. A key pillar of Musk and the company’s fight, prior to acquisition, was the billionaire’s belief that the company was under reporting the amount of fake accounts running on its platform.
Women have faced gender-based discrimination in the workforce throughout history, denied employment in all but a handful of subservient roles, regularly ignored for promotions and pay raises — and rarely ever compensated at the same rates as their male peers. This long and storied socioeconomic tradition of financially screwing over half the population continues largely unabated into the 21st century where women still make 84 cents on the dollar that men do. In her new book, The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future, Professor of Law and founding member of the Center for Intellectual Property Law and Markets at the University of San Diego, Dr. Orly Lobel, explores how digital technologies, often maligned for their roles in exacerbating societal ills, can be harnessed to undo the damage they've caused.
For years, the double standard was glaring: employers demanded secrecy about salaries while asking prospective employees for their salary histories. Now, we can tackle both ends of this asymmetry. Just as digitization is helping to reverse information flows to foster more transparency in the market about employees’ worth, new laws are also directing employers to not rely as much on past pay levels, which can be tainted by systemic inequality. In 2016, Massachusetts became the first state to pass a law prohibiting employers from asking job candidates about their salary histories. Since then, more than a dozen states have followed suit.
Barring employers from asking prospective job candidates about their salary histories has two goals. The first is breaking the vicious pay gap cycle, which emerges when women are paid less at a previous job and that gap is then replicated by the next employer. The second is addressing gender differences in the negotiation process Salary figures are plagued by gender disparity, and they can perpetuate and further exacerbate existing market disparities. When a woman discloses that she currently earns less than a man, she could be harming her salary trajectory — both in the applied-for position and for the rest of her career. Each time she discloses her current salary to a potential employer, that gap is likely to grow, as recruitment efforts and promotions are often offered as a percentage increase in relation to current base salary. Rather than relying on biased figures, bans on salary history inquiry induce employers to use other ways to determine a potential employee’s worth, including a shift to automated computation. Employers using market and internal data can consider merit-related characteristics when determining pay, such as experience, training, education, skill, and past performance.
And yet, as we have seen, human bias can creep into our algorithms, and an algorithm that is fed data tainted by salary bias is likely to perpetuate that bias itself. Feedback loops are digital vicious cycles that can result in self-fulfilling outcomes. Once again: bias in, bias out. The risk is that an algorithm will learn that certain types or categories of employees are on average underpaid, and then calculate that into salary offers. This is the wrong that recent policy has been designed to eliminate — and that we can program AI to avoid. Removing the anchored numerical figure encourages employers to proactively assess pay based on the company’s needs and the candidate’s fit rather than on a tainted number. At the same time, having pay scale information for a job but not having a salary history on the table can embolden women to ask for more.
What’s more, AI can also help in the future — maybe not even the distant future — by replacing some of the negotiation that takes place in unequal settings. Empirical studies on negotiation differences between men and women have repeatedly shown that women on average negotiate less, and that when they do, employers react negatively. Women don’t ask for higher salaries, better terms, promotions, or opportunities nearly as frequently as men do. In my research, I’ve called this the negotiation deficit. In one study at Carnegie Mellon University, 93 percent of female MBA students accepted an initial salary offer, while only 43 percent of men did. In another study, female participants simulating salary negotiations asked for an average of $7,000 less than male participants. Economists Andreas Leibbrandt and John List have also found that while women are much less likely to negotiate with employers over salary, this difference disappears when all job seekers are explicitly told that pay is negotiable, mitigating the pay gap. My own experimental research with behavioral psychologist and law professor Yuval Feldman, my longtime collaborator, has found that women in some work environments act less as “homo economicus” — that is, as rational economic actors — and more as altruistic social actors, such that women do not demand for themselves as much as men, and are more likely to value non-monetary benefits, such as good corporate culture.
Can these research insights offer us clues for developing new software tools that will spur women to negotiate? Digital platforms can serve employees by providing advice and information on asking for a raise or preparing for an interview. Information on pay—and especially an explicit expectation that pay can and should be negotiated—can empower applicants to negotiate higher salaries before accepting job offers. The digital platform PayScale conducts annual surveys asking thousands of job seekers whether they disclosed their pay at previous jobs during the interview process. PayScale’s 2018 survey found that women who were asked about their salary histories and refused to disclose were offered positions 1.8 percent less often than women who were asked and disclosed. By contrast, men who refused to disclose when asked about salary history received offers 1.2 percent more often than men who did disclose.
Even when women do negotiate, they are treated differently. In my research, I call this phenomenon the negotiation penalty. Women are told to “lean in” and make demands, but the reality is that for centuries, women have been universally viewed as weaker negotiators than their male counterparts. In one series of experiments, participants evaluated written accounts of candidates who did or did not initiate negotiations for higher salaries. The results in each experiment showed that participants penalized female candidates more than male candidates for initiating negotiations, deeming women who asked for more not “nice” or too “demanding.” While qualities such as assertiveness, strength, and competitiveness culturally benefit male negotiators, women who display such characteristics are often considered too aggressive. Another study looked at data from a group of Swedish job seekers and found not only that women ended up with lower salaries than equally qualified male peers, but also that they were often penalized for negotiating like them. Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson have shown that attractive avatars lead to more intimate behavior with a confederate in terms of self-disclosure and interpersonal distance. In a second study, they also observed that tall avatars lead to more confident behavior than short avatars in a negotiation task. They term it the Proteus Effect (the Greek god Proteus was known to have the ability to take on many self-representations). The Proteus Effect suggests that the visual characteristics and traits of an avatar are associated with correlating behavioral stereotypes and expectations, including those that affect the way we negotiate.
The eleventh annual competition for artificial intelligence that has been trained to negotiate — the Hagglebot Olympics, as it’s been termed in the popular media — was held in January 2021. Universities from Turkey and Japan won this time. In some experiments involving negotiations with bots, most people did not even realize they were talking to a bot rather than another person — the bots had learned to hold fluent conversations that completely mimicked humans. Using game theory, researchers are increasingly improving the ways bots can negotiate on behalf of humans, eliminating some of the aspects in which we humans are fallible, like trying to factor in and weigh many different aspects of the deal. AI can now predict the other side’s preferences quite fast. For example, an AI listening by microphone to the first five minutes of negotiation is learning to predict much of the eventual deal just from the negotiators’ voices. Following these speech patterns through machine learning, it turns out that when the voice of a negotiator varies a lot in volume and pitch, they are being a weak player at the negotiation table. When the negotiating sides mirror each other, it means they are closer to reaching an agreement. Using AI also has helped uncover the ways in which women are penalized at the negotiation table. A new study out of the University of Southern California used a chatbot that didn’t know the gender identities of participants to evaluate negotiation skills. The study showed that most of us — both men and women — do quite badly at negotiating salaries. Over 40 percent of participants didn’t negotiate at all, and most people left money on the table they could have received. Women valued stock options less than men did as part of their compensation package, affecting women’s likelihood to accumulate wealth over time. These advances can also help with negotiation disparities across different identities. A group of Israeli and American researchers looked at how a smart computer can negotiate with humans from different cultural backgrounds. Without telling the machine anything about the characteristics of people from three countries — Israel, Lebanon, and the United States — they let the AI learn about the patterns of cultural negotiation differences by engaging in negotiation games. They found that the computer was able to outperform people in all countries. These developments are promising. We can envision bots learning about negotiation differences and ultimately countering such differences to create more equitable exchanges, level the playing field, and achieve fair outcomes. They can be designed to tackle the specific distributive goals we have.
If you love technology as much as we do and have writing chops to boot, we want to hear from you. Engadget is looking for freelance news writers in the US! Interested applicants should send a cover letter, resume and links to three writing samples to jobs at engadget dot com. Here’s the deal:
Contributing writer
Engadget is looking for ambitious and enthusiastic freelance writers capable of telling compelling stories about technology, science and the future of everything. The ideal candidate will put important news in proper context with minimal fluff, find an interesting and original angle from which to tackle a story, explain complicated subjects simply and clearly, and do this all reasonably quickly.
As a writer at Engadget you'll be an essential part of our dedicated and passionate news team. Our ideal candidates will have some solid professional media experience under their belt, but we're also open to early-career writers who are ready to hustle. You'll gain valuable experience and exposure in a fast-paced, online newsroom. Plus, you'll have access to some of the finest writers and reporters in the business who can offer invaluable lessons on how to thrive in the modern media landscape.
Freelance contributing writers will take on between three and five assignments per day (sometime between 8AM and 9PM ET, but your exact schedule is negotiable). We are currently looking for writers located in the US, or anyone willing to work during US business hours. Shifts will be a minimum of four hours.
We're looking for:
Preferably someone who already has some professional tech/science/auto bylines under their belt.
A familiarity with and sincere interest in consumer technology.
A writer with a strong, lively voice who can turn in clean copy quickly.
Works well with others, and is receptive to feedback.
Experience with Photoshop or other photo editing software is a plus.
After multiple delays and false starts, Apple now has a solid start date for its hybrid work arrangement. According to Bloomberg and The Verge, the tech giant will start requiring employees who work in its Santa Clara Valley offices to report to office three times a week starting in the week of September 5th. They're expected to come in every Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the third day set by their individual teams. In a letter sent to staff members, Apple's SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi encouraged employees to share their input about that third team-specific day with their managers to help them decide.
Apple has been planning to enforce a hybrid arrangement wherein employees are required to work from its offices since June 2021. At the time, though, it wanted personnel to come in every Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. The company, which puts great value in what Tim Cook calls the "irreplaceable benefits of in-person collaboration," has made several attempts to enforce a hybrid work week arrangement since then but has had to keep pushing its plans back due to rising COVID-19 cases and other factors.
Earlier this year, it again attempted to start enforcing its hybrid work policy in the week stating on May 23rd. However, employees had criticized the policy for being "driven by fear" — "[f]ear of the future of work, fear of worker autonomy, fear of losing control," they said in an open letter. Apple even reportedly lost Ian Goodfellow, its director of machine learning and most cited expert in the field, over the policy. In the end, the company backtracked and softened its stance, launching a pilot that required some employees to report to its offices two days a week instead.
Now, it looks like there's no stopping Apple from requiring employees to report to its offices. "September 5th marks the true start of our hybrid work pilot in the Santa Clary Valley," Federighi wrote in his memo. As he mentioned, though, it is still a pilot, and the company expects to learn from its implementation in the coming months as it prepares for employees' return to office in other locations.
In the first days of social media, to build a personal brand online you mostly just needed a basic working knowledge of html. In 2022, however, the influencer marketing industry's reach is estimated at around $16.4 billion. With so much money to be made, it's little wonder that an entire support ecosystem has sprung up to help get the next generation of PewDiePies camera-ready. In the excerpt below from her new book examining the culture and business of online influencing, Break the Internet, Olivia Yallop enrolls in a summer gaming influencer camp for teens.
Beginning the course bright and early on a Monday morning in August stirs memories from classrooms past, as the students — myself, plus a small group of animated pre-teen boys hailing from across the UK — go around and make our introductions: an interesting fact about ourselves, our favourite foods, two truths and a lie. A pandemic-proofed schedule means we are learning remotely, in my case prostrated on my parents’ sofa. Once logged on, we meet our course coach Nathan, an upbeat, relentlessly patient Scottish instructor with a homegrown YouTube channel of his own, on which he reviews electronic synthesisers and (he reveals privately to me) vlogs whisky-tasting.
Twenty minutes into our induction, I realise I am already out of my depth: I have accidentally landed in a class of aspiring YouTube gamers. Within the influencer landscape, gaming is a microcosm complete with its own language and lore, each new game franchise spawning an expansive universe of characters, weaponry, codes, and customs. Whilst the students are happily chatting multiplayer platform compatibility, I am stealthily googling acronyms.
Far from the bedroom-dwelling pastime of the shy and socially reclusive, as it has been previously painted, gaming is a sprawling community activity on social media platforms. Over 200 million YouTube users watch gaming videos on a daily basis; 50 billion hours were viewed in 2018 alone, and two of the five largest channels on YouTube belong to gamers. And that’s just YouTube — the largest dedicated gamer streaming platform is Twitch, a 3.8m-strong community, which has an average of 83,700 synchronous streams — with 1.44 million viewers — taking place at any time.
Just a fraction of these numbers are users actually playing games themselves. Gaming content usually consists of viewing other people play: pre-recorded commentary following skilful players as they navigate their way through various levels or livestreamed screenshares to which viewers can tune in to watch their heroes play in real time. According to Google’s own data, 48 per cent of YouTube gaming viewers say they spend more time watching gaming videos on YouTube than actually playing games themselves.
If, like me, you find yourself wondering why, you’re probably in the wrong demographic. My classmate Rahil, a die-hard fan of Destiny 2, broke it down: ‘What makes these content creators so good is that they are very confident in what they do in gaming, but they are also funny, they are entertaining to watch. That’s why they have so many followers.’
Watching other people play video games is a way to level up your skills, engage with the community’s most hyped gaming rivalries, and feel connected to something beyond your console. Being a successful gaming influencer is also a way to get filthy rich. Video game voyeurism is a lucrative market, making internet celebrities of its most popular players, a string of incomprehensible handles that read to me like an inebriated keyboard smash but invoke wild-eyed delight in the eyes of my classmates: Markiplier, elrubiusOMG, JuegaGerman, A4, TheWillyrex, EeOneGuy, KwebbelKop, Fernanfloo, AM3NIC.
PewDiePie — aka 30-year-old Felix Kjellberg, the only gamer noobs like me have ever heard of — has 106m followers and is estimated to earn around $8 million per month, including more than $6.8 million from selling merchandise and more than $1.1 million in advertising. Blue-haired streamer Ninja, aka Detroit-born 29-year- old Tyler Blevins, is the most-followed gamer on Twitch, and signed a $30 million contract with Microsoft to game exclusively on their now- defunct streaming service Mixer. UK YouTube gaming collective The Sidemen upload weekly vlogs to their shared channel in which they compete on FIFA, mess around, prank each other, order £1,000 takeaways, and play something called ‘IRL Tinder’, living out the fever dream of a million teenage boys across the internet. For many tweens, getting paid to play as a YouTube gamer is a hallowed goal, and each of my classmates is keen to make Minecraft a full-time occupation. I decide to keep quiet about my abortive attempt at a beauty tutorial.
Class kicks off with an inspirational slideshow titled ‘INFLUENCERS: FROM 0 TO MILLIONS’. My laptop screen displays a Wall of Fame of top YouTubers smiling smugly to camera: OG American vlogger Casey Neistat, Canadian comedian Lilly Singh, PewDiePie, beauty guru Michelle Phan, and actor, activist, and author Tyler Oakley, each underlined by a subscriber count that outnumbers the population of most European countries. ‘Everyone started off where you are today,’ says Nathan enthusiastically. ‘A laptop and a smartphone — that’s all they had. Everybody here started with zero subscribers.’ The class is rapt. I try to imagine my own face smiling onscreen between professional prankster Roman Atwood (15.3m subscribers) and viral violin performer Lindsey Stirling (12.5m subscribers). Somehow, I can’t.
Nathan hits play on early comedy vlogger nigahiga’s first ever upload — a 2007 viral video sketch entitled ‘How to Be Ninja’ that now has 54,295,178 views — and then a later video from 2017, ‘Life of a YouTuber’. ‘Look at that — 21.5M subscribers!’ Nathan taps on the follower count under the video. ‘It didn’t happen overnight. It took a year, 12 months of putting up content with 50 views. Don’t get disheartened. Take every sub, every view as a...’ he mimes celebrating like the winner of a round of Fortnite.
Thanks to its nostalgic pixelation and condensed frame ratio, watching ‘How to Be Ninja’ creates the impression that we’re sitting in a history class studying archival footage from a distant past: Late Noughties Net Culture (2007, colourised). In a poorly lit, grainy home video that feels like a prelapsarian time capsule, two teenage boys act out a hammy sketch in which they transform into martial arts experts, including off-tempo miming, questionable jump cuts, and a tantalising glimpse of old-school YouTube — running on Internet Explorer — that flies over the heads of my Gen Z classmates. The sketch feels like two friends messing around with a camera at the weekend; it’s almost as if they don’t know they’re being watched.
In the second video an older and now more-polished Higa — complete with designer purple highlights in his hair — breezily addresses his multi-million-strong fanbase in a nine-minute HD monologue that’s punctuated by kooky 3D animation and links to his supporting social media channels. ‘I am in one of the final stages of my YouTube career,’ he says, ‘and my YouTube life, so …’ The camera cuts to reveal his extensive video set-up, professional lights, and a team of three clutching scripts, clipboards, cameras, and a boom mic behind the scenes, all celebrating exuberantly: ‘That means we can get out of here right?’ asks one. ‘Yeah, it’s really cramped back here…’ says another, ‘I have to poop so bad.’
‘What’s the difference between these two videos?’ Nathan prompts us. ‘What changed?’ The answers roll in quickly, students reeling off a list of ameliorations with ease: better lighting, better equipment, a better thumbnail, slicker editing, a more professional approach, background music, higher audio quality, and a naturalistic presentation style that at least appears to be ad-libbed.
‘What makes a good video more generally?’ asks Nathan. ‘What are the key elements?’ When he eventually pulls up the next slide, it turns out Nathan wants us to discuss passion, fun, originality, and creativity: but the class has other ideas. ‘I heard YouTube doesn’t like videos lower than ten minutes,’ offered Alex. ‘There’s many things that they don’t like,’ Lucas corrects him. ‘The algorithm is very complicated, and it’s always changing. They used to support “let’s plays” [a popular gaming stream format] back in 2018, and then they changed it, and a lot of Minecraft channels died.’ Rahil pipes up: ‘They find as many ways as possible to scrutinise your video … if you do many small things wrong, you get less money, even though YouTube is paid the same money by the advertisers. So you should never swear in your videos.’ ‘No, demonetisation is different,’ corrects Fred.
There is something fascinating and incongruous about watching pre-teens reel off the details of various influencer revenue models with the enthusiasm of a seasoned social media professional. The fluency with which they exchange terms I’m more accustomed to encountering on conference calls and in marketing decks is a startling reminder of the generational gulf between us: though they may be students, they’re not exactly beginners on the internet.
As the conversation quickly descends into technocratic one- upmanship, Nathan attempts to steer our analysis back to entry level. ‘Once you reach 1,000 subscribers,’ he enthusiastically explains to the class, ‘that means you can monetise your channel and have ads on it.’ A heated debate about the intricacies of YouTube monetisation ensues. Nathan is corrected by one of his students, before another pipes up to undercut them both, and suddenly everyone’s talking all at once: ‘Most YouTubers make money from sponsorships, not advertising revenue, anyway,’ offers one student. There is a pause. ‘And merch,’ he adds, ‘the MrBeast hoodies are really cool.’
‘Okay then,’ says Nathan brightly, shifting the slide forward to reveal a list of attributes for creating successful content that begins, ‘Attitude, Energy, Passion, Smile’, ‘what about some of these…’
Looking at my notes, I realise Nathan’s original question, ‘What makes a good video?’, has become something else entirely: what does YouTube consider to be a good video, and thus reward accordingly? It’s a small elision, admittedly, but significant; good is whatever YouTube thinks is good, and interpretations outside this algorithmic value system aren’t entertained. His prompt about creative possibilities has been heard as a question about optimising the potential of a commodity (the influencer) in an online marketplace. ‘It’s all about value,’ he continues, unwittingly echoing my thoughts, ‘what value does your video bring to the YouTube community? How are you going to stand out from all the other people doing it?’
This cuts to the heart of criticism against influencer training courses like this one, and others which have sprung up in LA, Singapore, and Paris in recent years: that it’s ethically inappropriate to coach young people to commodify themselves, that it’s encouraging children to spend more time online, that it’s corrupting childhoods. Influencers and industry professionals rolled their eyes or responded with a mixture of horror and intrigue when I’d mentioned the Fire Tech programme in passing. ‘That’s disgusting,’ said one agent, ‘way too young.’ (Privately, I thought this was an inconsistent position, given she represented a mumfluencer with a family of four.) ‘I respect it,’ said a Brighton-based beauty guru, ‘but I would never personally make that choice for my kids.’ ‘Crazy times we live in,’ offered a NYC-based fashion influencer, before admitting, ‘for real, though, I kind of wish I had had that when I was younger.’
That big-name guest might not have appeared on your favorite podcast out of the kindness of their heart. Bloomberg has learned that podcast guests are routinely paying big money to appear on popular podcasts. Guestio, a marketplace for these deals, has seen huge transactions in the past six months. Four podcasters made $20,000 from charging for appearances, while one made $50,000. The most profitable show, Entrepreneurs on Fire, regularly charges $3,500 for guest spots and has sometimes taken a cut of product sales.
It's not clear how widespread this activity is. However, Bloomberg interviews suggest pay-to-appear systems are popular for business, cryptocurrency and wellness podcasts. Hosts like Entrepreneurs on Fire's John Lee Dumas see appearance fees as filters. Guests will be well-prepared if they're making an "investment" in airtime, the creator said.
However, there are ethical and legal concerns surrounding the practice. This could be considered a modern take on payola, or the pay-for-play schemes used to boost songs on the radio — is a guest appearing because they're relevant, or just because they're willing to pay? And while disclosures are mandatory for those radio plays, the situation isn't so clear with podcasts. While many shows on Guestio have disclosures, not all of them properly reveal when an interview subject is paying to show up.
That could pose a problem in the future. A Federal Trade Commission spokesperson said that there's deception whenever consumers are mislead about the nature of advertising and promotional messages, regardless of the media format. The regulator didn't say if it would crack down on podcasters who improperly disclose paying guests, but the message could serve as a warning to show hosts.
On Wednesday, former Amazon employee Tori Davis and 25 other workers filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) alleging the company forced them to work in a dangerous environment, reports the Chicago Tribune. Davis raised concerns about Amazon's handling of a racist death threat, and claims the retailer fired her after she threatened legal action if it did not address the incident.
In May, workers at the company’s MDW2 warehouse in Joliet, Illinois — a city 35 miles outside of Chicago — found two racist messages using the N-word scribbled on the wall of one of the facility’s bathrooms, according to the complaint filed with the EEOC. Davis, who is Black, left work without pay after her co-workers discovered the graffiti. After police investigated the incident, Amazon allegedly sent a text message to staff stating law enforcement “did not identify threats to the site’s safety."
According to the complaint, Amazon also allowed white employees at MDW2 to wear clothing that displayed the Confederate flag. One individual allegedly had a shirt where workers could see the flag “prominently” on both the garment’s back and sleeves.
“Amazon works hard to protect our employees from any form of discrimination and to provide an environment where employees feel safe,” an Amazon spokesperson told Engadget. “Hate or racism have no place in our society and are certainly not tolerated by Amazon.”
At a press conference, Davis said she would like to see Amazon implement additional safety policies at MDW2 and improve Black worker representation at the facility. She is also appealing her termination. Amazon has faced allegations of allowing racism in the workplace before. Last year, a manager with the company’s AWS division said she was subjected to harassment from a supervisor who used racial tropes. The company also has a history of terminating employees who have sought to improve conditions at its workplaces.
