Not that I think we need ANY more bike-share startups, at least they are getting a bit savvier. This one says its different because of its modular design, which includes swappable parts and batteries, resulting in a 4x longer product life cycle. https://t.co/iDXepjf0BK

— Kate Clark (@KateClarkTweets) January 23, 2019

Netflix is expected to continue its rapid growth in the next few years, and traditional TV will continue to suffer.

In a report released on Thursday, Morgan Stanley analysts predicted that Netflix will account for 20% of online video consumption in the US by 2023. Hulu will gain ground but remain much smaller, the analysts predicted.

Time spent on traditional TV will drop to 42% of total video consumption in the US. Netflix has gained ground on traditional TV every year since 2013, as seen in the graph below: Morgan Stanley

Overall online-video viewing has increased over time, and is expected to be on par with the amount of traditional TV viewing in the next few years.

Morgan Stanley sees the biggest video growth in the category of "other" online video services — all streaming services minus Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube — which will see a significant increase between now and 2023. That includes the launch of Disney+ but also international streaming platforms.

The chart below shows Morgan Stanley's estimated global subscriber growth for major streaming services, including Asian platforms Eros, iflix, and Hotstar. Each of these services are anticipated to grow substantially.

Morgan Stanley

Netflix said that it serves 100 million hours of video per day, and that it accounted for 10% of TV viewing in the US in 2018 during its earnings call this month.

A number of factors contribute to Netflix's pull with audiences. There was an all-time high of 495 scripted original TV shows in 2018, with online services like Netflix contributing 160 of them. Audience demand for Netflix originals is expected to surpass that of licensed content this year, according to an October report from research firms Parrot Analytics and S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The top five original streaming shows in 2018 were all Netflix series, according to Parrot.

But it will face added competition in 2019, as Disney and AT&T release their own Netflix competitors.

As Netflix continues to gain share of video viewership, the big question will be whether it can get its cash burn, which reached $3 billion in 2018, under control.

Netflix recently increased its prices for new users and will for current users within the next three months, and it's most popular plan is now at $13. Netflix has said it will likely continue to raise prices, but will face a bigger challenge in retaining subscribers when the price hits $15 a month, according to a recent Business Insider survey.

Facebook plans to partially combine its most popular messaging apps — and some lawmakers don't sound happy about it.

On Friday, The New York Times broke the news that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pushing his company to merge the back-end of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. The change would mean that users of one app would be able to message users of another, and it would tie the currently disparate Facebook-owned products far more closely together.

The change comes as Facebook attempts to move on from months of bruising scandals and intense scrutiny over its handling of users' data, from Cambridge Analytica's misappropriation of more than 80 million users' info to Facebook's role spreading hate speech that fueled genocide in Myanmar.

Against that backdrop, Facebook's latest messaging plans quickly raised fears that the controversy-plagued social network could become ever more powerful, and potentially dangerous.

California Democratic congressman Ro Khanna was one of the first to comment, suggesting on Twitter that the move raised anti-trust concerns about Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014 respectively.

"This is why there should have been far more scrutiny during Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp which now clearly seem like horizontal mergers that should have triggered antitrust scrutiny," he tweeted.

"Imagine how different the world would be if Facebook had to compete with Instagram and WhatsApp. That would have encouraged real competition that would have promoted privacy and benefited consumers."

In an emailed statement, Democratic senator Ron Wyden, an outspoken voice on tech policy issues, told Business Insider he had concerns about privacy and data protection issues.

"I have a lot of questions about how Facebook intends to combine these services. If it does anything to weaken the security and encryption of WhatsApp, that would represent a major blow to the security of millions of people around the world," he wrote.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

"If Facebook is doing this so it can harvest even more our personal information for profit, it's yet another reason to be concerned about how corporations are using our data. This is yet another reason to pass a strong privacy bill, like the one I've proposed."

These comments from Capitol Hill may be more bark than bite for now. But with a growing call for tech regulation, and with several state attorney generals currently looking into practices of social media companies, Facebook can ill afford to give lawmakers another reason to scrutinize the company.

According to The New York Times' report, Facebook plans to use end-to-end encryption across all three apps once the merger has taken place. It's not clear how it will work in practice, and spokesperson Jennifer Hakes declined to provide any information beyond a short statement.

"We want to build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private," the statement reads. "We're working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks. As you would expect, there is a lot of discussion and debate as we begin the long process of figuring out all the details of how this will work."

The criticisms are indicative of the immense skepticism Facebook now faces from many lawmakers and members of the general public, and the uphill struggle it will face to convince people that any changes it makes going forward have its users' best interests at heart.

That said, not everyone is as pessimistic about the potential consequences of the move. Alex Stamos, the outspoken former head of Facebook's security, hailed it as having the potential to be "the most impactful uplift of communications privacy in human history," if Facebook does implement end-to-end encryption.

"We should support the idea and demand transparency in the safety-privacy-[user experience] balancing decisions and technical details."

Do you work at Facebook? Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Telegram or WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Open-source leader Confluent raises $125M on $2.5B valuation

Electric cars are going to be a major part of our automotive future.

Not only are they better for the environment due to their absence of carbon emissions, but they can also be cheaper to maintain than a conventional gasoline-powered car.

However, the financial benefit of driving an electric car can is different based on where you live. This is mainly due to varying commute times among cities, as well as differences in the cost of gasoline and the cost of electricity, which is different for every city.

In 2018, Crescent Electric Supply Company (CESCO) published a study to find out which American cities offered the most financial savings for commuters who went electric. The study analyzed average commute length as well as gas prices and electricity rates in each major city in America. From there, CESCO used this data to calculate annual commute costs for electric and gas vehicles with an EV that used 34 kWh of electricity per 100 miles and a traditional gas-powered car that obtained 30 mpg of fuel economy.

Read more: Nissan fixed the biggest problem with the Leaf EV, and now it's ready to take on Chevy and Tesla.

According to the study, commuters in New York would save $55 a year by switching to an electric car. That pales in comparison to the whopping $212.87 folks in Seattle, Washington would save.

Much of this difference can be attributed to the price of electricity. Seattle has the cheapest electricity rates, at only $0.08 cents per kilowatt-hour, while New York has the highest prices, at a cost of $0.23 cents per kWh.

"Overall, drivers in every city would save money on their commute if they switched to an electric vehicle, but it was surprising to see how much different cities could save or how little they would spend," said Alex Lucas, a researcher who works for Crescent Electric, in a statement.

However, it should be noted that charging infrastructure around the nation is still lacking and the cost of long-range electric cars remain unaffordable to a large number of consumers.

Here's a closer look at the 10 cities where switching to an electric car will save you the least money.

Read more:The 10 US cities where you save the most money by driving an electric car

The Earth is not flat and soon, you should start seeing fewer videos on YouTube that say that it is.

On Friday, YouTube announced in a company blog post that it would recommend less "borderline" content, or videos that are untruthful in potentially harmful ways.

Essentially, YouTube, which is owned by Google, thinks it has created a better solution for stopping the spread of conspiracy theory videos on its platform.

Examples of videos YouTube hopes to promote less often include the Earth is flat claim, as well as those that promote phony cures for serious illnesses or make blatantly false claims about historical events like 9/11.

Many of these "borderline" videos don't necessarily violate YouTube's Community Guidelines, but the company says that limiting their reach will provide a better experience for its users. "We think this change strikes a balance between maintaining a platform for free speech and living up to our responsibility to users," YouTube said in its blog post.

These videos will not be removed entirely from the platform, and they may still appear in search results or recommendations if a user follows certain channels, the company explained.

YouTube also provided a bit of insight into how its recommendation model works, which involves "human evaluators and experts from all over the US" reviewing videos and using that feedback to train its machine learning systems.

YouTube has long struggled with its recommendations algorithm, catching backlash for promoting conspiracy theories and facing criticism for leading its users to more extreme corners of the Internet.

Read more: One viral thread shows how quickly YouTube steers people to wacko conspiracy theories and false information

"It's just another step in an ongoing process," the company said in its blog post on Friday. "But it reflects our commitment and sense of responsibility to improve the recommendations experience on YouTube."

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal at +1 (209) 730-3387, email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., or Twitter DM at @nickbastone.

For years, Ferrari scoffed at electric cars. True, the Italian automaker added hybrid-electric technology to its stratospherically expensive LaFerrari hypercar.

But it wasn't until just before his untimely death last year that CEO Sergio Marchionne even hinted that Ferrari would go electric. It now seems likely that the prancing horse will at least take a crack at something all-electric, although the timetable is uncertain.

The hybrid-electric piece makes sense, as Ferrari's gas-chugging machines can't survive in a world of rising emissions and fuel economy standards imposed by governments.

This has led to some misperceptions, however. Ferrari has been pitted against Tesla — even though the former sells less than 10,000 cars annually, while the latter delivered almost 250,000 in 2018. Tesla also sells two sedans and an SUV, while Ferrari sells no sedans and has only just begun working on what it calls a "FUV."

Read more: We drove a $250,000 Ferrari 488 and an $80,000 Corvette Z06 to see which we liked better — and the winner was clear

More critically, analysts are leaping ahead to an all-electric Ferrari future. You can't entirely blame them, because under Marchionne and with a successful IPO in 2015, Ferrari indeed became more of a global luxury brand than it was before. The entire auto industry is chattering away about EVs, and Ferrari has been sucked into that conversation.

For some analysts, it's even a potential sticking point. In a research note published on Friday ahead of Ferrari's fourth-quarter and full-year earnings, Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas — who has a "hold" rating and $140 target price on the stock, which is now trading around $110 — wrote, "[W]e think investors may be underestimating the up-front costs to transition to all-electric architectures."

The Ferrari 812 Superfast. Business Insider/Jessica Tyler

Jonas, for the record, is relatively bullish on Ferrari — shares are up 13% year-to-date — and thinks that investors should buy if the stock slides following any kind of downgraded guidance for 2019. (Jonas is also the most formidable Wall Street analyst when it comes to all things new in mobility and transportation).

The problem is that, unless Ferrari wants to create its own all-electric racing series, it can't transform its lineup being battery-powered.

Over and over and over and over again, Wall Street makes this mistake about Ferrari. Honestly, Jonas should know better. After all, this is the only publicly traded automaker that always discusses its Formula One results on quarterly earnings call. The point is that, ever since Enzo Ferrari opened his Scuderia Ferrari lo those many decades ago, Ferrari has been a racing brand first and a consumer brand second.

The company simply can't sever this defining link and run a racing program that's disconnected from the cars it sells to the public. And in many ways, I often point out, the whole reason for decades of road cars is that racing is expensive. The money to support the F1 team has to come from someplace.

Electric cars can be race cars — Formula E has been surprisingly successful. Hybrid-electric powertrains have also taken to the track. But serious all-electric racing is sort of impossible. In Formula E, the rapid depletion of batteries was solved by switching cars. That's going away, but flat-out running is still disappointing because Formula E cars are still slower than F1 cars.

Luckily, Ferrari doesn't even need to go all-in with electrification. It can ride the internal-combustion engine until it's literally the last one standing. If it has to charge people absurd sums to buy these cars ... well, it already charges absurd sums, and people stand in line to pay up.

Ferrari is, in a word, special. And that's what investors actually need to understand.

It seems pretty clear that electric cars are going to be a major part of our automotive future.

Not only are they better for the environment because of the absence of carbon emissions, but they can also be cheaper to maintain than a conventional gasoline-powered car. And some of them even look really cool.

However, the financial benefit of driving an electric car is different based on where you live. This is mainly because of varying commute times among cities, as well as differences in the cost of gasoline and the cost of electricity, which is different for every city.

In 2018, Crescent Electric Supply Company (CESCO) published a study to find out which American cities offered the most financial savings for commuters who went electric. The study analyzed average commute length as well as gas prices and electricity rates in each major city in America. From there, CESCO used this data to calculate annual commute costs for electric and gas vehicles with an EV that used 34 kWh of electricity per 100 miles and a traditional gas-powered car that obtained 30 mpg of fuel economy.

Read more: We drove a $211,000 Porsche Panamera to see if it's a hybrid supercar for the whole family. Here's the verdict.

Seattle has the cheapest electricity bills, at only $0.08 cents per kilowatt-hour, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that it offers the most annual savings for an electric vehicle commute, reaching a whopping $212.87 per year.

In comparison, New York has the highest electric bills in the country, at a cost of $0.23 cents per kWh, which leads to New Yorkers only saving $55 per year if they make the switch to an electric vehicle.

"Overall, drivers in every city would save money on their commute if they switched to an electric vehicle, but it was surprising to see how much different cities could save or how little they would spend," said Alex Lucas, a researcher who works for Crescent Electric, in a statement.

However, it should be noted that charging infrastructure around the nation is still lacking and the cost of long-range electric cars remain unaffordable to a large number of consumers.

Here's a closer look at the 10 cities where switching to an electric car will save you the most money.

Nearly a fifth of the world's 100 richest billionaires made their fortune in tech. And although some of their success stories start off modestly (and most likely in a garage), many tech moguls are taking their millions and splurging on real estate.

For instance, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft's Bill Gates live less than a mile from each other in the waterfront city of Medina, Washington, and own two of the country's most expensive estates.

Los Angeles is also another popular spot for tech moguls: Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and his wife, Miranda Kerr, bought their Brentwood home overlooking the city for $12 million, while Elon Musk's Bel Air abode boasts seven bedrooms, a giant screening room, and a tennis court.

Here's a look at some of the homes of the tech industry's elite:

Weeks after NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made the farthest-ever visit to an object, located more than 4 billion miles from Earth, the probe beamed home an unprecedented photo.

The image (above) is devoid of color and looks somewhat fuzzy, but it represents the most detailed look yet at the object. Researchers say there are more and even better pictures that have yet to arrive.

Early in the morning on New Year's Day, NASA's nuclear-powered mission zoomed past the snowman-shaped object, which is formally known as (486958) 2014 MU69, though it's commonly called "Ultima Thule" (see the editor's note below).

New Horizons flew within 2,200 miles of MU69 at a speed of about 32,200 mph, and data from the flyby is giving scientists a window into the formation of the solar system. Since Mu69 is so cold and far away, it's essentially the most pristine building block for planets ever seen.

"This is exactly what we need to move the modeling work on planetary formation forward, because we're seeing evidence — right here — of accreting objects, and then having them combine," Cathy Olkin, a deputy project scientist on the New Horizons mission, said during a press conference earlier this month.

Read more: NASA's deep-space nuclear-power crisis may soon end, thanks to a clever new robot in Tennessee

However, as Olkin and researchers have known for a long time, it will take about 20 months — likely into late 2020 — to download all of the data from New Horizons' historic maneuver.

That's why researchers released the "best-yet view" of Mu69, shown above, just this Thursday — more than three weeks after the flyby.

In the comparison below, the left image is one of the earliest photos of the object sent to Earth, photographed by New Horizons from about 85,000 miles away. On the right is the new image, which was taken from about 4,200 miles away. Both are sharpened to show more detail.

An early view of MU69 (left) vs. the most detailed version yet (right).NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

The new photo is far from the last that researchers will get access to, however; New Horizons took hundreds of images and recorded scores of other data during the flyby.

"Over the next month there will be better color and better resolution images that we hope will help unravel the many mysteries of Ultima Thule," Alan Stern, who leads the New Horizons mission, said in a press release published on Thursday.

An illustration of the Kuiper Belt with New Horizons' flight path, Pluto, and Ultima Thule (or 2014 MU69).NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Alex Parker

When New Horizons flew past Pluto in July 2015— the first-ever visit to the minor planet — it took the probe about 15 months to send back all of its data to Earth. In the case of Mu69, it will take about 20 months to send everything it recorded on New Year's Day.

The wait is so long because of the hardware on and distant location of New Horizons.

NASA built its probe in the early 2000s, then launched it from Earth in 2006. So while New Horizons' systems are redundant and healthy, the electronics themselves are outdated by about 15 to 20 years.

New Horizons is featured on a 2016 US Post Office stamp. USPS Another bottleneck is the weak signal from the spacecraft's radio antenna. Right now, its power output is about 15 watts, or one-fourth that of a standard 60-watt incandescent light bulb.

A third problem is that it's broadcasting from more than 4 billion miles away. At this distance, each bit of digital data — sent as radio waves traveling at light-speed — takes more than six hours to reach antennas on Earth.

Read more: The speed of light is torturously slow, and these 3 simple animations by a scientist at NASA prove it

These factors throttle the probe's output to below 1,200 bits per second, which is about 80,000 times slower than the average broadband internet download speed in the US in 2018.

At this rate, it took weeks to get enough images to create a small movie showing the rotation of MU69, which spins about once every 16 hours.

The New Horizons team expects to see the highest-resolution color photos sometime in February.

"We are guardedly optimistic that those highest-res images will cover a massive amount of the surface," Stern said earlier this month. "Stay tuned for February."

Planetary scientists like Stern are eager to see more because the pictures and other data should help solve some longstanding mysteries about the solar system's 4.5 billion years of history.

"It's like the first time someone opened up the pharaoh's tomb and went inside, and you see what the culture was like 1,000 years ago," he said. "Except this is exploring the dawn of the solar system."

Editor's note: After a public campaign, the New Horizons team selected Ultima Thule as a nickname for (486958) 2014 MU69. However, we've de-emphasized the nickname because the Nazi party used the word "Thule" as a tenet of its ideology.

Kanye West may have said it best in his song "Power" when he sings, "no one man should have all that power." That's where these prominent, high-profile couples come in.

While some tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg have been with their partners since college, some notable figures in the tech sector have gravitated toward partners with just as much power and pull in their industries.

There have also been some high-profile splits in the last year that have hit some prominent tech leaders. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced in early January that they were getting a divorce. Tesla's CEO Elon Musk and Canadian singer Grimes dated for a while, though it's unclear whether the on-again off-again couple was still together come 2019.

Here are 13 of the top power couples in the tech industry:

Penalties from California regulators are raising new questions about workplace safety at Tesla's vehicle production facilities in Fremont.

California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal-OSHA) inspected GA4, an assembly line Tesla constructed in an open-air structure outside its main factory in less than a month, between June 21 and December 18 (the agency did not specify the number of times it visited the facility) and issued penalties for six violations of California's labor regulations. The citations resulted in fines that total $29,365.

According to Cal-OSHA, Tesla failed to do the following:

Tesla appealed the citations, saying for each that it did not violate the specified regulation and that the corresponding penalty was unreasonable.

"Nothing is more important to me or to Tesla than the health and well-being of our employees," Laurie Shelby, Tesla's vice president of environmental, health, and safety, said in a statement to Business Insider. "My EHS team and operational leaders have been intently focused on GA4 over the past six months, implementing safety protocols throughout the new line that not only keep Tesla in compliance with existing standards but also reduce risks to associates. The OSHA inspection did not result from any incident or injury and occurred during the construction phase of the project. Tesla will challenge OSHA's findings regarding the safety conditions that were present at the time of GA4 construction,"

Read more: Ex-Tesla employees describe the abrupt way they were laid off and say questions linger

Thomas Armstrong, a professor at the University of Michigan who has worked with auto companies to make their manufacturing processes more ergonomically friendly, told Business Insider that the violations are not surprising due to the speed with which Tesla built GA4, but he said the violations do not necessarily indicate that the facility is unsafe, since they largely refer to failures to take preventive measures, rather than worker injuries.

"It certainly is not an endorsement for their safety culture, but, again, it doesn't mean that they aren't operating safely," he said.

The kinds of violations Tesla was cited for are common in the auto industry, and the fine Tesla received amounts to "a slap on the wrist," Armstrong said.

Questions about worker safety

Injury statistics and reports from media outlets have raised questions about worker safety at Tesla's factories, though concerns about workplace safety are not unique to Tesla in the auto industry.

A 2017 report from the worker advocacy group Worksafe said the injury rate at Tesla's Fremont factory was 31% higher than the industry average in 2015 and 2016, but Tesla said in 2018 that it had made safety improvements that led its recordable injury rate to fall by nearly 25% in 2017. The automaker said its 2017 recordable injury rate was "equivalent" to the industry average.

Worksafe has not released an analysis of Tesla's 2017 or 2018 injury rates, but Tesla received more citations from OSHA related to vehicle manufacturing than Ford, General Motors, or Fiat Chrysler from 2017 through the end of 2018. Tesla received 21 citations during that period, while Ford received 15, General Motors received three, and Fiat Chrysler received one. Ford was fined the most during that period, $102,554, while Tesla was fined $63,870, General Motors was fined $14,122, and Fiat Chrysler was fined $7,967.

While OSHA's online database does not disclose the nature of each violation, reports from Reveal published in 2018 claimed that Tesla misreported workplace injuries, avoided using safety markings for aesthetic reasons, and failed to give injured employees proper medical care. The first report was published before Tesla built GA4, and the second made no specific mention of the facility.

Tesla has denied that it has misreported workplace injuries and failed to use safety markings for aesthetic reasons. The automaker did not respond to requests for comment on the allegation that it failed to give injured employees proper medical treatment.

An unconventional decision

The decision to build an open-air structure to supplement vehicle production in less than a month was unconventional. It was motivated by a desire to hit production goals for the Model 3 sedan, which had been subject to significant production delays in the prior year.

Michael Ramsey, an automotive analyst at Gartner, told Business Insider at the time that the move had no precedent in the auto industry.

"It's extremely unusual, at a minimum," he said. "I've never heard of anyone ever doing this before on a grand scale."

But Tesla CEO Elon Musk praised GA4 on multiple occasions, saying he preferred it to the main factory and highlighting how it increased the automaker's production output by 50%.

"It's actually way better than the factory building. More comfortable & a great view of the mountains," Musk said in June.

Have a Tesla news tip? Contact this reporter at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Airbnb has acquired Gaest.com, an online marketplace for renting out meeting spaces for just hours at a time, the company announced Friday.

Gaest was founded in Denmark in 2015 by CEO Anders Mogensen. It's used by guests to book spaces for meetings, team building events and "even photoshoots," according to the press release. Gaest lets hosts list their own spaces for rent just like Airbnb lets hosts rent out their personal spaces to vacationers.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Airbnb was last valued at $31 billion in 2017.

"Working professionals may spend more than half their waking hours at work. Meetings and events offer a unique opportunity for Airbnb to address local use cases and support our full community of diverse professionals," Airbnb said in a statement.

Gaest.com, which offers it service in numerous countries across six continents, will operate as a unique platform for now, though its employees will join Airbnb, according to the statement.

The acquisition comes just a couple of weeks after Airbnb disclosed that it's been profitable for the last two years, at a time when profitability is quite rare for even the most successful venture-back startups, including Uber and Lyft.

Airbnb is also rumored to be pursing an IPO.

It also highlights a new growth strategy with Airbnb. By moving into workspace, Airbnb gears up to compete against companies like WeWork, which let nomadic workforces rent out desk space and meeting rooms for short periods of time.

WeWork, which recently rebranded to The We Company, was last valued at $47 billion in a January financing round led by SoftBank.

You've likely heard that learning a new language is easier for children than it is for adults. But all hope is not lost for grown-ups looking to expand their linguistic knowledge.

While a recent MIT study did pinpoint 17.4 years as the cut-off for obtaining a native-like mastery of another language's grammar structure, the results of the same study suggest that people over the age of eighteen can definitely still learn a foreign language quickly - they just may not achieve the same native-like proficiency.

It is also important to remember that children are not inherently better learners than their adult counterparts: the two groups just learn very differently, and, in fact, there are a few ways that adults can outperform children in language acquisition based on their longer and more robust life experiences.

If you're a person over the age of eighteen determined to learn a foreign language, read on for five easy strategies you can employ today:

Condé Nast said this week that it would put all its titles behind a paywall by the end of the year and that it would charge marketers a premium to advertise to digital subscribers.

Ad buyers expressed doubts that the glossy-magazine publisher's paywalled audience is worth paying more for, though.

Chris Mitchell, chief business officer for Condé Nast's culture division — which includes The New Yorker, Wired, and Vanity Fair — said the company planned to start charging a premium probably in the second quarter. That premium would apply across the aggregated digital subscriber audiences of those three titles, which already have paywalls in place that people hit after reading four articles a month.

Read more: Glamour was selling millions of magazines, but still couldn't make the business work. And it shows the dire state of advertising.

Currently, Wired's digital subscribers get an ad-free experience, but that would change. Ars Technica, Condé Nast's specialty tech publication, also could be part of the experiment.

Subscribers are more engaged than non-subscribers

Making the case for charging a premium, Condé Nast said that The New Yorker subscribers spend on average 7.3 times as much time on the site per month as non-subscribers do.

On Wired, subscribers spend 8.7 times as much time, and for Vanity Fair, it's nine times as much.

"We know they're more engaged, they've visited more articles to be behind the paywall, they're visiting more articles than the people who visit through search," Mitchell said. "So they're inherently more valuable."

Publishers of all kinds have been turning to paywalls and membership programs to prop up their businesses. Monica Ray, Condé Nast's EVP of consumer marketing, said the rest of Condé Nast's titles, including Vogue, GQ, and Bon Appétit would go behind the paywall starting in the third quarter.

"I think it's going to be a tough sell," said John Wagner, group director of published media at PHD, of the idea to charge a premium for paywalled readers.

Wagner said Condé Nast will have a hard time selling this way because other paywalled publications don't sell this way. And advertisers could still try to buy around the premium by buying programmatically.

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, for example, don't sell their audiences this way.

Advertisers would also expect to get a discount for the non-paywalled audience if the publisher charges more to reach the paywalled audience, he said.

Ad buyers are pushing back

Barry Lowenthal, CEO of The Media Kitchen, challenged the idea that people who pay for content are more valuable than freeloaders.

"I don't think it's any more valuable then free content," he said. "Of course they will try and say that subscribers are more valuable — maybe richer and more engaged — than non-paying readers, but publishers have spent decades telling us that it doesn't matter. People may also assume that if they pay for content, they won't see ads."

Mitchell pointed out that Condé Nast has always maintained that most of its print copies are paid for — it's just trying to test the notion of applying that same thinking to the digital sphere.

As for lowering the rates for non-paywalled audiences, he said: "I don't think there's anything wrong with the current CPM; this isn't about lowering the value of the user base, it's about identifying the higher value of people behind the paywall."

Still to be worked out are things like how much of a premium will be charged, and if the ad experience behind the paywall will be different from the one in front of it. Condé Nast will pay attention to how the ad market responds to the pricing change and how digital subscribers engage with ads compared to non-subscribers, Mitchell said.

Condé Nast has tried before to charge advertisers more to reach audiences based on their path to the sites, based on the idea that people who come from Facebook, for example, stay more on site than people who come from Twitter. The practice hasn't caught on widely, though.

Condé Nast will experiment with dynamic paywalls

Paywalls can impact traffic and, in turn, advertising revenue. Ray said the paywall approach would vary by title but that the plan is that most people wouldn't hit the paywall, so there would be minimal impact on traffic.

"For a lot of longform journalism, the meter makes sense," she said. "For brands like Bon Appétit, there's so much engagement around recipes; Architectural Digest, there's so much engagement around its photo archive. We're really going after this longtail audience."

Ultimately, the company might try other value exchanges for people who hit the paywall but are resistant to subscribing. Once a reader hits the paywall, they might get another free article that's sponsored by an advertiser, or get to read an article after watching an advertiser's video, for example.

Ray also said the company plans to experiment with so-called dynamic paywalls, as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times use. That would let Condé Nast vary the number of free articles someone is able to see depending on their propensity to subscribe.

One of Facebook's most high-profile executives has been flouting the social network's rules on using your own name on your profile for eight years.

Andrew Bosworth, the company's head of AR and VR (augmented and virtual reality) and a key lieutenant of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is commonly known as "Boz."His personal Facebook page lists his name only as "Boz," in violation on Facebook's controversial rules around names, Business Insider has found.

The California social network has been repeatedly criticized for its rules that stipulate that users must use their real names on the platform. In 2014, executive Chris Cox was forced to apologize to transgender and other LGBTQ Facebook users after the policy was abused to target them.

But Bosworth's rule-breaking suggests that the company is less worried about enforcing its rules when it comes to its own leadership team.

Reached for comment, Facebook spokesperson Tera Randall said that it was a "mistake" and Bosworth's name is going to be changed to "Andrew Bosworth (Boz)."

Andrew Bosworth's Facebook profile, which lists his name only as "Boz". Facebook

The rules, and how 'Boz' breaks them

The current real-name rule, according to Facebook's public help page, reads: "The name on your profile should be the name that your friends call you in everyday life. This name should also appear on an ID or document from our ID list," a list that includes official government documentation like passports and driver's licenses.

Unless Bosworth has legally changed his name to simply "Boz," then "Boz" alone breaks this rule.

The help page then adds: "Nicknames can be used as a first or middle name if they're a variation of your authentic name (like Bob instead of Robert)."

"Boz" would clearly qualify as a nickname — but Bosworth isn't using it merely as a first or middle name. It's his entire name on his Facebook profile, without a last name, meaning he is still in violation of the rules.

Business Insider attempted to remove this reporter's last name on Facebook, to see if the social network would allow users to go by their first name (or a nickname) only. It would not, displaying an error message saying: "You must provide a last name."

Additionally, users can list "another name" on their account, including "maiden name, nickname, [or] professional name." But doing this normally lists the additional name alongside their actual name — not instead of it.

Bosworth's profile has also been verified by Facebook, indicating that the social network has confirmed that it really belongs to him and isn't an impostor.

Facebook doesn't allow ordinary users not to have a last name. Facebook

The difference between Pages and Profiles

There are two different kinds of user-pages that users can create on Facebook: "Pages," and "Profiles."

A profile is a personal account directly linked to you, showing your real name (according to Facebook's rules, at least). Users need a profile on Facebook to do almost everything, from making comments to adding friends. Content posted to profiles can be either public or private, at the profile owner's discretion, and if the profile-owner allows it other users can "follow" their profile, meaning their public posts show up in the followers' news feeds.

A page, meanwhile, is a public page users can make about themselves, or a business they own, or things they like, or just about everything. Other users can then like these pages and receive posts from them their News Feeds. There are no rules about what pages can be called, beyond the standard ones around obscenity or illegality.

A Facebook exec (or anyone else) could make a page using a fake name and then post from it without breaking any rules. But this isn't what Bosworth is doing. He is using the "Boz" name on a personal Facebook profile.

Bosworth has used the same profile to make both personal and professional posts about his life for more than a decade. He makes public posts from it to this day, and it now has nearly 125,000 followers on it — but it's still a profile.

At least one other Facebook executive who is widely known by a nickname internally uses their real name on their Facebook profile. Kang-Xing Jin is often referred to as KX, but his name is listed on his profile as "Kang-Xing Jin."

A post on Andrew "Boz" Bosworth's profile from 2006. Facebook

It's not the first time Facebook has employed double-standards for its executives

Facebook's "discriminatory" real-name policy has caused huge upset among users over the years, from trans users who feel unable to express their true identities on the platform to users from ethnic groups whose names don't sound "real" to Facebook's moderation team.

The Silicon Valley tech giant has defended the rule as necessary to ensure users know who they're really communicating with, and to protect people from harassment, scams, and anonymous abuse - even if it inadvertently causes pain to users penalized by the policy.

But the company seems much less interested in enforcing the rule when one of it is own executives violating it.

In a statement, Facebook's Randall said: "Boz has had this profile name since 2011 when one of our automated systems from that time prompted him to make the change due to what our technology and policies allowed at that point. Since then we've instituted our ID-name match requirement ... We never changed it when the policy changed, which was a mistake we will correct by returning it to Andrew Bosworth (Boz). He has never asked for an exception to our policies or used our systems in any way not available to people at the time."

The apparent double-standard is reminiscent of an incident in April 2018, when tech news site TechCrunch discovered Facebook had secretly been deleting messages Zuckerberg had sent other users, without the recipients' knowledge or consent. The company claimed it was necessary for "corporate security" and hastily promised to roll out an "unsend" feature for all users — but nine months later the feature still appears to be in the testing phase.

Facebook exec Andrew "Boz" Bosworth gives a talk at the Online Marketing Rockstars marketing trade show in Hamburg, Germany, 03 March 2017. Christian Charisius/picture alliance via Getty Images

Andrew Bosworth is a key adviser to Mark Zuckerberg

Andrew Bosworth first joined Facebook in 2006, and is a member of of the "M-Team"— an elite group of execs that help steer the company and advise Zuckerberg. He has held a number of roles over the years, including helping launch News Feed and leading the company's advertising efforts, and is currently overseeing Facebook's AR and VR efforts as VP of AR/VR.

In 2018, BuzzFeed News published an internal memo written by Bosworth from 2016 in which he defended Facebook's growth at any cost, even if people died as a result.

"The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good," he wrote. "It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned."

Bosowrth subsequently said he doesn't agree with the memo, and didn't believe what he wrote even when he wrote it.

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