Reddit just turned a profit for the first time. As part of its third quarter earnings results released on Tuesday, the company reported a profit of $29.9 million, along with $348.4 million in revenue — a 68 percent increase year over year.

The company hasn’t been profitable at any point in its nearly 20-year history. Since going public, Reddit lost $575 million during its first quarter on the market, but it decreased that loss to $10 million last quarter and is now finally in the black.

Reddit’s advertising revenue grew to $315.1 million, while “other” revenue reached $33.2 million on account of “data licensing agreements signed earlier this year.” Both Google and OpenAI have cut deals with Reddit to train their AI models on its posts.

A Russian court has ruled that Google owes Russian media stations around $20 decillion in fines for blocking their content, and the fines could get bigger.

To put that into perspective, the World Bank estimates global GDP as around $100 trillion, which is peanuts compared to the prospective fine. Google would therefore have to find more money than exists on Earth to pay Moscow - but on Tuesday fell a little short of that mark when it posted $88 billion quarterly revenue.

The bizarre amount has been calculated after a four-year court case that started after YouTube banned the ultra-nationalist Russian channel Tsargrad in 2020 in response to the US sanctions imposed against its owner.

The court imposed a fine of 100 thousand rubles ($1,025) per day, with the total fine doubling every week. Owing to compound interest, Google is now on the hook for an insane amount of money, or what the judge on Monday called “a case in which there are many, many zeros.”

i feel like Goku would do well with the younger demographics but they would be outnumbered by the boomers and gen Xers who would vote for Superman

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-introduces-new-imac-supercharged-by-m4-and-apple-intelligence/

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nt1Nw4wT6I7VlzNknxTiIz3hfED0ttO8Q

Since The Office ended, Brian Baumgartner—who played the show’s subdued, perfunctory "Kevin Malone"—has made a second career for himself as one of the top earners on Cameo, the website that allows celebrities to leave personalized messages for fans. A report in 2021 claimed that Baumgartner had made over a million dollars through Cameo videos alone.

However, it would appear that, in one case, Baumgartner’s friendly online videos accidentally contributed to an aggressive disinformation campaign aimed at toppling the current president of Moldova. A new report from Wired claims that Baumgartner was one of a number of celebrities who recently made a Cameo video decrying the President Maia Sandu. "We, Hollywood stars, support the people of Moldova in their desire to overthrow you, Sandu," the actors said. That video was subsequently tied into what has been described as a "tide of disinformation unprecedented in complexity and aggression" aimed at the tiny eastern European nation.