OpenWeb, a platform used by publishers to manage comments and user interactions, has raised $150 million in a series E financing round that values the company at $1.1 billion, its CEO and co-founder Nadav Shoval tells Axios.

Why it matters: OpenWeb's growth is driven by a realization from publishers that building direct relationships with their audiences online is a stronger value proposition long-term than being reliant on social media and search giants.

Details: The company, which was previously called Spot.IM, licenses technology to publishers that helps them moderate user comments.

• It plans to use the funds to build more tools for publishers to create direct relationships with their audiences, Shoval says.
• As privacy becomes a bigger issue, the company has doubled down on offerings that will help publishers collect first-party data from its users.

The round was led by investment firms Insight Partners and Georgian, with participation from The New York Times, ad giant Dentsu, Samsung Next, tech investor Omer Cygler, Israeli-based investment group Harel, and Entrée Capital and media personality Scott Galloway.

• Galloway has joined the company’s board.

The participation from The Times is emotional for Shoval, who says he moved to the U.S. from Tel Aviv in order to court their investment.

• The Times, he says, "holds us accountable to make sure we’re solving the right things."
• "OpenWeb’s mission of combating toxicity in online conversations and empowering publishers to develop direct relationships with their audiences deeply resonates with us," New York Times Director of Corporate Development Matthew Lloyd-Thomas said in a statement.

By the numbers: The new round brings the company's total amount raised to around $225 million.

• The company has booked around $80 million in revenue so far this year, Shoval tells Axios.

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Politics and hard news have moved to the back burner of the national conversation, with sports — and particularly the NFL — generating more interest, new data shows.

Why it matters: It's a huge shift from a year ago, when most of the top stories in the U.S. were about hot-button political topics, Axios' Neal Rothschild and I write.

• Sports have climbed to the top of Americans' news diets, according to pageview data from Taboola, a content recommendation company known for its boxes of thumbnail ads, which pulled data from 1,400 news sites.
• On the day of and the day following the House passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, there were more Google searches for Aaron Rodgers than Joe Biden, according to Google Trends data.

The big picture: Simultaneously, interest in politics has plunged.

• Social media interactions (likes, comments, shares) on politics stories over the last 8 weeks have dropped 37% compared to late spring (before even the Afghanistan news began to ramp up), according to exclusive data from NewsWhip.
• Engagement on the @POTUS Instagram account has steadily waned. Interactions in October were down 78% from February and 59% from June, according to CrowdTangle data.

Zoom out: Coronavirus remains the top news topic, per Taboola, but interest is falling.

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Investors and consumers are showing growing interest in privacy-focused alternatives to Google and Facebook amid renewed scrutiny over the real cost of their "free" services, Axios' Ina Fried and I write.

Yes, but: It's still hard to compete with the massive profit engines that those companies have created.

Driving the news: A new privacy-oriented search engine, You.com, is entering public beta today and announcing it has landed $20 million in funding, led by Marc Benioff with participation from Breyer Capital, Sound Ventures, Day One Ventures and others.

• ProtonMail, the end-to-end encrypted email service, expects to have 75 million users by the end of next year, up from 50 million in June, CEO Andy Yen tells Axios. 
• DuckDuckGo says it saw a 55% increase in downloads between June 2020 and June 2021.
• Brave, a privacy-focused search browser, says it now has 36.2 million monthly active users, up from 18.3 million in August 2020.
• Presearch, which is approaching 3 million users, is still small but the success of bigger privacy-focused search engines like DuckDuckGo is a good sign for the upstart.

The catch: The business models for many of these startups are either immature or nonexistent, and even the most developed ones don't hold a candle to the cash generated by the Web giants.

• Yen says that "at least 95%" of ProtonMail users don't pay for any services.

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Kids and family programming deals are surging as streaming companies look to double down on content that serves a highly-engaged cohort of younger users.

Why it matters: Kids content used to be perceived as a tool to stop users from cancelling streaming accounts. Now it's a key driver for new user growth.

• "I think the big thing they (streamers) have realized is that the value of kids and family content goes beyond retention," said Chris Williams, founder and CEO of Pocketwatch Inc., a kids content firm.
• ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish told investors on an earnings call last week that kids and family content "was the top genre on Paramount+ for both acquisition and engagement in the quarter."

Driving the news: Pocketwatch has hired financial advisory firm Lazard as it explores potential new investments or a possible sale.

• The firm, which has exclusive licensing and production deals with major kids YouTube franchises, has received inbound interest about a possible sale as well as new investment, according to two sources familiar with the company's business.
• The Wall Street Journal reported about the effort last month.

What to watch: YouTube has proven a breeding ground for streamers looking to adopt franchises that can easily sell toys and other products.

• Merchandise from the Ryan's World franchise, formerly called Ryan's ToysReview, generated more than $250 million in sales in 2020.

The big picture: The streaming arms-race has put a premium on digital content studios, particularly those that cater to kids programming.

• Moonbug Entertainment, the UK-based digital content company that's home to the YouTube streaming hit "Cocomelon," sold for roughly $3 billion last week to an unnamed media company backed by Blackstone and led by former Disney executives Tom Staggs and, Deadline reported on Monday.
• Roald Dahl Story Company (RDSC), the UK-based firm that owns and manages the rights of the storied works from the late British author Roald Dahl, was acquired by Netflix in September.
• Alvin and the Chipmunks owner Bagdasarian Productions has engaged in sale talks, per CNBC, including with big streamers like ViacomCBS.

The combined market value of the six most valuable American companies is now more than a quarter of the entire value of the S&P 500.

Why it matters: These companies' gains accelerated in the past year, as the pandemic's initial shock receded and businesses like e-commerce, gaming, cloud storage and digital advertising exploded.

The big picture: Alphabet is the third U.S. company to surpass a $2 trillion market cap, following Apple in 2020 and Microsoft earlier this year. Amazon is closing in.

• Yes, but: Market capitalization is built on market sentiment as much as business fundamentals, and can be vulnerable to big swings.

What to watch: Facebook, now called Meta, joined the $1 trillion club over the summer, but has since seen its value drop below the $1 trillion mark in response to changes to Apple's privacy policies and its recent coverage of a whistleblower's leaked reports documenting harms to users.

Illinois became the first state to require one unit of media literacy for all high school students this summer, and now it's debuting a rough draft of the curriculum, Axios Chicago reporter Monica Eng writes.

According to the law, the media literacy unit should help students analyze:

• The purpose of media messages and how they are made.
• How media influences behavior and which points of view are included.
• The importance of digesting multiple media sources.

What to watch: The law has already become a political flashpoint.

• A Republican state legislator called the law "anti-Trump, anti-conservative” and an attempt by the left "to get into our school systems at a young age," per Illinois Radio Network.

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