The consolidation of the digital media industry is well and truly underway, with Refinery29, New York Media and PopSugar each being swallowed up in the past few weeks. Those deals have highlighted how much valuations have come down from the highs of recent years—with implications for the companies that remain.

Potentially most affected is BuzzFeed, whose CEO Jonah Peretti had been most ...

Japan is a popular travel destination, but planning visits to lesser-known sights can be hard for foreigners. Online booking isn’t always available on local websites, and information in English can be limited. That’s where Klook, a fast-growing global tourism app, comes in. Its offerings in Japan include tickets for everything from trains to museums to hot ...

When U.S. Attorney General William Barr urged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week to hold off on a plan to bolster encryption of its messaging services, the social networking giant fought back, saying it strongly opposes creating a loophole that would allow government access to users’ communications.

Elsewhere in the tech industry, the silence was striking. Neither Google nor Apple, ...

One of Airbnb’s earliest employees plans to leave his position atop the company’s “Experiences” division that sells travel tours and other activities, putting a spotlight on a division seen as key for Airbnb’s hopes of diversifying into a broader group of travel services than just accommodation, people familiar with the matter said.

Joe Zadeh has been ...

Chinese internet giant Tencent is planning to invest about $500 million in Hillhouse Capital Group’s Chinese drugstore business, in a deal that values the unit at around $2.5 billion, a person familiar with the matter said.

The potential investment would be another sign of how Tencent, which operates the ubiquitous WeChat social messaging app, is pushing into healthcare as it moves beyond ...

Zillow CEO Rich Barton has been around the internet long enough that he can recognize a disruptive technology on the verge of upending a market. 

At Netflix, where Barton has been a board member since 2002, he was present when the company got into video streaming after anticipating the demise of its DVD rental business. Several years later, he watched as Netflix poured money into making ...

Judging by the response to recent stock offerings from consumer tech companies, Postmates will likely face a skeptical reception for its planned IPO. While the on-demand meal delivery service has earned a passionate following in places like Los Angeles, the company is unprofitable at a moment when public investors have soured on money-losing tech ventures. The fact that Postmates is in a war ...

If you bumped into a venture capitalist this week, he or she probably brought up the super-secret confab Benchmark partner Bill Gurley held this week to proselytize the benefits of direct listings. 

Investors, directors and lawyers gathered at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, and, despite the presentation screens going out on Gurley’s talk, more than a dozen attendees told me they ...

Tubi TV, a free ad-supported video streaming service that shows old movies and TV shows, is in talks to raise around $150 million in a new round of funding, according to two people familiar with the plans. If successful, it would be by far the largest round raised by the service and would signal the interest investors have in the ad-supported part of the video streaming market.

Tubi TV is one ...

WeWork co-CEO Artie Minson apologized to employees Thursday for the controversies that have roiled the company in recent weeks and for the layoffs ahead. He said he knows what it is like to lose a job in a corporate restructuring. “Actually, in a very public way—cover of the Wall Street Journal way,” he said, an apparent reference to his 2013 ouster as AOL chief operating ...

Travis Kalanick is trying again in China. The former Uber CEO’s latest startup, kitchen-rental firm CloudKitchens, has quietly acquired six Chinese startups this year as he looks to expand the business into a global leader.

Earlier this year, Kalanick bought a Shanghai-based startup called Jike Alliance, one of the leading players in China’s kitchen-rental market, based on its ...

Facebook’s burgeoning hardware group, its digital currency team and the executives leading Instagram are among the highlights of this updated org chart for the company, which identifies roughly 180 of the most senior people at Facebook.  

The chart—which is based on Facebook’s internal org chart and supplemented by additional reporting by The ...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s claim on Tuesday that Facebook has “bulldozed competition” reflects a view that is driving an antitrust investigation into the social network giant. It’s a little ironic, then, that two of Facebook’s highest-profile rivals, Snap and Twitter, have lately been doing better than they have in a long time.

To be sure, both companies might be much ...

Five years ago, the cryptocurrency startup Blockchain was seen as a rising star within the burgeoning field. Equipped with a conspicuous name and a practical-sounding plan to help consumers store crypto assets, it attracted $70 million in venture capital over several years from prominent funders.

But behind the scenes, the London-based startup has been struggling. Lacking a steady business ...