YouTube accounted for about 6% of Google’s overall sales last year, but the video website doesn’t produce a profit—despite
a billion monthly users. Those figures reflect YouTube’s struggles to
expand its core audience beyond teens and tweens, who treat the site as a
video repository to be accessed from links or embedded video players
posted elsewhere, rather than visiting YouTube.com daily. That is a
problem facing Susan Wojcicki as she begins a potentially tough second
year running YouTube.
Islamic State’s ability to
lure thousands of Westerners is unprecedented in modern history, and may
be its scariest success. It is especially disturbing because the bulk
of these women and men flocking to Syria
are relative newcomers to Islamic observance—a sign the murderous group
is gaining appeal well beyond its ultraconservative roots.
British bank Standard
Chartered has named Bill Winters as its next chief executive, making him
the latest former deputy to J.P. Morgan CEO James Dimon to land the top
job at a major financial firm. Other former J.P. Morgan executives now
run Visa, First Data and PNC. For Mr. Dimon, leader of the largest U.S.
bank by assets, his firm’s emergence as a top breeding ground
is both a blessing and a curse, highlighting his firm’s ability to
develop talent as well as the uncertainty surrounding J.P. Morgan’s
succession plan.
If Jamie is going to
aspire to be the best global bank in the universe, he’s going to lose
good people, and he has lost good people.
Switzerland’s decision last
month to lift the cap on the franc sent the currency flying and roiled
financial markets world-wide. But for many in the Swiss borderlands, the
decision hit painfully close to home.
In Campione d’Italia, a tiny piece of Italian territory within
Switzerland’s borders, some people are paid in euros but pay most of
their expenses in francs. So the surge in the franc took a drastic toll
on family budgets.
Saturday’s release of Warren
Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders will mark 50 years since he sent
his first. As the 84-year-old billionaire’s returns have swelled, so
have the numbers of people laying claim to his name.
The phrase “the Warren Buffett of” has appeared 450 times in news
reports since 2005. There is a Warren Buffett of gambling, wine, Irish
property, fishing, barges and jewelry merchandising.
