In an effort to make the app cool again, the company is paying influencers $1 billion to use the site.

Facebook has announced plans to pay influencers $1 billion to use its products. The programme will run until the end of 2022 in an effort to revive the platform, which is now mostly known for misleading political conspiracies, photos of your mum’s garden, and seeing that everyone from high school is getting married before you.

According to billionaire and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the programme will allocate bits of the money to all kinds of influencers – incentivising the use of specific Facebook and Instagram features and setting milestones for creators to reach.

For now, the invitation-only programme seems to focus on users regularly live-streaming in exchange for payment, although any posts, videos, images, etc. are encouraged to draw influencers and users back to the app.

Further, the FB creator said he wants to “build the best platform for millions of creators to make a living”. However, as Gen-Z-centred apps like TikTok continue to grow in popularity, OG platforms like Facebook seem to fall behind in their cultural relevance…read more

An unopened copy of Nintendo’s Super Mario 64 has sold at auction for $1.56 million.

Heritage Auctions in Dallas said that the 1996 game sold Sunday, breaking its previous record price for the sale of a single video game.

A spokesman did not immediately respond to an inquiry about who purchased the game.

Super Mario 64 was the best-selling game on the Nintendo 64 and the first to feature the Mario character in 3D, the auction house said in a statement.

The sale follows an unopened copy of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda selling at auction Friday for $870,000. Valarie McLeckie, Heritage’s video game specialist, said the auction house was shocked to see a game sell for more than a $1 million two days after the Zelda game broke its past record.

In April, the auction house sold an unopened copy of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. that was bought in 1986 and forgotten about in a desk drawer for $660,000…read more.

It’s no secret that tech giants have exploded in value over the last few years, but the scale can be hard to comprehend.

Through wide-scaling market penetration, smart diversification, and the transformation of products into services, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have reached market capitalizations well above $1.5 trillion.

To help us better understand these staggering numbers, a recent study at Mackeeper took the market capitalization of multiple tech giants and compared them with the annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of countries. Click to see full article.

Just when it feels like we’re shaking off the stigma and are edging closer to federal legalization and social acceptance of cannabis, one of the world’s most powerful social media sites bans a weed-related online magazine.

Facebook-owned (NASDAQ: FB) Instagram recently and without explanation shut down Cannabis Culture Magazine’s account on June 28th, reported Cannabis Culture.

Why? The magazine’s editors seem not to have a clue.

The last posting published on Cannabis Culture before getting tossed off Instagram was a screenshot of an article about Rhode Island cannabis workers calling for a one-day strike on June 26 in support of unionized workers at the Greenleaf Compassionate Care Center.

As it turns out, the magazine’s page was unceremoniously removed within an hour of this posting “without warning or notice as to any violation of community guidelines.”

Although Cannabis Culture recognized the possibility of coincidence in timing, it pointed out that it was left with no explanation or means to contact or appeal to Instagram in order to find one.

“Thus far, all attempts to reestablish the page have proven fruitless,” the Canadian-based Cannabis Culture wrote.

Because of new rules enforced by Facebook, the magazine is being prevented from creating a new account with the word “cannabis” as part of the username, the report went on. “We have no way of knowing the reason for the ban, because Instagram will not provide us with the reason we’ve been banned. We have no means of recourse or appeal.”…read more.

“BookTok” has sent old books back to the top of bestseller lists and helped launch the careers of new authors. Videos with the BookTok hashtag have been viewed a collective 12.6 billion times.

Author Adam Silvera four years ago released the young adult science fiction novel “They Both Die at the End,” which found success and landed a few weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

But years later in August 2020, Silvera said his publisher noticed a significant sales bump, the start of a trend that would send the book to the top of the New York Times’ young adult paperback monthly bestseller list in April, where it still reigns. Silvera had no idea where the sales spike was coming from.

“I kept commenting to my readers, ‘Hey, don’t know what’s happening, but there’s been a surge in sales lately, so grateful that everybody’s finding the story years later,’” Silvera said. “And then that’s when a reader was like, ‘I’m seeing it on BookTok.’ And I had no idea what they were talking about.”

“BookTok” is a community of users on TikTok who post videos reviewing and recommending books, which has boomed in popularity over the past year. TikTok videos containing the hashtag #TheyBothDieAtTheEnd have collectively amassed more than 37 million views to date, many of which feature users reacting — and often crying — to the book’s emotional ending.

BookTok’s impact on the book industry has been notable, helping new authors launch their careers and propelling books like Silvera’s to the top of bestseller lists years after their original publication. Madeline Miller’s “The Song of Achilles,” E. Lockhart’s “We Were Liars” and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” — all of which were published before BookTok began to dominate the industry — are among some of the other books that have found popularity on the app years after their initial release.

Retailers like Barnes & Noble have taken advantage of BookTok’s popularity to market titles popular on the app to customers by creating specialized shelves featuring books that have gone viral…read more.