Digital Platform Policy Highlights - Digest 13
Summer 2023 Edition: Influencers, Travelers, Writers, Game Developers and Talent: these are some of the "users" that digital platforms targeted with their policy changes. 2 out of 6 are using LLMs :)
This post is part one of a series documenting policy changes and feature improvements introduced by platforms in Summer 2023. A lot of interesting changes.
TL;DR → Policy Changes to Attract New Users include:
YouTube lowers eligibility requirements for monetization
YouTube has reduced the thresholds for the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) from 4000 valid watch hours to 3000 or from 10 million Shorts views down to 3 million. The YPP allows creators to access various monetization features, such as paid chat, tipping, channel memberships, and shopping. YouTube’s move is likely an effort to maintain parity with TikTok which has already reduced the threshold. As noted in an earlier post, YouTube already had altered its monetization requirements to keep content creators on YouTube (link)
Patreon offers free membership and digital goods sales
Patreon, a platform that allows creators to be paid for their content, is launching a free membership option and a feature to sell digital products directly to subscribers. With this move, Patreon intends to fill the gap of “digital product subscription”, which is not the main focus of Instagram and TikTok, the platforms for content creation/distribution. It is interesting to see how Instagram and TikTok will respond to this “disintermediation” (link)
Booking.com releases ChatGPT-powered trip planner
Booking.com’s new AI Trip Planner blends its own artificial intelligence (AI) technology with OpenAI’s ChatGPT API. The planner will answer general travel questions as well as more specific questions regarding destinations and accommodations. The new AI Trip Planner seems like a smart feature for Booking.com to add (planning itineraries is often suggested as a possible use for AI chatbots). However, the prospect of hallucinations here could be highly inconvenient and even dangerous for travelers depending on the tool (link)
Substack Introduces Follow Button for Writers
Substack, a newsletter platform, has added a new feature that allows users to follow writers without subscribing to their newsletters. Users can see what writers are reading, liking, publishing, and subscribing to on their Notes feed and profiles. The “social-media” like feature adds another way for users to interact with writers. However, this may add pressure on writers to be more active on Substack lest their followers become bored and head elsewhere. It will be interesting to see if this feature changes the composition of “writers” on Substack (link)
Epic Games Offers 100% Revenue Share for Six Months of Exclusivity
Epic Games has launched a new program called “Epic First Run'' that gives developers 100% of the revenue from their games for the first six months of launching exclusively on the Epic Games Store. After that, the revenue share will revert to the standard 88/12 split. Epic is trying hard to woo more developers to its Games Store, but the store still lags behind PC gaming’s top dog, Steam. Without a large user-base, developers may be less inclined to make their games exclusive to the Epic Games Store, even when keeping 100% of the revenue earned there (link)
Meta Releases LLaMa 2 Model to Open Source Community
Meta’s LLaMa 2 is trained on a larger and “carefully” curated corpus and has been released for both commercial and research use. This is a major departure from Meta’s competitors, like Google and Microsoft, which have preferred to keep the actual AI chatbot model under close wraps. By open sourcing the model, Meta expects to learn immensely by observing how the open source community improves a foundational LLM. It also is a move to attract new talent to work at Meta, since Meta is demonstrating its resources and capabilities (link)
Research help from Anantesh Mohapatra (Thanks a ton, Anantesh!)