Recent subscriber data explains just why Blue Apron is exploring mergers and sales. The company’s customers dropped from about 557,000 at the end of 2018 to 351,000 a year later — that’s a drop of nearly 37 percent in the space of a year. Orders dropped by nearly a third, too. And while Blue Apron has been targeting “high affinity” (read: particularly loyal) customers, its average income per customer only climbed slightly. Blue Apron is losing its audience, and those people who are left aren’t big enough fans to make up the difference.

There has been sign of trouble for a while, including a failed public stock offering in 2017 as well as more than one round of layoffs.

The primary cause of Blue Apron’s woes isn’t clear. It does have competition in the meal kit world from Amazon and Walmart, but there may also be a threat from restaurant delivery apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash. Customers might simply be happier to pay for ready-made meals instead of the ingredients for home-cooked food, even if they spend significantly more in the process. Whatever the cause, Blue Apron may have a tough time revitalizing its business if it’s forced to go alone and can’t pinpoint what it’s doing wrong.

After years of wrangling in courts, Facebook has settled a lawsuit over its use of facial recognition. Last year it agreed to stop turning on the tech to scan photos by default, which built a template of your facial data, and automatically suggested tags in photos based on it. During an earnings call on Wednesday afternoon to announce that Q4 profits grew to $7.3 billion giving it a profit of over $18 billion for 2019, CFO David Wehner gave a one-line mention to the fact that they have a settlement in principle to pay $550 million to resolve the suit.

Plaintiffs sued based on the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, arguing that its service did not receive “explicit consent” from users before collecting their data. Asked about the settlement, a spokesperson responded “We decided to pursue a settlement as it was in the best interest of our community and our shareholders to move past this matter.” ACLU attorney Nathan Freed Wessler pointed to the result as an example of what other states should do, saying “this case is a great example of how states can take the lead to protect their residents’ privacy rights despite Congress’ failure to do the same.”

According to one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, Jay Edelson, “Biometrics is one of the two primary battlegrounds, along with geolocation, that will define our privacy rights for the next generation. We are proud of the strong team we had in place that had the resolve to fight this critically important case over the last five years. We hope and expect that other companies will follow Facebook’s lead and pay significant attention to the importance of our biometric information.” The settlement will still need to be approved by a judge.

The good news continued on Wednesday when the company released its Q4 2019 earnings and 2020 financial forecast. Thanks to a quick turnaround in building its Shanghai Gigafactory, which was completed in just 10 months, Tesla can now focus on ramping up production of its new crossover SUV, the Model Y, at its existing production plant in Fremont, California. The Ys, which were expected to begin shipping in Fall of 2020 are now slated for delivery by the end of Q1 instead. The company also announced that it is boosting the range of its $51,000 Model Y AWD variant from 280 miles to 315. Tesla did not note whether the $47,000 long-range version, the AWD or the $60,000 performance version are being built first.

Tesla plans to have a 500,000-unit production capacity of Model 3s and Model Ys at the Fremont plant by year’s end. That makes sense since the 3 and Y share more than 75 percent of their components.

Additionally, the company announced that its solar power business is booming. Tesla 54 MW of solar capacity in Q4, 26 percent more than in the prior quarter. Over the course of 2019, the company rolled out 1.65 GWh of energy storage, more than the previous four years put together.

To back up that claim — and push back against belief that Disney+ and others are already starting to catch up — it posted a Google Trends result showing The Witcher blowing The Mandalorian out of the water over the last few months, a result that holds up even if you add “baby Yoda” searches to the mix. Netflix’s example also included The Morning Show on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime’s Jack Ryan, although neither showed much impact by this metric.

Still, you’ll have to grade that result on a curve, since Netflix also mentioned a change to how it’s gathering those numbers, “Given that we now have titles with widely varying lengths – from short episodes (e.g. Special at around 15 minutes) to long films (e.g. The Highwaymen at 132 minutes), we believe that reporting households viewing a title based on 70 percent of a single episode of a series or of an entire film, which we have been doing, makes less sense.”

“We are now reporting on households (accounts) that chose to watch a given title…The new metric is about 35% higher on average than the prior metric. For example, 45m member households chose to watch Our Planet under the new metric vs. 33m under the prior metric.”

Now, if you watch something for at least two minutes, “long enough to indicate the choice was intentional” then it counts. By that measure, 83 million households opted for the new Michael Bay / Ryan Reynolds flick 6 Underground, 73 million have “chosen to watch” The Crown throughout its run, and Netflix estimates its thriller You will have 54 million views in its first four weeks. Of course, the stat doesn’t really tell us how many people stuck around for more than twenty minutes or dozed off after a single episode, but they will likely look better than the old numbers. They also give Netflix something it can show to stars (and their agents) who are considering a role in one of its productions, instead of its old strategy of never discussing numbers at all.

Numbers that aren’t open for interpretation are its subscriber count — it has more than 167 million paid memberships around the globe, up 28 million from last year and its net income is up by more than 50 percent.

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