paid

Yahoo on Monday increased the amount of storage Flickr users get by 70-fold, and at the same time quietly introduced a new pro tier that costs users 20 times as much as the one it replaces.

That plan, dubbed the "Doublr," bumps the 1 terabyte of photo and video storage up to 2 terabytes, and costs $499.99 per year. By Yahoo's calculations, that takes the theoretical limit from 537,731 photos, up to just over 1.07 million full-quality shots. This top of the line program joins a $49.99 per year plan that gets rid … Read more

YouTube on Thursday launched a new service for video content makers that lets them charge users to subscribe to their channels.

What Google calls just a "pilot program" for the time being, lets video makers charge users a monthly fee for access to their videos. The subscription plans start at 99 cents a month, but can be set higher. All paid channels offer a 14-day free trial and can be sold at a discount if users subscribe a year at a time, YouTube said in a post announcing the program.

The service is launching with 53 paid channels … Read more

YouTube is clearly eyeing paid subscriptions, though it won't reveal if such an option has gotten the green light.

Speaking with reporters in Los Angeles yesterday, Robert Kyncl, a YouTube vice president, said that paid subscription channels are "incredibly important" in order to create "additional revenue streams" for content creators, the Wall Street Journal reported today. YouTube has reportedly already been chatting with producers about offering channels that would require a fee.

Possibly debuting as soon as next quarter, the first of such channels would charge users between $1 and $5 a month and initially … Read more

Google has been found to be the financial sweet spot for software engineers this year, according to a new report from jobs and careers site Glassdoor.

Based on salary reports shared over the past 12 months by software engineers at 15 various tech companies to compare average base salaries, Google was found to have the highest average base salary among the top dogs in technology.

Here's a glance at the top five:

Based on more than 5,000 salary reports, Glassdoor cited that the … Read more

Apple and Samsung continue to grab smartphone sales from the rest of the industry.

Collectively, the two companies watched their U.S. sales increase by 43 percent from the second quarter of 2011 to the same quarter of 2012, says a new report from NPD Group. Over the same time, combined sales for other companies, such as HTC, Motorola, and LG, fell by 16 percent.

For the quarter, Apple carved out 31 percent of the smartphone market, while Samsung captured 24 percent. That left HTC with 15 percent, Motorola with 12 percent, and LG with just 6 percent.

"By … Read more

In playing catch up with President Obama's social media savvy, Republican nominee Mitt Romney might have cut some corners. A new report by Barracuda Labs shows that more than 15 percent of Romney's Twitter followers may have come from bogus accounts generated by pay-for-followers services.

"We believe most of these recent followers of Romney are not from a general Twitter population but most likely from a paid Twitter follower service," Barracuda Labs research scientist Jason Ding wrote in the report.

It's important to note, however, that it's not clear if the Romney campaign, an … Read more

News Corp. digital media head Jon Miller is bullish on the odds of his friend Ross Levinsohn becoming the permanent chief executive at Yahoo.

"I would bet that Ross Levinsohn will be the CEO of Yahoo," he said today during an interview at the PaidContent 2012 conference in New York. 

"Ross is as good a person as exists on the planet [to run Yahoo]," he said.

The two were once partners in a venture firm, Velocity Investment Group, which was formed after Levinsohn resigned as president of Fox Interactive Media and Miller left his post … Read more

Having fast 4G access wherever you roam has a particularly sweet and succulent taste all its own. Committing to an onerous monthly contract, though, is a bitter pill to swallow. T-Mobile, with its new prepaid data plans, thinks it has an attractive alternative. … Read more