Your commercial news round-up: YouTube, WHSmith, Oracle Red Bull, anti-trust fines
updated on 17 February 2022
Reading time: three minutes
Commercial awareness is a vital skill for aspiring lawyers and being commercially aware allows you to think of new ideas and see things from a business perspective when reading news. With sound commercial awareness, you can develop your knowledge of industries through notable trends and patterns and spot business opportunities. So, without further ado, let’s dive into this week’s commercial news round-up.
- Who’s the latest money-making machine in town? It’s YouTube. The video streaming platform made an impressive $8.63 billion from advertising in quarter four last year. It generated average monthly revenues of $2.87 billion from adverts in this quarter – that’s $93.8 million per day. YouTube even beat its streaming rival, Netflix which achieved only $7.71 billion in the same period. Who suddenly has the urge to start a YouTube channel?
- WHSmith has launched its first ‘Just Walk Out’ store in New York City’s LaGuardia airport, after months of planning. The store, which is in the airport’s new Terminal B, allows customer to scan a QR code, pick up their goods and leave the store without visiting a till. The use of camera and sensors in the store can detect when items have been removed from a shelve and by who in order to charge the correct number of items once a customer has exited the store. Since the pandemic, there’s been a trend of retailers using digital transformation and technology to improve customer experience by making it more convenient to shop. Two weeks ago, we reported Amazon’s plans to open its first clothing store in a Southern California mall, plus three new Amazon Fresh branches in Chingford, Euston and Wandsworth.
- In racing news, Oracle Red Bull, the Formula 1 (F1) team, has signed a £111 million sponsorship deal with Bybit, a cryptocurrency exchange. The three-year contract is a world record sponsorship deal that will accelerate the success of F1 drivers this year and pave the way for more cryptocurrency and blockchain technology partnerships in the sports sector. Christian Horner, the team principal and chief executive, said: “It’s fitting too that, as we enter a new generation of competition of F1 in 2022, with an advanced and potentially game-changing new philosophy of cars taking to the track, that Bybit also exist at the cutting edge of technology.”
- The Dutch antitrust watchdog slapped Apple with another hefty anti-trust fine. The Authority of Consumers and Market (ACM) fined the tech giant £4.2 million for failing to allow software app makers to use non-Apple payment methods to pay for dating apps on the Apple Store. This isn’t the first time Apple has been naughty, in fact, it’s the fourth time the ACM has fined them. It’s certainly not a good year for Apple as they were also sued for £1.5 billion in May 2021 for charging “excessive and unlawful fees” on its App Store. Someone check on Tim Cook and see if he’s okay!
Check the News every Thursday for this weekly commercial news round-up.
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