As Wikipedia turns 20, Papercup launches its first ‘weekly news picks’: articles from around the internet about the tech industry at large and pieces of interest to the companies we work with – spanning entertainment, news and education.

Content owners: pay attention to how Netflix is redefining video consumption

The Papercup Blog

Papercup’s CEO, Jesse Sheman, writes about how Netflix continues to grow its global subscriber-base by “challenging preconceptions notions around dubbing and subtitling.” The streamer is known for “redefining content consumption habits” and as it expands its production hubs in other markets, creating local-language content there that resonates globally, “it stands to [do so] yet again.”

To break through the overly saturated English speaking markets, Jesse recommends that content owners do follow Netflix’s lead.

The Other Tech Giant: Wikipedia Turns 20

The Economist

On the 15th January 2021, Wikipedia – “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” – turns 20. According to The Economist, “the platform hosts more than 55 million articles in hundreds of languages, each written by volunteers.” It’s also ranked the “13th-most popular site on the internet, ahead of Reddit, Netflix and Instagram.” Pretty impressive for a site that has grown organically and defies the usual “Silicon Valley recipe for success” that means  “no shareholders and sells no advertising.”

Despite the self-proclamation that “Wikipedia is not a reliable source”, it’s gained a reputation over the years as being an accurate and dependable source of information— for anything and everything. Testament to which – in October 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) started working with Wikipedia to make information on Covid-19 available via the site to prevent the spread of  “mis-information on the virus.”

A couple of other fascinating soundbites from the piece: “Amazon and Apple rely on it to allow Alexa and Siri to answer factual questions,” and “Google uses it to populate the ‘fact boxes’ that often accompany searches based on factual questions.” Lastly, since it’s revenues come from charitable donations and grants, the platform is hard to value, though some researchers have tried to guess:  “one study [values] it at $42bn a year in America alone.” That’s what happens if you stay in the job for 20 years.

If you’re not subscribed to The Economist, you can register for free to read the piece.

Is Substack the Media Future We Want?

The New Yorker

The New Yorker ponders the merits and pitfalls of Substack, “a service that enables writers to draft, edit, and send e-mail newsletters to subscribers.” Though it doesn’t present a major challenge to traditional media yet, it has changed the way people consume written media in its short, four-year lifespan.

It allows writers to cut out the middle people of newspapers and magazines, write more candidly than an editor might allow and speak directly to their following. Which inevitably attracts writers that span the political spectrum.

Curiously, the piece notes, for a platform that in theory allows people to go it alone, the most successful Sub-stackers “are almost always written by people who have already cultivated an audience at traditional publications or built up a following elsewhere.”

If you subscribe to Stratechery, Ben Thompson has an interesting take on Substack, its business model and traditional media’s reception of it.

In other news…

Here are some entirely serious tech predictions for 2021

Wired

Hilarious from start to finish, notwithstanding this:

“The team at OpenAI reveal that it has been four years since it replaced Mark Zuckerberg’s brain with the latest version of its artificially intelligent text generating bot, GPT-4. With that knowledge, Zuckerberg’s New Year’s resolutions suddenly make a lot of sense.”

Twitter has banned 70,000 accounts sharing Qanon content.

The Guardian

Twitter has said it has suspended more than 70,000 accounts since Friday that were primarily dedicated to sharing QAnon content. QAnon allegedly pushes conspiracies on social media “that include the baseless claim that Trump secretly is fighting a cabal of child-sex predators, among them prominent Democrats, figures in Hollywood and ‘deep state’ allies.”

The Guardian reports that: “Shares in Twitter dropped sharply after it permanently suspended Trump following the attack on the US Capitol last week. The social media company lost $5bn in market value as investors took fright at potential tougher future regulation for the site.”