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TikTok ban?
Edition #477
What will we do with all that extra attention? TTD makes an acquisition & LLMs drive influx of traffic.
So will TikTok be up by the end of the weekend or not? Who knows. It seems unlikely at time of writing. It’s worth mentioning that India cut TikTok back in 2020.
So who benefits? eMarketer suggests that Meta and YouTube could capture about half of the reallocated TIkTok ad dollars.
Let’s say, US Ad spend on TikTok is about $1.5b/month (as it was tracking last year). That’s $50m/day. A lot of dollars in flux.
The wider question is what happens to the creator class, where do they go and create?
I’ve been reading up on food halls recently, and what makes the magic of European ones work so well is they are often independent proprietors. Whereas in New York (at least) they tend to all be the same owner. The argument is the real estate is too expensive to have it otherwise.
And this is kind of what creators are like, a lot of independent operators, all doing their thing in their unique way. Once they formalize and join a publisher, or network, they become owned by the network.
I don't really have a conclusion there, except for the collection of independents, tends to be a more enduring strategy. But not all play long term games.
At a societal level, TikTok users spend 58 minutes a day on it. Suddenly the whole of attention that is now free’d up for other things. Other platforms will benefit for sure, but it was TikTok’s unique sauce that got them that attention in the first place, in a marketplace where the other platforms existed. So that attention, like water, will filter elsewhere I’d imagine.
It’s an interesting thought, next week, there’s going to be around 30m hours of attention in the US, diverted to other things.
Notable stories this week
Bluesky is getting its own image sharing app.
Live video is available to all publishers in the Substack app.
Brands are seeing an influx of traffic from ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
Beehiiv is the latest platform to try to lure independent journalists with perks.
2024 laid the groundwork for brand studios. Will it start to pay off in 2025?
Reddit at CES: How AI Can Evolve “Conversational Commerce”
OpenAI to fund four new Axios Local newsrooms.
The new rules of content marketing. And the new rules of media.
That sports news story you click on could be AI slop.
He Makes $1M Per Month Selling Peanut Butter on TikTok Live.
Google won’t add fact checking despite new EU law.
Ampersand’s new measurement platform combines linear and streaming data.
Meta is blocking links to decentralized Instagram competitor Pixelfed.
Microsoft is using Bing to trick people into thinking they’re on Google.
Duolingo is building an ad sales team.
Criteo appoints new CEO.
Amazon aims to expand advertising business by letting retailers use its ad tools on their stories.
Edo and Chalice partner to optimize outcomes across programmatic CTV and digital ad campaigns.
Magnite has announced its selection as Fifa+’s global programmatic provider.
Decades of ‘free’ news has publishers scrambling to find revenue.
The Washington Post’s New Mission: Reach ‘All of America’.
Just how many ads are there on ad-supported streaming apps really? Continue reading
