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Volotea begins to charge extra due to the rise in oil prices on its flights. 97% of passengers have agreed to pay it

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More and more airlines are already taking measures to contain the energy chaos that has arisen as a result of the conflict in the Middle East. Although many of them have chosen to cancel a good number of flightsothers have chosen to make their tickets more expensive. One of them has been Volotea. And the Spanish airline has launched a price adjustment policy linked at the cost of fuel which can make the ticket already purchased more expensive up to a week before flying. Crisis in the Middle East. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuzthrough which it passes about 40% of oil consumed by European airlines, has skyrocketed the price of fuel and forced the sector to look for ways to avoid absorbing the blow on their own. Volotea has been the first Spanish airline to transfer this cost to the passenger explicitly and with its own mechanism. What exactly has he done. Since March 16, Volotea has applied what it calls the Fair Travel Promise: seven days before the departure of each flight, the airline consults the market price of fuel in public sources and, if it has increased compared to the time of the reservation, charges the passenger a supplement of up to 14 euros per person per trip. According to they count From 20 Minutes, most surcharges are between 7 and 10 euros. And the adjustment can also work the other way around: if the price of fuel drops, the company returns the difference. What options does the passenger have? The traveler who receives the surcharge notice has a period of 48 hours to decide what to do. You can pay the supplement and continue with your plans, request a full refund of the ticket, or take advantage of the time offered by the airline to modify or cancel the reservation for free up to four hours before takeoff. The company ensures that its customers are aware of this policy before booking, since they must accept it at the time of purchase. The numbers that Volotea manages. According to data from the airline itself, 97% of affected passengers have chosen to pay and keep their trip. The company interprets that percentage as a sign that the measure “is aligned with customer expectations,” in its own words. In addition, it has canceled a small percentage of flights due to higher fuel prices, although it assures that it affects less than 1% of its total schedule. Countermeasures. Not all airlines are acting the same. According to Expansioncompanies such as Air France-KLM, Qantas or Cathay Pacific already apply fuel supplements, while IAG (the group that owns Iberia and British Airways) or Ryanair do not do so at the moment. Groups such as Lufthansa or Ryanair itself have asked the European Union to study a joint purchasing model for kerosene, similar to the one that was launched with gas after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why can it go further? If the Strait of Hormuz blockade is prolonged, pressure on fuel prices could intensify. The Airports Council International (ACI Europe) and Ryanair already have warned that the problem of cancellations in the industry could worsen if supply suffers. Spain has some margin thanks to its national refining capacity (almost 9.9 million tons of kerosene per year, according to share El Mundo), but it is not a structural solution. Volotea has moved in a different way, and now we wonder if more airlines will join this strategy. Cover image | Dylan Agbagni (Wikipedia) In Xataka | Airlines are becoming more imaginative to save costs: Lufthansa is going to clean economy class less

A streamer shared out-of-print movies. Now Enrique Cerezo wants him to go to prison for two years and pay 870,000 euros

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In October 2021, five riot police equipped with shields, tactical shotguns and a battering ram burst into the home of a YouTuber from Burgos known as “El Feo”. They were not looking for weapons, drugs or criminals who had committed blood crimes, but hard drives with movies. Films out of circulation, that no one offered almost anywhere on the Internet and whose exploitation rights remained in legal limbo until that moment. David against Goliath. With that assault, the judicial process begins, which culminated on April 9 with the trial in Burgos against El Feo, the nickname of the person responsible for the YouTube channel. The Cursed and the now closed Zoowoman website. The private prosecution, headed by EGEDA (the entity for managing the rights of audiovisual producers that Enrique Cerezo has chaired since 1998), requests two and a half years in prison and compensation that the parties estimate between 850,000 and 870,000 euros. No profit motive. Zoowoman was a platform without advertising, subscription or any type of business model. Its purpose was to rescue and make available to the public out-of-print audiovisual works, films whose production companies had disappeared or that had erratic or zero commercial distribution. Zoowoman functioned as a collective repository of links: the community’s own users shared access to films hosted on external servers such as MEGA or archive.org, without the files residing on the web. Sister website. La Filmoteca Maldita, the associated YouTube channel that is currently still active, functions as an archive of essays that provide historical context and cultural readings of genre and cult cinema. It includes nearly 4,000 film analyzes (according to data provided by El Feo’s defense), which is pertinent when approaching its intentions as a cultural disseminator, rather than as a mere exploiter. Several of these videos, as well as the often unfindable films that resided in Zoowoman, have been used as teaching material in universities such as UNAM, the University of Buenos Aires or the University of Medellín, as Feo himself states in a video where he explains his case. The legal argument. The prosecution cannot claim direct profit from El Feo because Zoowoman did not generate income, so it relies on the reform of the Penal Code of 2015which expanded the definition of piracy to include “indirect economic benefit.” Under this interpretation, offering free movies can be considered a “hook” to attract followers to the main channel and reinforce the reputation of the creator and generate income through other means, which would constitute criminally relevant profit even if there is no money involved. The police investigation estimated the alleged indirect profit obtained in this way at around 12,000 euros. The defendant defended himself by explaining that this amount is equivalent to his total income as streamer during its first four years of activity, and that the messages that the agents interpreted as codes from a piracy network were donations from its community (“for your birthday”, “so that you can have a drink”), consistent with the crowdfunding model of any independent creator. In January 2025, before the trial was to take place, the prosecution tried to reach an agreement: if he pleaded guilty and paid 100,000 euros, the sentence would be reduced to one year in prison. El Feo rejected him. Who sues? Enrique Cerezo, apart from presiding over the plaintiff entity, is the owner of Video Mercury Films, the distributor that controls between 70 and 80% of all Spanish cinema, with a catalog of more than 7,000 titles. He is also the president of Atlético de Madrid and the promoter of FlixOléthe platform streaming launched in 2020 with the intention of disseminating Spanish cinema from all eras, much of it out of print or not seen for decades. The complaint that ended the 2021 raid occurred shortly after the launch of FlixOlé, whose catalog largely coincided with that distributed by Zoowoman. The logic, described by the accused himself, is that Zoowoman offered for free what the new platform charged in a subscription. Cerezo has not made public statements about the case. EGEDA acts as a private prosecutor on behalf of the producers whose rights it manages, which includes films in the Video Mercury catalogue. This is not the first time that EGEDA has embarked on complaints of this type: in 2017 it denounced WebTV device distributors and in 2022, to 17 websites that they spread content without permissionamong which was Zoowoman. Beyond the trial. If the thesis of indirect profit prospers, any free cultural dissemination channel that builds an audience could potentially be prosecuted under the same legal umbrella. There are international precedents that point in the same direction. In the United States, the case of Hachette against Internet Archive, resolved in 2024 with a defeat of the digital archive, demonstrated that courts tend to prioritize the rights of the owner over arguments of cultural access, even when the model is non-profit. The legal question. Spain has a regime for orphan works (transposed from a European directive in 2014 and developed by Royal Decree in 2016) but its use is reserved exclusively for public cultural institutions such as museums, libraries or film libraries. An individual or an independent digital creator cannot rely on it, which leaves precisely the type of initiative that Zoowoman represents without legal coverage and which is called into question from the very moment Cerezo creates FlixOlé so that these films are no longer inaccessible. Image | House of America In Xataka | AI has been built by plundering the content of the Internet. Now there are people who want to charge for allowing it

that talent has to pay to work

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Japan needs foreign workers. The really need and urgently. But its hiring system for foreigners experiences a curious paradox: the country needs these foreigners, but charges them a fortune and places innumerable obstacles for them to go to work. Well, to be exact, it’s not actually the government that charges them to work, but a network of intermediary agencies in recruitment who take a good commission before the worker even sets foot on Japanese soil. According to the second edition of the survey on foreign workers in Japan85% of foreign workers who arrive in Japan do so through some type of intermediary. The majority pays a bill for this service that can exceed 6,000 euros. Import workers due to low birth rate. According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfarethe number of foreign workers in the country reached 2.57 million at the end of 2025, 11.7% more than the previous year, and the thirteenth all-time record consecutive. That is, in 2025, that figure was almost three times higher than that recorded a decade earlier. The manufacturing industry accounts for 24.7% of the total foreign employees, followed by the services sector with 15.2% and wholesale and retail trade with 13.3%. By city, Tokyo, Aichi and Osaka host more than 43% of all these workers. These data show that there are entire sectors that cannot fill the majority of their vacancies with local workers and need this foreign workforce to fill them. They pay to go to work in Japan. According to the data collected According to the Japanese Ministry of Labor, the vast majority of these workers arrive through a recruitment agency at origin that charges them a fee of between 200,000 and 400,000 yen (the equivalent of between 1,200 and 2,400 euros), while 13.2% of foreigners paid up to 6,000 euros just to have the opportunity to go to work in Japan. Of the 10.9% of workers who reported having had labor disputes in Japan, 18.6% indicated that the cost of agencies was excessive, and 14.9% admitted not having known who to turn to when difficulties arose. Meanwhile, 69% of companies cited labor shortages as the main reason for hiring foreign staff, up from 64.8% a year earlier. The end of the system that allowed it. Much of this friction has its origin in how the Japanese immigration system itself was designed. For more than thirty years, the Technical Internship Program (TITP), launched in 1993 with the stated objective of training workers from developing countries. In practicethis program functioned as a way to obtain cheap labor that, once in the country, had very little capacity for maneuver, denouncing marathon days, salary failures and the impossibility of freely changing sectors or jobs. In June 2024, the Japanese Parliament approved its replacement by the system Ikusei Shuro Seidowith entry into force scheduled for June 2027. For the first time, the Japanese government officially recognizes that the goal of the new program It is to train and retain foreign labor to cover the talent shortage, something that the previous regulations did not allow. Unlike the TITP, the new model does allow changing companies within the same sector under certain conditions, and sets a limit on commissions from recruitment agencies equivalent to two months of the worker’s salary. More visas, more sectors, more talent. The Japanese government has opened new entry ways to foreign labor. In March 2024, the Specific Skilled Worker (SSW) visa program incorporated new sectors in which foreigners can work, raising to 17 the total number of sectors covered. Those who arrive with a university degree can benefit from the J-Find visaaimed at graduates from the top 100 universities in the world. This visa allows you to reside up to two years in Japan to look for work or prepare a business project without having to have an employer to guarantee your arrival. Unlike the SSW or the TITP, the J-Find is a commitment that goes beyond filling vacant positions, and what it seeks is to compete for highly qualified talent at a global level and encourage the creation of startups and innovation projects in Japan. Companies also have their share of the problem. In addition to demographic pressurethe companies themselves have spent years unable to fill vacancies with local workers. According to the MHLW survey30% of the establishments declared having difficulties and “linguistic and cultural barriers” with their employees, and “complexity of the procedures to manage their residency status.” That is to say, not only is it a complex bureaucracy for workers, but Japanese companies are also having problems with this hiring system. The reforms underway aim to correct the most problematic points of the system, from agency abuses to the rigidity that tied workers to a single employer. The reforms will not be completed until 2027, so until that time comes, the paradox that Japan is experiencing still the same: a country that urgently needs foreign workers, in which those same workers have to pay a high sum to be able to work. In Xataka | Japan is being the canary in the mine of the labor market in Spain: reversible retirement is the proof Image | Unsplash (Il Vagabiondo)

that you pay to make friends

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Never before have we been so connected and, at the same time, so isolated. Loneliness is one of the big problems that we face as a society and, of course, the market is finding ways to make it profitable. Do you feel lonely and would like to have more friends? Well, rent one. Loneliness. They count in The Country that unwanted loneliness affects more and more people. According to data from Soledades Observatory of the Once Foundationin 2024, 20% of Spaniards admitted feeling lonely and at least two thirds claimed to have felt this way for years. It is not something exclusive to our countrybut a global trend that is already classified as a priority public health problem. In this context, all kinds of services are emerging that expand your circle of friends in exchange for a subscription, of course. RentFriend. The name leaves little to the imagination and it is exactly what it sounds like: a service that allows you to rent friends by the hour. You just have to choose your area, if you want a man or a woman, where you want to go (to the movies, to the gym, shopping, to accompany you to a wedding…) and the age range. The users who advertise are the ones who choose how much they are going to charge you for their company. In Valencia I have found people who charge 20 euros an hour, others 10 euros and some who do not charge anything. It is not the only portal of this style, there is also another service called RentAFriend or Rent A Local Friend that have a very similar operation. Timeleft. The proposal of this service is different. In exchange for a monthly subscription, they organize dinners for you with groups of six people who have similar interests to yours. Of course, you pay for dinner. If you like someone, you can continue talking through the app and repeat a meeting. “Embrace the uncomfortable. From sitting at a table with strangers. The vulnerability of accepting that you are looking for friends,” they say on their website. The subscription cost is about 20 euros per month. One of the reviews of the app says “I find it a little overpriced since they only ask you a game of questions during dinner and little else.” GroupVibe offers a very similar service. The app, available in 40 cities including Madrid and Barcelona, ​​organizes meetings for between four and six people from the same city to have a coffee, brunch or dinner. WeRoad. If you like to travel and don’t have anyone with you, this service organizes a group trip with like-minded people; You choose the destination and the dates and they assemble the group. You travel with a WeRoad coordinator who takes care of arrangements such as check-in, booking activities, and keeps track of the common fund. By default the accommodation is in shared rooms, although you can go in pairs and in that case they put you with your companion Mussa. It is a service aimed exclusively at women that works with a subscription model that gives access to different events. Among the experiences they offer there are embroidery workshops, photography workshops, Pilates classes and even bingo nights. The subscription costs 30 euros per month, but then you have to pay for each activity. There are some that are free, but most have a price that can range from 5 euros to 60 euros or more. There is a country that has years of advantage. If there is a country where a phenomenon like this is already normalized, it is undoubtedly Japan. In 2017 there was already talk of renting people for all types of situations, from people who offer their company even companies that They rent actors to impersonate your partner or family. This business responds to a culture where social isolation is profound. Services like Family Romance cover everything from dinner companions to fake family members at weddings. Although some see it as a practical solution, others criticize that it reinforces the real disconnection. Image | Xataka In Xataka | Sweden has encountered an unexpected problem for the country’s defense and health: an epidemic of loneliness

More and more Spanish bars refuse to let you pay at the table. Its objective is very simple: greater rotation

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“To pay, at the cashier.” It doesn’t matter if you live in the very center of Madrid, the most touristy area of ​​Barcelona, ​​next to Malagueta, in Vigo or a remote town in Bierzo, it is most likely that at some point in the last few months you have heard that phrase when you ask a waiter to please charge you. To pay for the coffee you just had, you must get up and go to the checkout yourself. Or what is the same, you do not have the option of being charged at the table. It seems like a minor issue, but this decision is not accidental: it responds to a logic that seeks to speed up the rotation in the premises and get the most out of them. “Excuse me, can I have the bill?” In Spain there are some 87,000 restaurants and food stalls, almost 163,400 drinking establishments and 270,200 “food and beverage services”, according to INE datawhich gives a pretty clear idea about how we live in Spain: we like (a lot) to go out for coffees, beers and tapas. Therefore, no matter what region you live in, chances are that in recent months you have sat at a table in a bar or restaurant. And that’s also why you’ve probably noticed that it’s becoming more and more common that when you want to pay and ask for the bill, answer the same: “To pay, at the cashier.” Unraveling the mystery. The question is obvious. Why the hell are they asking us to pay at the cashier? Are we not hindering the passage of other customers like this? Does it have any advantages over the option of paying the bill directly at the table? The mystery was cleared up a few months ago Jairosanbor, a tiktoker that usually publishes on his account videos related to the world of hospitality. And the answer is quite simple: although several factors come into play, everything is limited to a simple question of rotation in the premises. In other words, make a business profitable and get the most out of it. Time and agility. The logic is simple. If the customer receives the bill at their table, pays and the waiter charges them, even having to return to the bar to get change, a process is lengthened that could be simplified if the payment is made at the cashier. It may be a matter of minutes, but over the course of an entire day, a week, a month or a year (even more) that time can translate into higher turnover. More rotation. More clients. Higher income. “A little trick”. “What you get is that the customer gets up without any problem and leaves you the table free so that someone else can automatically sit down. If you had him here waiting for you to bring him the bill, charge him, he leaves and comes, in the end more time is wasted,” comments Jairposanbor in his TikTok video, of just 30 sure. “It’s a little trick for the rotation.” Personnel issue? The “little trick”, as the hotelier defines it, may seem simple, but it has given rise to a good number of articles about the themein the pressand some debate in the comments of the video. There are those who relate it, for example, to the greater or lesser availability of waiters in the establishment. “Another trick: add more staff and if the customer leaves happy that they don’t have to wait, they’ll probably come back,” comment a user. Another adds that charging cash may increase turnover and profitability of the establishment, but it can have a negative effect: it places more workload on the employee behind the bar. Cash vs card. They would come into play more keys. For example, although it is increasingly common for restaurants or cafes to allow payment by card, especially in large chains, in those cases in which the business only accepts cash, the “collection at the counter” rule simplifies the process quite a bit. No picking up cashround trips between the bar and the table to look for change or for the money to ultimately pass through several hands within the business. Useful, not infallible. Of course the tactic can be useful, but it is by no means infallible. First because, as some users also comment on TikTok, there are customers who do not like being sent to the bar to pay for their drinks. Second, because rotation is not 100% guaranteed either. As another remembers tiktokerthe trick fails when there is more than one person at the table, only one gets up to pay and then returns to his seat to continue chatting. A sector in change. César Sánchez-Ballesterospresident of the Tourism and Hospitality Federation of the province of Pontevedra, Feproturprovides some extra keys. Tricks like the one shared by Jairoposanbor seek greater optimization, but that is not the only way that hoteliers follow to achieve it. For years the group has opted for new strategies, such as online reservations, letters with QR codeapps that allow you to make orders and pay… Until reaching extreme examples such as experiments of McDonald’s in the US, with stores where there is hardly any interaction with staff. Of orders, payments… and personnel. “We see more and more examples of optimization,” comments Sánchez-Ballesteros, who remembers in any case that the client always has the last word, as has been made clear in the comments of TikTok: he is the one who decides what compensates him, what practices he considers good, what bothers him or the services he is not willing to give up. Against this backdrop, there is another factor that conditions work in restaurants and bars: the shortage of qualified personnel, which further reinforces the urgency that businesses have when it comes to polishing internal processes. It’s nothing new. For years the hospitality industry has been pointing out on a recurring basis the shortage of professionals, a deficit that becomes especially visible in times of … Read more

John Deere had been preventing farmers from repairing their tractors for years. Now he will have to pay them 99 million dollars

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A modern tractor is a computer on wheels: GPS, sensors, telemetry and proprietary software. Buying it costs a lot more money than a normal car, but until now not even that made the farmer its real owner. John Deere has agreed to pay $99 million to close a class action lawsuit in the United States which accused him of monopolizing the repairs of his machinery, forcing thousands of farmers to depend on authorized workshops with inflated prices and waiting times that could ruin an entire harvest. Why is it important. This agreement is not just about tractors. It is the most visible case of a battle that affects phones, cars, appliances and consoles: that of right to repair what you have bought. If a manufacturer can software block access to the guts of a product you already own, ownership becomes a mere pantomime. What John Deere has done with its tractors, Apple has long done with its iPhones and Tesla with its cars. What has happened. The lawsuit was filed in 2022. Farmers Alleged Deere Purposely Restricted Access to Its Diagnostic Softwareforcing them to go to dealerships that charged artificially high prices. Deere has not admitted wrongdoing, but has accepted the following: Create a $99 million fund to compensate those affected who have paid reparations since 2018. Open to farmers and independent workshops the diagnostic tools that until now only their dealers had. Allow diagnostics and reprogramming in offline mode before the end of 2026. Between the lines. The figure of 99 million is not coincidental. Deere has chosen to stay a million short of nine figures, a classic psychological trick to make it sound less serious in the headlines. But the estimated real damages are much higher: the overpricing in repairs has cost farmers between 190 and 387 million, and total losses could reach 4.2 billion. The fund will be distributed among around 200,000 farmers. Each one will receive a symbolic amount. They cost less than $500 each. Yes, but. John Deere has committed to opening up its repair tools, but only for ten years. After that period, nothing prevents you from turning off the tap again. The company already promised to improve access to repairs in 2023 and, according to the plaintiffs, it failed to keep its word. Additionally, the Federal Trade Commission, the US regulator, keeps another lawsuit open against Deere by the same pattern of behavior. So this soap opera will have more chapters. The big question. The case of tractors is the tip of the iceberg of something that affects us all. A modern tractor, an electric car or a smart thermostat share the same logic: the software inside can turn the owner into a user with permission from the manufacturer. What has been decided in a US court about agricultural machinery will end up defining the limits of ownership in the digital age. Also in Europe. In Xataka | Every summer fires devastate Spain. There is a common culprit that goes unnoticed: old tractors Featured image | Randy Fath

While most citizens pay the electricity bill, electricity pays Amancio Ortega: 49.2 million in dividends

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There are people who pay electricity bill every monthand people who are paid by “the light”. Amancio Ortega belongs, without a doubt, to the second group. The founder of Inditex will earn 49.2 million euros this year in dividends from three energy companies in which it has participation: Enagás, Redeia and the Portuguese REN (National Energy Networks). Despite being a considerable sum in terms of dividends, those 50 million euros seem like pocket change when compared to the amounts of its large business, 3,234 million euros that will receive from Inditex in 2026 for 59% of the shares it controls through its investment instruments Pontegadea and Partler 2006. Redeia: the largest energy check. Ortega’s most profitable participation, in terms of dividends, within the energy sector It is the one that the millionaire maintains in Redeia, the company he manages the Spanish electrical network. Through his company Pontegadea Inversiones, the businessman settled in La Coruñaacquired 5% of the company’s capital in July 2021 for approximately 456 million euros. With this position, it is the second largest shareholder in the company, only behind the State, which owns 20% through SEPI. The Board of Directors of Redeia will propose to the General Meeting the distribution of a dividend of 0.80 euros per share charged to the 2025 results, of which 0.20 euros They were already paid in January and another 0.60 euros are planned as a complementary dividend in July. Taking into account Ortega’s percentage of participation, that means about 21.6 million euros for Pontegadea, the same amount as the previous year. Furthermore, the Redeia’s new strategic plan For the period 2026-2029, it foresees a dividend that the company describes as “growing and sustainable”, to reach 0.87 euros per share in 2029, which represents an annual increase of 2%. In this way, Pontegadea, as representative of Ortegawould receive about 91 million euros over the next four years. The Portuguese bet: REN. Ortega’s other great energy pillar in 2025 has been the Portuguese REN, the Portuguese equivalent of Redeia. Far from settling for its initial position, Pontegadea expanded its participation in REN last yearpurchasing an additional 1.7% until reaching 13.7% of the capital. With that move, Ortega consolidated his role as second largest shareholder of the Portuguese company, only behind the Chinese electricity company State Grid Corporation of China, which controls 25% of the shares. By 2025, the REN Board of Directors proposed distribute among its shareholders a total of 106,750,601.92 euros, which corresponds to a gross dividend of 0.160 euros per share. On this occasion, the payment has been divided into two: a dividend of 0.064 euros per share has already been distributed as an advance at the end of November 2025, while a second payment of 0.096 euros per share is expected after its approval at the general meeting scheduled for April 15, 2026. The part corresponding to Pontegadea for its 13.7% of the capital represents about 14.6 million euros in total, which They add to those of its Spanish counterpart. A commitment to energy diversification: Enagás. The third leg of the energy business of the founder of Inditex is Enagás, the company that manages the natural gas network in Spain. Pontegadea acquired 5% of its capital at the end of 2019, paying 281.63 million euros for that package. Today that participation is valued below the purchase price, but the difference has been compensated through the dividends collected over the years. The gas company maintains his remuneration one euro per share for this year, maintaining the containment plan that began in 2024 and will last until 2027. The dividend will be paid in two payments: one of 0.4 euros that was already paid in December 2025 and another of 0.6 euros scheduled for July 2, 2026, with a total distribution of 157.2 million euros among all its shareholders. Due to its percentage of participation, the part corresponding to Pontegadea exceeds 13 million euros. A long-term strategy. Ortega’s investment in the energy sector is not an opportunistic bet in a sector in times of economic prosperity. It is a strategy that he has been building since 2019, when he joined Enagás, and that was completed in 2021 with the entry into Redeia and REN. To this we must add the alliances that has signed with Repsol to participate in renewable energy portfolios: wind farms in Aragón and Castilla y León, and solar plants in Albacete and Cádiz, among other assets. The Pontegadea model does not consist of investments by distribution companies, but rather in companies that manage infrastructure energy companies, which offer regulated and stable income with recurring dividends year after year. They are not high risk investments nor high speculative volatilitybut in strategic sectors independently of the economic cycle. In Xataka | There is a 50-ton “nuclear reactor” in a bunker in Fuenlabrada: it has been donated by Amancio Ortega Image | Pexels (Jan Kopriva), GTRES

Netflix has slowly raised prices and already costs more than much pay TV

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Netflix price rises again. For now, only in the United States, although movements like this tend to be the canary in the mine of increases: very possibly, we will soon experience a similar one in Europe. It is the second increase in less than two years for a platform with more than 325 million subscribers in the world, in a sector where escalating prices has become the norm. The new prices. The standard plan with ads, the cheapest, goes from $7.99 to $8.99 per month. The ad-free standard goes up two dollars, from 17.99 to 19.99. The premium (four simultaneous screens, 4K, no ads) scales from $24.99 to $26.99 per month. The cost of adding an extra member also increases: one dollar more in all cases, that is, it remains at $6.99 for the plan with ads and 9.99 for the variants without advertising. The average increase is around 11% and the new prices will be applied in the next billing cycle, after notifying subscribers by email. To understand the proportion of the accumulation, it is worth looking back. The standard plan without ads was $15.49 before January 2025 and $11.99 until October 2023. In less than three years, that same plan has gone from just over twelve dollars to twenty. 22,000 million profit. Netflix does not raise prices because it needs to. In 2025 it generated $45.2 billion in revenue and a gross profit of almost 22,000 million, with an operating margin of 29.5%, the highest in its history. Net profit for the year was 11,000 million, and free cash flow reached 9,500 million, compared to 6,900 million in 2024. For 2026, it projects an operating margin of 31.5%. Netflix is ​​not a struggling company looking to plug holes. The increase does not respond to financial pressure but to just the opposite: the company has detected that it can charge more because it knows that the majority of its subscribers are not going to leave. The analyst firm TD Cowen calls him pricing power (pricing power), which is the technical way of saying that the customer is trapped enough to take the hit. According to their estimates, the average revenue per subscriber in the US and Canada will grow 6% in 2026 due to this adjustment alone. Shared accounts no. Added to all this is the ban on account sharing, applied globally since May 2023. Far from causing the flight of subscribers that many anticipated, the measure worked: since then Netflix has added tens of millions of new subscribers. What seemed like a risk was actually a monetization lever. Each household that previously took advantage of a third-party account had to choose: pay or do without the service. And the majority paid. Ads go up. The rise in the cheapest tier (from $7.99 to $8.99) is perhaps the most revealing move. This plan has existed since 2022, designed as a safety net for those who could not or did not want to pay more. It has worked: it accumulates more than 190 million monthly active users and represents 55% of new registrations in markets with advertising enabled, according to Netflix itself. That is, it is the plan that captures the most price-sensitive users, but the truth is that there is no longer a comfortable position within the Netflix ecosystem that is protected from increases. Especially this plan: The platform’s advertising revenue exceeded $1.5 billion in 2025, multiplying by 2.5 compared to the previous year. The goal for 2026 is to double that figure to nearly 3 billion. In this context, charging an extra dollar to 190 million people means optimizing to the maximum a source of income that already works perfectly. And in Spain? The increase currently affects only the US. In Spain, current prices They are the result of the last revision applied in October 2025: 6.99 euros for the plan with ads, 13.99 for the standard without advertising and 19.99 for the premium. In January 2025, when Netflix went up in the US, Canada and Portugal, Spain was left out. But it will end up arriving: Netflix has been in Spain for eleven years and in each cycle of between twelve and eighteen months it has revised upwards some of its plans, usually with increases of one or two euros. As I said: everything according to plan. In Xataka | You’ve rewatched an episode of your favorite series and you feel like it’s missing scenes. You’re not paranoid: they are being removed

Danone wants to pay 1 billion for a powdered shake company. It’s his answer to Ozempic

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Danone has announced the acquisition of Smella British shake and powder company that competed with things like Soylent or Joylent in the “complete nutrition” sector, for about 1,000 million euros. It is an earthquake in the sector, but (above all) because of what it implies. The food industry is preparing for the earthquake caused by the new GLP-1 drugs and is doing so by gobbling up everything there is for functional nutrition. What is Huel? Founded in 2015 in the United Kingdom, it had a turnover of around 250 million pounds in 2025, sells in more than 100 countries and has among its investors to Idris Elba and Jonathan Ross. But none of that explains why a company like this is worth so much money. After all, Human Fuel sells nutritionally complete meals: powders, shakes, bars and instant meals. Although the idea is that these products cover 100% of daily needs, the same company recommends complementing it with conventional food. And why does Danone want that? That’s the big question. The purchase of Huel is part of the strategy Renew Danone which, since 2022, seeks to expand and diversify the company’s work. Danone already has Nutriciaits specialized medical nutrition division (Fortimeloncological supplements, pediatric formulas), which operates in the clinical and hospital setting. With Huel, you are building a functional and specialized nutrition ecosystem that covers all steps from the clinic either probiotics to mass consumption. The central issue is that the market does not stop growing. To grow and transform. It is estimated that meal replacements move between 16,000 and 21,000 million dollars each year. and heanalysts agree in which it will grow at a rate greater than 5%. But what makes this operation more than a corporate purchase is the context. GLP-1 drugs (Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro) are radically transforming food purchasing habits. Users eat less, buy less ultra-processed foods, and when they eat, they look for maximum nutritional density in every bite. According to Circana, households with LPG-1 usersThey will represent 35% of food sales in the US by 2030. Nestlé has already launched a specific line (Vital Pursuit), Conagra Label your dishes “GLP-1 Friendly” and General Mills is reformulating its products so they have more protein and fiber. And why now? Basically because Danone has money. In 2024, they had a cash flow of more than 3,000 million euros. In 2025, Danone CEO made it clear that the company wanted to “go on the offensive with acquisitions. And I have done it. In the last few years they have bought three emerging companies in key sectors (and many others that, finally, has not been able to acquire). Danone isn’t buying a smoothie maker: it’s buying a position in the new food chain the GLP-1s are creating. One where food is not sold for pleasure or convenience, but for function. Image | In Xataka | Neither Soylent nor Joylent. May the future not take away the ritual, flavor and texture of eating.

Meta has ended up firing its developers to pay for AI

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Mark Zuckerberg’s company is not having its best week. To the sanctions imposed by a US court for not protecting users of the addictive consequences of their platformsjoins a new round of layoffs that affects hundreds of people in five business areas. It’s not the first time so far this year, and it probably won’t be the last either. We cannot say that the measure has caught Meta employees by surprise, because a few days ago Reuters I was already ahead that the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp was planning to cut staff due to the increased costs of AI development. Now have materialized eliminating the departments closest to the metaverse. 700 employees on the street and a metaverse that goes out. According to published NBC Based on sources close to the company, Meta will lay off about 700 employees in this round. The cuts will affect Reality Labs, the division that for years was the flagship of Zuckerberg’s big bet on the metaverse, which just a few days ago announced the Horizon Worlds closure on Quest headsetsas well as some in the human resources departments, sales and Facebook employees, as pointed out The New York Times. Those affected are a small fraction of the nearly 78,000 employees that Meta currently has on staff, but the reason given by the company is already a classic in big tech: “Meta’s teams restructure or implement changes periodically to guarantee that they are in the best position to achieve their objectives,” said a Meta spokesperson. in a statement to which you have had access NBC. Layoffs down, bonuses up. Hours before these layoffs were announced, Meta presented a new stock compensation program for six of its senior managers. The message between the lines has not gone unnoticed. While the company cut staff with the argument of reducing costs to face the huge investments in AIwith a forecast of expenses of between 162,000 and 169,000 million dollars for 2026, the executives closest to Zuckerberg saw their compensation increased by up to 921 million dollars each for the next five years. Meta justifies the increase to its managers as a tool to retain talent in the middle of the war for the best AI profiles, but the temporal coincidence between both announcements could not have been more unfortunate. ​Layoffs without financial hardship. Historically, a company laying off its employees was a clear sign of financial problems. Instead, in the age of AI, each round of layoffs is celebrated on the financial markets with increases in the price of shares because it is a clear sign that the company is restructuring to adapt to changes in strategy for the development of AI and continue generating million-dollar income. In fact, one of the phenomena that is occurring In the latest rounds of layoffs in large technology companies, while hundreds of employees are being laid off from certain departments, new vacancies are opening up. to hire new employees with another profile more AI oriented. ​Meta is not an isolated case. What happens in Meta is part of a dynamic that is repeated throughout the sector. Amazon, Microsoft and other big tech companies have announced massive cuts in recent months, and in all cases the AI appears as the main justification for layoffs. According to data From the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, AI has been the argument for 12,304 layoffs so far in 2026, the equivalent of 8% of all layoffs recorded in that same period.​ In Xataka | Mark Zuckerberg spent millions on a “superintelligence” team. He is dedicating it to creating a personal AI agent for you Image | Goal

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