Daily Crunch: Facebook makes a big bet in India – TechCrunch

Facebook makes a $5.7 billion investment in Reliance Jio, Netflix’s latest quarter was even better than expected and Patreon lays off 30 employees. As China’s fast-growing ByteDance (owner of TikTok) emerges as a formidable competitor in what has become the world’s second largest internet market, Facebook has found the horse it wants to bet on in the new decade. Facebook said it will focus on collaborating with Jio to create “new ways for people and businesses to operate more effectively in the growing digital economy.” Before the COVID-19 crisis, Netflix had forecast 7 million net new paid subscribers for its Q1 earnings. With the dramatically changed landscape, growth was obviously going to beat the forecast, but the quarter came in at more than double expectations, with 15.77 million paid net additions. At the same time, the company said it saw patrons exiting the platform more than usual due to financial hardships. Another interesting tidbit from the earnings release was the 35% year-over-year growth in daily time spent watching content in Discover. An entrepreneur writes in to lawyer Sophie Alcorn asking how to support an immigrant co-founder and employee as they wind down their startup. The focal point of the new legislation is the $310 billion it will allocate to the Paycheck Protection Program. When Fortnite launched on mobile in 2018, Epic Games very notably sidestepped the Google Play Store and pushed users to download the title directly from their website, an effort made to avoid the substantial revenue cuts that Google takes from in-app purchases of Play Store downloads.