Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, May 8th

• Candid, Comedic and Macabre YouTube Stars Feel an Advertising Pinch: Tim Wood sat on a chair inside a house in Hinsdale, N.Y., long rumored to be haunted. He had a Ouija board in his lap and was livestreaming the experience to a group of fans on YouTube. “You’re not ever supposed to do Ouija alone, let alone in a place that had an exorcism done in it,” he said to the empty room. As he filmed last month, the comments rolled in, some admiring (“You are one brave ghost hunter”), others fearing for his safety (“Tim, don’t summon what u can’t banish”). Mr. Wood, 39, has amassed a small but loyal following by making online videos of ghost hunts and paranormal activity, using YouTube to broadcast his work since about 2013. Automatically placed advertisements on his channel, LiveScifi, which has about 470,000 subscribers, have allowed him to turn the videos into a full-time job.But in the wake of a recent advertiser exodus from YouTube, prompted by major brands discovering they were showing up on videos promoting hate speech and terrorism, his earnings have plunged. Mr. Wood, who lives in San Francisco with his fiancée and their infant, said his channel had brought in at least $6,000 a month in revenue last year — which helped pay for travel to site locations, the production of his videos and his other day-to-day bills. In January, his estimated revenue was about $3,900. In February and March, he was alarmed to see that drop below $3,000. Last month, he saw around $1,600 and has been using crowdfunding to cover his shooting costs.In February and March, a slew of advertisers yanked their money from the platform, prompting YouTube to tighten its default settings for where ads appear and to offer new ways for brands to manually and automatically avoid material that violates its guidelines. “Rates are a lot lower and hurting a lot of folks,” said Krishna Subramanian, a founder of Captiv8, a firm that connects brands to social media influencers. His firm recently conducted a survey of 100 YouTube creators and said that channels focused on comedy and gaming experienced the sharpest drops in revenue last month compared with February. At the same time, creators in food, beauty and fashion, and family and parenting had increases. YouTube shares ad revenue with creators, who keep more than half. Some creators are “looking at a video saying, ‘It got a million views, but I only got $700 — I used to get $2,500,’” Mr. Subramanian said.

• Buffett Says His IBM Thesis Was Flawed, He Blew It on Google: Warren Buffett, who long shunned investments in technology stocks and then made an ill-fated bet on IBM, said that mistake shouldn’t discourage wagers on the broader industry. “I thought it would do better in the six years that have elapsed than it has,” Buffett said of International Business Machines Corp. Saturday, at the annual meeting of his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. “And Apple, I regard them as being in a quite different business. I think Apple is much more of a consumer-products business” with skill at finding opportunities that are difficult for rivals to duplicate. Apple Inc. has become one of Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire’s largest holdings, valued at about $19.2 billion as of March 31. The billionaire said this week that he cut about a third of his stake in IBM, sending the shares down 2.5 percent Friday. Buffett and Vice Chairman Charles Munger built Berkshire into one of the world’s largest companies with bets on consumer-product companies like Coca-Cola Co. and older industries such as railroads. Munger said Saturday that avoiding Silicon Valley investments made sense for the pair, with some exceptions. “We avoided the tech stocks because we felt we had no advantage there, and other people did. And I think that’s a good idea not to play where the other people are better,” Munger said. “But, you know, if you ask me in retrospect, ‘What was our worst mistakein the tech field?’ I think we were smart enough to figure out Google.” The stock of Alphabet Inc., the parent of Google, has advanced 20 percent this year, and its co-founders became two of the richest people in the world. Buffett said Berkshire’s Geico unit was an early customer of Google, paying the search-engine company when people clicked on the auto insurer’s ads. Given the price that Geico was paying per click, Buffett said, he should have seen the technology company’s promise. “I had plenty of ways to ask questions, or anything of the sort, and educate myself,” Buffett said. “But I blew it.” He also said he missed an opportunity by failing to invest in Amazon.com Inc.