YouTube wants to win the love of musicians by solving their biggest problem: how to turn popularity into cash. So today it announced it’s acquired BandPage, a startup that helps artists show off and sell concert tickets, merchandise, and exclusive fan experiences. [Update: According to a source familiar with what BandPage shareholders were sent about the terms of the deal, the… Read MoreYouTube Acquires BandPage For $8M To Attract Musicians With Money-Making Tools
YouTube wants to win the love of musicians by solving their biggest problem: how to turn popularity into cash. So today it announced it’s acquired BandPage, a startup that helps artists show off and sell concert tickets, merchandise, and exclusive fan experiences. [Update: According to a source familiar with what BandPage shareholders were sent about the terms of the deal, the… Read More
As the world’s big messaging apps add more features to keep their users locked in for longer, other apps are tapping into messaging features in the hopes of creating more stickiness of their own. In the latest development, Flipagram, the app that lets you sew together pictures and video snippets with one minute of music to create packaged stories, has added a direct messaging feature. 
Video is booming on Instagram with watch time up 40% in 6 months, so now it’s trying to lure the best video makers and marketers from competitors like Vine and YouTube. Over the next few weeks, Instagram will begin showing view counts on videos where the Like number used to be, though you can still click through to see the heart count. As on Facebook, 3 seconds counts as a view. With… 
Call it the Tinder effect: in the past two years use of online dating has surged among the youngest U.S. adults, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center. Rates of online dating have also risen significantly for U.S. adults in their late 50s to early 60s. 
Twitter had a terrible, horrible, no good very bad earnings day, and unfortunately, the only thing that might save it is a time machine. The company announced that it saw zero growth in its total user count. Excluding SMS-only users, it actually declined from 307 million to 305 million users. That’s despite it launching and buying expensive TV commercials promoting Moments, which was… 
Twitter can be an incredibly confusing service for new and existing users, and Twitter says it’s now planning to address some rules that might make it unwieldy. In the company’s letter to shareholders, the company said that changes were coming to rules like the @reply and the .@name syntax. We don’t know what that looks like just yet, but that the company plans to address… 
Marc Andreessen is having quite a contrite Wednesday. Andreessen, who currently sits on Facebook’s board, caused a stir last night with his online response to Indian Internet regulator TRAI nixing Facebook’s plans to implement its ‘Free Basics’ program in India. Updated with statement from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg below. He took to the Twitterverse last night… 
Twitter today reported its fourth-quarter earnings — one of the most important quarters of the company’s history — and basically fell flat on its face. Twitter’s monthly active user growth, on a quarterly basis, was flat, compared to a slight jump that what analysts were expecting. Last quarter, the company had 320 million monthly active users, and this quarter was… 
Here’s why Twitter’s new algorithmically sorted timeline announced today could solve its growth problem: For many people, especially new users, Twitter feels like yelling into a black hole. They just don’t have that many followers. Their tweets are met with dead air. It’s disheartening…