Business
College Athletes Announce a Flurry of Sponsorships Now That They Can Profit Off Their Name, Image, and Likeness
Published
11 months agoon
By
Cory Ray
Some athletes even announced their own ventures, including Marshall University offensive lineman Will Ulmer, who can now book live music gigs under his own name.
Deals, Deals, Deals
Thursday marked the first day that college athletes were allowed to begin profiting off of their name, image, and likeness (NIL), and many students wasted no time securing sponsorships.
One of the most common sponsorships seen Thursday was with the video game platform Yoke, which allows gamers to play “face-to-face with [their] favorite athletes,” according to the company’s website. Yoke sponsorship deals were reached with at least five players for Alabama Crimson Tide football, at least two players for Michigan Wolverines football, and at least 11 players for Auburn Tigers football.
In another interesting announcement, Arkansas receiver Trey Knox unveiled a partnership with PetSmart that will feature his husky, Blue.
We’re so excited to be partnering with Arkansas wide receiver, Trey Knox. We’d do anything for pets and Trey would do anything for his pup, Blue. @Fbu1Tk #AnythingforPets pic.twitter.com/TZztDfqNpA
— PetSmart (@PetSmart) July 1, 2021
Football players were far from the only athletes announcing deals.
Fresno State women’s basketball players and sisters Haley and Hanna Cavinder, who have millions of TikTok followers, announced two deals: one with the wireless carrier Boost Mobile and another with the nutrition company Six Star.
Some Athletes Are Launching Their Own Revenue Streams
Many athletes also announced their own ventures.
In addition to partnering with a fireworks store in Iowa, Hawkeyes basketball guard and major NIL proponent Jordan Bohannon launched his own t-shirt line.
Just under 3 hours until the official launch of the first J3O shirt!!! Website goes live at midnight🙌🏼 #GoHawks pic.twitter.com/Bv2OKsKkfJ
— Jordan Bohannon (@JordanBo_3) July 1, 2021
Some athletes, including Texas running back Bijan Robinson, also announced their debut to Cameo, where customers can request personalized videos from stars.
Notably, two quarterbacks — McKenzie Milton of Florida State and D’Eriq King of the University of Miami — jointly launched a platform called Dreamfield that is meant to help other college athletes find opportunities for booking live events.
Miami QB D'Eriq King, Florida State QB McKenzie Milton team up to assist athletes with new NIL ruleshttps://t.co/vZ9jQSiUxS
— Barrett Sallee (@BarrettSallee) July 1, 2021
In perhaps an even more unique route, Marshall University offensive lineman Will Ulmer will now be able to book live music gigs under his own name. Previously, Ulmer went by the alias “Lucky Bill” since National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules were broad enough that he could have potentially been penalized had his music career been tied back to his athletic career.
Now that the NCAA will allow it, I will be playing live shows this year as Will Ulmer!! I am open to all venues and business opportunities!! DM if interested, let’s make some music🎶 pic.twitter.com/iniLdoz2ye
— Will Ulmer 𓅓 (@UlmerWill) July 1, 2021
This is just a small taste of the announcements made by college athletes Thursday. Among others, Electronic Arts told Axios that it is now exploring the “possibility of including players” in a college football video game series that it initially pulled in 2014 over NIL disputes.
NCAA Allows Players to Profit Off NIL
The reason college athletes are now able to profit off their NIL as of Thursday is because of an interim policy approved by the NCAA Division I Board of Governors on Wednesday.
Prior to implementing the policy, the NCAA had long faced calls to allow players to profit off their NIL, considering schools were making billions off of these athletes.
Ultimately, the NCAA only conceded after multiple states passed college NIL laws that were set to go into effect on July 1. As of Thursday, those laws are now live in Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas.
Meanwhile, similar legislation in Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Tennessee has passed but is not yet in effect. While Missouri’s Congress has passed a student athlete NIL law, it’s still awaiting a signature from Gov. Mike Parson (R).
Thirteen other states have introduced bills seeking to implement NIL laws, and only 10 have not proposed any sort of legislation.
With different rules for different states set to take effect, the Division I Council finally agreed to reverse its NIL ban so that schools in states with NIL protections don’t gain an advantage in recruiting athletes over schools in states that don’t have NIL protections.
That said, individual schools will be given the power to “adopt their own policies,” but doing so could mean that they lose out on recruiting more sought-after students.
See what others are saying: (CBS News) (Axios) (ESPN)

Business
Uber Forks Over $19 Million in Fine for Misleading Australian Riders
Published
4 weeks agoon
April 26, 2022By
Chris Tolve
The penalty is just the latest in a string of lawsuits going back years.
Uber Gets Fined
Uber has agreed to pay a $19 million fine after being sued by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for making false or misleading statements in its app.
The first offense stems from a company policy that allows users to cancel their ride at no cost up to five minutes after the driver has accepted the trip. Despite the terms, between at least December 2017 and September 2021, over two million Australians who wanted to cancel their ride were nevertheless warned that they may be charged a small fee for doing so.
Uber said in a statement that almost all of those users decided to cancel their trips despite the warnings.
The cancellation message has since been changed to: “You won’t be charged a cancellation fee.”
The second offense, occurring between June 2018 and August 2020, involved the company showing customers in Sydney inflated estimates of taxi fares on the app.
The commission said that Uber did not ensure the algorithm used to calculate the prices was accurate, leading to actual fares almost always being higher than estimated ones.
The taxi fare feature was removed in August 2020.
A Troubled Legal History
Uber has been sued for misleading its users or unfairly charging customers in the past.
In 2016, the company paid California-based prosecutors up to $25 million for misleading riders about the safety of its service.
An investigation at the time found that at least 25 of Uber’s approved drivers had serious criminal convictions including identity theft, burglary, child sex offenses and even one murder charge, despite background checks.
In 2017, the company also settled a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for $20 million after it misled drivers about how much money they could earn.
In November 2021, the Justice Department sued the company for allegedly charging disabled customers a wait-time fee even though they needed more time to get in the car, then refused to refund them.
Later the same month, a class-action lawsuit in New York alleged that Uber charged riders a final price higher than the upfront price listed when they ordered the ride.
See what others are saying: (ABC) (NASDAQ) (Los Angeles Times)
Business
Report Finds That Instagram Promotes Pro-Eating Disorder Content to 20 Million Users, Including Children
Published
1 month agoon
April 14, 2022
According to the study, even users hoping to recover were given eating disorder content because they were “still in Instagram’s algorithmically curated bubble.”
Instagram Promotes Eating Disorder Content
Instagram promotes pro-eating disorder content to millions of its users, including children as young as nine-years-old, according to a Thursday report from the child advocacy non-profit group Fairplay.
The report, titled “Designing for Disorder: Instagram’s Pro-eating Disorder Bubble,” studied what it called an eating disorder “bubble,” which consisted of nearly 90,000 accounts that reached 20 million unique users. The average age of the bubble was 19, but researchers found users aged nine- and 10-years-old that followed three or more of these accounts. Roughly one-third of those in the bubble were underage.
According to Fairplay, Instagram’s parent company Meta derives $2 million in revenue a year from the bubble and another $228 million from those who follow it.
“In addition to being profitable, this bubble is also undeniably harmful,” the report said. “Algorithms are profiling children and teens to serve them images, memes and videos encouraging restrictive diets and extreme weight loss.”
“Meta’s pro-eating disorder bubble is not an isolated incident nor an awful accident,” it continued. “Rather it is an example of how, without appropriate checks and balances, Meta systematically puts profit ahead of young people’s safety and wellbeing.”
Researchers identified the bubble by first looking at 153 seed accounts with over 1,000 followers that posted content celebrating eating disorders. Some used phrases like “thinspiration” or other slang terms like “ana” and “mia” to refer to specific eating disorders. Others included an underweight body mass index in their bios.
Those seed accounts alone had roughly 2.3 million collective followers, 1.6 million of which were unique. Of those unique users, researchers looked at how many seed accounts each followed to determine that nearly 90,000 accounts were part of the eating disorder bubble. Those accounts totaled over 28 million followers, 20 million of which were unique.
These pages posted content ranging from memes and photos of extreme thinness to screenshots of progress on calorie counting apps. One user said they were on their third day of eating just 300 calories.
Others, including children under the age of 13, put their current weights and goal weights in their account bios. Some wrote that they “hate food” or were “starving for perfection.”
Content’s Impact on Children
Fairplay claimed that many of those in the bubble wanted to recover but were essentially trapped in Instagram’s algorithm.
“Many of the biographies of users in the bubble talk about wanting to or being in recovery, wanting to get ‘better’, to ‘heal’ or being aware of how unwell they were,” the report said. “However, these users are still in Instagram’s algorithmically curated bubble. They will still be feeding content from other accounts in the bubble, including the seed accounts, that normalizes, glamorizes or promotes eating disorders.”
The report also showcased the firsthand account of a 17-year-old eating disorder survivor and activist identified as Kelsey. Kelsey wrote that it was impossible to “imagine a time when the app didn’t have the sort of content that promotes disordered eating behavior.”
“I felt like my feed was always pushed towards this sort of content from the moment I opened my account,” Kelsey continued.
“That type of content at one point even got so normalized that prominent figures such as the Kardashians and other female and male influencers were openly promoting weight loss supplements and diet suppressors in order to help lose weight.”
Kelsey said Instagram delivered that content without any relevant searches, but posts about body positivity needed to be actively sought out.
The report concluded by arguing that there needs to be legislation that regulates platforms like Instagram by requiring them to prioritize user safety, particularly for children.
Meta and Instagram have long been accused of disregarding child safety. Last year, a whistleblower unveiled documents that revealed the company knew of the harm it posed to young people, specifically regarding body image. A Meta spokesperson told The Hill that they were unable to address the most recent allegations in Fairplay’s report.
“We’re not able to fully address this report because the authors declined to share it with us, but reports like this often misunderstand that completely removing content related to peoples’ journeys with or recovery from eating disorders can exacerbate difficult moments and cut people off from community,” the spokesperson said.
See what others are saying: (The Hill) (CNet)
Business
Etsy Sellers Strike Amid Increased Transaction Fees and Mandatory Offsite Advertising
Published
1 month agoon
April 11, 2022
“What began as an experiment in marketplace democracy has come to resemble a dictatorial relationship between a faceless tech empire and millions of exploited, majority-women craftspeople,” an Etsy seller wrote in a petition.
Thousands of Etsy Sellers Shut Down Shops
Roughly 15,000 Etsy sellers are closing up their online shops starting Monday in protest of several grievances they have with the platform, including a new fee increase.
Starting on Monday, transaction fees are getting boosted from 5% to 6.5% on the platform. CEO Josh Silverman sent a memo claiming that this hike will allow the company to “make significant investments in marketing, seller tools, and creating a world-class customer experience,” but sellers have been frustrated by the change.
“Etsy’s last fee increase was in July 2018. If this new one goes through, our basic fees to use the platform will have more than doubled in less than four years,” seller Kristi Cassidy wrote in a petition calling for a strike. As of Monday morning, over 50,000 Etsy sellers, customers, and employees had signed the petition.
“These basic fees do not include additional fees for Offsite ads – which started during the first wave of the pandemic,” Cassidy continued.
Offsite ads allow Etsy to advertise sellers’ products on other websites like Google. Sellers who make over $10,000 a year reportedly have no way of opting out of the program and Etsy takes at least 12% of sales generated through the promotions.
“Etsy fees are an unpredictable expense that can take more than 20% of each transaction,” Cassidy wrote. “We have no control over how these ads are administered, or how much of our money is spent.”
Etsy became a pandemic success story as online shopping rose amid lockdowns. Many turned to the platform to purchase masks and other goods, prompting its stock, sales, and number of sellers to rise.
“It’s really obnoxious to tell us sellers, ‘Hey, we made record profits last year and we’re gonna celebrate by raising your fees a whole bunch,’” Bella Stander, a maps and guidebooks publisher who sells on Etsy, told the Wall Street Journal.
What Etsy Sellers Are Demanding
Currently, there are over five million sellers on Etsy. Cassidy hopes that if enough of them unite, the company will have to respond.
“As individual crafters, makers and small businesspeople, we may be easy for a giant corporation like Etsy to take advantage of,” she wrote. “But as an organized front of people, determined to use our diverse skills and boundless creativity to win ourselves a fairer deal, Etsy won’t have such an easy time shoving us around.”
In the petition’s list of demands, it asks that Etsy cancel the transaction fee increase, allow sellers to opt out of offsite ads, and provide a transparent plan to crack down on resellers who take up space on the platform.
It also demanded that Etsy end its “Star Seller Program,” which impacts how sellers can interact with their buyers.
“Etsy was founded with a vision of ‘keeping commerce human’ by ‘democratizing access to entrepreneurship.’ As a result, people who have been marginalized in traditional retail economies — women, people of color, LGBTQ people, neurodivergent people, etc. — make up a significant proportion of Etsy’s sellers,” Cassidy wrote.
“But as Etsy has strayed further and further from its founding vision over the years, what began as an experiment in marketplace democracy has come to resemble a dictatorial relationship between a faceless tech empire and millions of exploited, majority-women craftspeople.”
In a statement to Yahoo Finance, an Etsy spokesperson claimed that sellers were the company’s “top priority.”
“We are always receptive to seller feedback and, in fact, the new fee structure will enable us to increase our investments in areas outlined in the petition, including marketing, customer support, and removing listings that don’t meet our policies,” the spokesperson said. “We are committed to providing great value for our 5.3 million sellers so they are able to grow their businesses while keeping Etsy a beloved, trusted, and thriving marketplace.”
The strike was a trending topic on Twitter Monday morning. Many sellers took to the social media site to pledge their support to the movement.
I will be joining my fellow small business owners in the strike against Etsy and will be temporarily closing my shop this upcoming week.
— Star★Salts (@starsalts) April 10, 2022
Etsy had seen record profits and yet continues to punish the artists that have helped built it. The corporate greed must end. #EtsyStrike pic.twitter.com/Iek4VhHWrO
So ya my Etsy is closed because of the #EtsyStrike but if anyone has an inkling they are more than free to check out my online store at https://t.co/4KLdXRv53a shares appreciated! pic.twitter.com/rTOoH4eB7V
— ✨️ Kate 🌟 Star Catcher Studio 🌟 (@starcatcher_art) April 11, 2022
‼️ My Etsy is now closed until the 18th. ‼️
— Lux! 👻 (@LuxrisArt) April 11, 2022
Please try not to shop on Etsy this week as a way to stand with creators like myself! ✊
Outstanding orders from the weekend will be posted out this week. If you have any questions please feel free to DM me. Thank you! #EtsyStrike pic.twitter.com/ike6Dqsldu
Many sellers are urging buyers to refrain from using the site for the remainder of the week, which is how long the protest is currently scheduled to last.
See what others are saying: (The Wall Street Journal) (Yahoo Finance) (TechCrunch)

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