According to sources, Netflix will spend $520+ million to make three movies, although none of them are likely to get a wide theatrical release. This month, Netflix committed almost $200 million to make the action movie “Red Notice,” with Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot. The company has stated that one-third of its 150 million subscribers are drawn to its movies, with TV accounting for the rest. New movie productions, it hopes, will help retain current viewers and attract new ones. Read more

Videos trending on YouTube are getting longer. Whereas many videos used to run seven or eight minutes, the most recent popular videos are as long as 60 minutes. Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg’s recent video is 30 minutes, for example, and Shane Dawson’s latest documentary is 60+ minutes. The driving force behind the trend is creators’ efforts to make more money via advertising. Ads run at the beginning of videos that are less than 10 minutes long, while YouTube allows the insertion of ads in the middle of videos that run longer than that. Read more

Recent reports from influencer marketing services indicate that brands and marketers are concerned with the growing costs of working with social influencers. According to a Mediakix survey, more than one-third of marketers in the U.S. explained that the rising cost in this space has become a significant challenge to marketing. A report from Klear points out that nano-influencers on YouTube (with 500 to 5,000 followers) earn an average of $315 per video, and power-influencers (with 30,000 to 500,000 followers) charge an average of $782 per video. Read more

A hacker accessed the personal data of about 106 million credit card customers and applicants of Capital One Financial, the fifth-largest credit card company in the U.S., making it one of the biggest such breaches of a large bank. Federal authorities arrested 33-year old Paige Thompson, who is accused of breaking through the bank’s firewall to access data stored on Amazon’s cloud service. Most of those exposed by the hack were customers and small businesses who applied for credit cards between 2005 and early 2019. Read more

The Justice Department approved the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint, respectively the U.S.’s third and fourth largest wireless networks. Critics of the merger, who include several state attorneys general and Democratic presidential candidates, reiterated that the deal would not benefit consumers, a point of view shared, until recently, by DOJ’s antitrust chief Makan Delrahim. He considered the ramifications but changed his mind when both companies agreed to sell portions of their businesses to Dish Network. Read more