Roku owns your living room

Above the fold news: Profits for the Times... The New York Times' quarterly earnings were politely reported in a totally fair way by crosstown WSJ. Profits rose 38% to $30M, driven by higher subscription revenue and... rental income from its giant headquarters building. When people are getting news from Facebook, you make money where you can.

User metrics matter... 500K people pay NYT for just its crossword puzzles and cooking recipes. But NYT is a news institution, so let's look at how many humans get all the news that's fit to print:

• 💻 3.6M pay for the Times digital.
• 🗞 0.9M still go old fashioned newspaper.
• 🏆 10M total subscribers is the goal by 2025 (ambitious).
• 🎧 Bonus episode: 2M people listen to the Times' podcast, "The Daily," daily.

Wasn't meant to be... Stamps.com dropped 45% after cutting its profit forecasts for the rest of the year by nearly half. Blame it on the big breakup between Stamps and the US Postal Service. News of the two moving on from each other was revealed in February, but now we know the financial fallout. It's big.

Wasn't meant to be... Stamps committed to an exclusive relationship with USPS back in 1996 to let you print postage at home with its software. It was good while it was good. But Amazon's 2-day shipping makes USPS 3-7 days look bad. Stamps apparently asked USPS to be more competitive, but USPS wasn't up for it. So Stamps wants to see other people. Here's how it will rebound:

• The good: It can finally print postage for customers shipping through FedEx, UPS, or DHL, who already deliver your ecommerce everything.
• The bad: Stamps said yesterday its post-breakup pains are real — it expects sales to fall 8% this year. Analysts thought ending exclusivity with USPS would boost sales, not shrink them.

Roku embraces the little guy mentality... It literally subleases office space from Netflix. But it tossed up big numbers Wednesday, with revenues up 51% and the number of active Roku customers jumping 40% from last year to 29M. The best part — The CFO welcomed Disney and others to video streaming: "When they win, we win."

Cord-cutters print money... Roku's direct competitors are Apple TV, Amazon Fire Stick, and Google Chromecast. Those all make TVs smart and streamable. Here's how Roku makes bank:

1. Ads: Its Roku Channel streams movies and shows free, with ads.
2. Subscription: The Roku dongle and its Smart TVs watch Netflix more than anything else. When you subscribe to Netflix (or HBO) through your Roku, the dongle takes a cut.
3. Hardware: The infamous purple dongle and the software it licenses to TV companies.

• ID'd: Walmart ups its tobacco-buying age from 18 to 21 (failing some FDA compliance checks had something to do with it)
• Surprise: Workhorse, a small Ohio electric truck-maker, surged 200% (and its website crashed) after Trump tweeted that GM will sell it a factory (GM confirmed it was true)
• Pivot: Bird, the scooter-share unicorn, is now selling some of its scooters for $1,299
• Entertaining: Disney earnings beat expectations — and they didn't even include Avengers: Endgame
• Crypto: Bitcoin — $40M worth — was just stolen from one of the biggest exchanges by hackers
• Paper: Amazon's newest cashier-free Go store isn't cashless (and it's emphasizing that)

• Earnings from Yelp, Zillow, Cronos, Keurig Dr. Pepper, and Dropbox
• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks publicly about his secretive rocket startup, Blue Origin

Disclosure: An author of this Snacks owns shares of Amazon and Roku