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Edition #470
What an earnings week, there’s a new search engine in town & PAAPI.
Halloween edition!
This week, we saw YouTube surprise, surpassing $50b in revenue in the last twelve months! Imagine that as a standalone business. Snap, hit new highs on subscribers (12m) and Reddit feels the Google traffic bump with a 68% year on year growth in revenue.
What’s driving YouTube? In their words “YouTube Ads revenues grew 12% year-on-year, driven by brand, closely followed by direct response.” Wait, that’s counter to the public narrative around brand spend not being out there in market.
The other intriguing story is Netflix launching ‘Moments’ a feature to help users clip and share clips from their fav shows. Why is this interesting? Well you may recall, Netflix has put a lot of protection into their apps, including the browser app, to stop screenshots. i.e. see this reddit thread, this was common.
This was to comply with the terms of their licenses. If they were loose with this, then rights holders wouldn’t be happy. Also, I believe, it’s to help avoid piracy of shows. That said, when you see how the NBA leaned into social sharing of clips and it driving a lot of their audience growth, Netflix really wants to tap into that. So Moments is their attempt. Smart.
BUT will it take off? Versus the native behaviors users already had. Who knows, maybe.
Notable stories this week
- OpenAI’s search engine is now live in ChatGPT.
- Two years post acquisition, and X’s relationship with advertisers has never been more complex.
- How brands can navigate the murky world of online streaming.
- Forbes top creators list.
- Netflix launches moments, a clip sharing feature.
- An ‘AI Travel Influencer’ is the new face of German tourism.
- Viant trains gene programmatic planning platform on Comscore data.
- Discover wiped out MFA spend by following these four basic steps.
- If AI creates everything, what’s original on the internet anymore?
- Web publishers can no longer rely on robust growth in non video programmatic digital display.
- Google quietly tests AI search ad tool to help advertisers reach new audiences.
- Meta strikes multi-year AI deal with Reuters.
- Newspapers flee presidential endorsements.
- Digital ad market booms for Big Tech.
- Perplexity announces their Curators program.
- Reddit’s ads biz exploded in Q3, ablate from a small base.
- PAAPI could be as effective for retargeting as third parties cookies.
- The media education of Jeff Bezos.
- It’s the creators economy stupid.
- If we scaled our fav restaurant, we’d ruin it. Are agencies any different?
- Jay Clouse shares his simple content strategy.
Deals/M&A
Campaign of the week
- On Running with Wired, talking on their lightspray technology and their NYC pop up.
View all 2024 best campaigns.
Smartest commentary
- “There are no major brands with significant sales on TikTok. All top sellers are brands that figured out a unique strategy for it or went viral early when the platform launched, like GuruNanda. Since content drives sales on TikTok, it is either the brands themselves creating it or, most often, a sea of influencers incentivized by a share of revenue.” –Jouzas Kazikiukenas.
Datapoints of note
- Of all the channels uploading to YouTube each month, 70% are uploading Shorts.
- During the Olympics, content from Paris 2024 had over 12 billion views on YouTube. More than 850 million unique viewers watched over 40 billion minutes of content, with 35% on their TV screens.
- Reddit daily active users rose 47% year on year to 97.2m.
- Threads now has 275m monthly users, seeing more than 1m sign ups/day.
- When the research results are normalized for ad spend and impression counts, PAAPI is 86.4% as effective as third-party cookies for clicks and 81.8% as effective for click-through conversions per dollar, according to the study.
Events
- Watch this space!
View all 2024 datapoints of note.
That’s it for this week.
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