Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 11/23 - Snapchat Launches Spotlight, A TikTok Clone

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

Cloning Snapchat isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Cloning TikTok. Even Snapchat has joined the bandwagon with Spotlight. Are people fleeing ads in feeds because the market is saturated? I break down all of last week’s big moves in Digital Media. And why the Covid Tracking Project deserves a friggin Nobel Prize. Sponsors: ProtonMail.com/techmeme Amazon.com/ridehome Links: Snapchat launches a TikTok-like feed called Spotlight, kick-started by paying creators (TechCrunch) Facebook Ads Could Be Reaching Saturation Point (WSJ) BuzzFeed to Acquire HuffPost in Stock Deal With Verizon Media (WSJ) Why the Success of The New York Times May Be Bad News for Journalism (NYTimes) Bots Grade Your Kids’ Schoolwork—and They’re Often Wrong (WSJ) Data Heroes of Covid Tracking Project Are Still Filling U.S. Government Void (Bloomberg Businessweek) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Monday, November 23, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Cloning Snapchat isn't cool. You know what's cool? Cloning TikTok. And even Snapchat has agreed and joined the bandwagon with Spotlight. Are people fleeing ads and feeds because the market is saturated?

I break down all of last week's big moves in digital media and why the COVID tracking project probably deserves a friggin' Nobel Prize. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Snap has announced Spotlight, a vertically scrollable TikTok-like feed inside of Snapchat, as well as plans to pay $1 million every day to users who create the top snaps featured in Spotlight through the end of the year. So high level here is the news that yes, even Snapchat wants to clone TikTok. Cloning TikTok is the new cloning Snapchat stories, so why not get on board even if you are Snapchat? But also, why growth hack your way to audience uptake?

on a new feature like this when you can just brute force it by giving away cash, making it rain, quoting TechCrunch. Snapchat this morning is officially launching a dedicated place within its app where users can watch short, entertaining videos and a vertically scrollable TikTok-like feed. This new feature called Spotlight will showcase the community's creative efforts, including the videos now backed by music, as well as other snaps users may find interesting. Snapchat says its algorithms will work to serve as the most engaging snaps to display to each user on a personalized basis. To do so, it will rank the snaps in the new feed using a combination of factors like how many other people found a particular snap interesting, how long people spent watching it,

if it was favored it or shared with friends and more. The algorithm will also consider negative factors like if a viewer skipped watching the snap quickly, for example. Over time, the feed will become tailored to the individual user based on their own interactions, preferences, and favorites. This is a similar system to what TikTok uses for its For You feed. However, on TikTok, only users with public profiles can have their videos hit the For You feed. Spotlight, meanwhile, can feature snaps from users with both private or public accounts. These snaps can be sent to spotlight directly or posted to our story. The company says the snaps from the private accounts will be featured in an unattributed fashion that is no name will be attached to the content. There will also be

no way to comment on these snaps or message the creator, Snapchat explains. Users who are over 18 can opt in to public profiles in order to have their names displayed, which allows them to build a following. But while this allows users to private and directly reply to creators, there are no public comment mechanisms on Spotlight. That's a different setup than on TikTok and give Snapchat a way to avoid the much larger hassle of handling comment moderation, end quote. Actually, as Alex Hearn pointed out on Twitter, that's a different proposition than most other social networks full stop, Twitter especially, but also Instagram and lately. TikTok, quote, anyone who's gone viral on here knows that broadly, it sucks. It renders the

platform unusable, opens you up to abuse and harassment, and has barely any upside. Snap's deal is basically lose the downside and take the upside in cash rather than followers, end quote. As we spoke about a bit on the weekend bonus episode, a new trend that seems to be emerging, or at least re-emerging, is not going viral, putting speed bumps on virality, or at least getting some of the upsides from virality in different ways. More from Axios's Sarah Fisher, quote, How the algorithm works. Each video gets distributed to at least 100 viewers.

Those with the highest engagement get elevated to the next distribution tier of 1,000 views. Tournament-style algorithms mean all content is treated equally by Snapchat's distribution algorithm at the start. Snapchat will moderate all videos within their first 100 views. That initial review process includes both humans and software. All videos must adhere to Snapchat's existing community guidelines and content rules, end quote. So I think they're going to be self-selecting out for controversial things, for even political stuff. As Scott Belski tweeted, quote, new social platforms differentiate themselves with novel formats, which is the origin story of Pinterest, Snap, TikTok, etc.

And users flock to new forms of creative expression. But innovation today seems more about how dominant platforms can retrofit, trending formats, end quote. Add to that that million dollars a day. They say the million dollars will be divvied up based on total number of unique views, and those with the most views get the biggest piece of the pie, I think, though it's unclear whether or not you could go on such a popularity run that you could, in fact, become a millionaire before this promotion ends. Don't know if this is related to everyone fleeing to these new social formats, but we've been hearing for a while now that throwing ads into feeds, which is the way that social media has made its money thus far,

is sort of coming to an end. Well, if not coming to an end, at least plateauing. And according to recent analysis, Facebook and Instagram ads especially appear to be reaching a saturation point after having grown by around 30% every single quarter since 2015, quoting the Wall Street Journal. In addition to ads on its legacy blue app, those on Instagram, company acquired for $1 billion in 2012, accounted for roughly a quarter of Facebook's overall revenue in the 12 months ended September 30th, according to consensus estimates compiled by visible alpha. Ads on both platforms now seem to be reaching a saturation point at just the wrong time. Amid an increasingly strict regulatory environment, it seems unlikely Facebook can

simply buy the next Instagram to populate. That could present growing pains for a mature company that has consistently increased its ad impressions to boost overall ad revenue over the last five years. Interestingly, while ad pricing has risen over that period on the same basis, prices began to decline in the second half of 2018 with the greatest declines this year. In the second quarter, for example, Facebook said ad prices declined 21% versus the prior year, while ads served increased 40%. There are multiple explanations for all this. Initially, much of the pricing decline came from a mix shift towards stories, where ads are fleeting and geographies, Facebook said monetize at lower rates. But lately, competition from social media peers appears to have become

more formidable. Third quarter sales from Snap's Snapchat and Pinterest grew 52 and 58% respectively versus last year, for example. Facebook sales grew less than 22% over the same period, albeit off a much larger base. The combination of lower prices and more ads served has meant Facebook has at least kept investors happy amid the pandemic, but especially since many of its users have fled its legacy app for the younger, cooler Instagram. Over-saturation of that platform could risk flight of its users from Facebook platforms entirely. With regulators threatening to break it up, Facebook isn't likely to be able to acquire anything meaningful for now. And adding ads to WhatsApp, a messaging service for which Facebook paid a whopping $19 billion in 2014, would likely be a non-starter for many

of its more than 2 billion users there for its encrypted privacy. Facebook has said it would instead try to monetize the app through hosting services paid for by merchants. Still, Facebook's attempts to generate revenue outside its ad business are unproven. Nearly 99% of overall revenue in the third quarter came from advertising, end quote. So I gave Google Gruff last week for being a one-trick advertising pony for because of that trying to squeeze blood from a stone on search and display ads. But it seems maybe the reckoner is coming for social and especially Facebook too. There's been quite a rolling story going on in digital media over the last week that I haven't had a chance to get to yet. So this is sort of to catch you up on old news, but still news worth being aware of.

First, BuzzFeed acquired Verizon Media's HuffPost in a stock deal, part of a larger agreement to syndicate content on each other's platforms. Quoting the Wall Street Journal, new media companies like BuzzFeed and HuffPosts were growing at breakneck speed a few years ago as online readers flocked to fast-paced delivery of news, lifestyle, and entertainment content and advertising dollars followed. The business became more challenging as tech Elias's Facebook and Alphabet's Google sucked up digital ad dollars. The coronavirus pandemic delivered yet another blow this year. While some publishers have found success developing revenue from subscriptions and e-commerce, many players in the sector have pursued mergers to chart a path forward. Last year, Vice Media acquired Refinery 29. Vox Media acquired New York Media and Group 9 media acquired pop sugar. BuzzFeed has explored other possible acquisitions.

according to people familiar with the matter. BuzzFeed expects to turn an operating profit this year for the first time in years, Mr. Peretti said in an interview, the company has saved money through layoffs, furloughs, and other cuts, end quote. Yes, full circle for Jonah Peretti, who helped launch the Huffington Post back before he jumped ship from there to found BuzzFeed. But also, in the last few months, Another big digital media player, Vox, has seen some really big names leave that company, including Andrew Sullivan, Kara Swisher, who we all know and love, and now two of the actual founders of Vox, Ezra Klein, and Matt Iglesias. What's interesting here is how it relates to some things we've been talking about, specifically, the Substack phenomenon. Iglesias and Sullivan both decamped to substack to start their own newsletter empires, joining Glenn. and Greenwald, who also left the publication he founded recently to do something similar on

Substack. Note also that another Vox founder, Lauren Williams, is leaving Vox to found a non-profit news organization serving black audiences. But Swisher and Klein were both poached to become columnists and podcasters for the New York Times. So that's an interesting story in its own right, because if you hadn't been noticing, the New York Times has been on a financial tear over the last few years. Digital subscriptions have paid off handsomely for the Grey Lady, and it seems they are opening up their checkbook now to literally buy up the talent that will continue that sort of growth. Might there someday only be a handful of players in the entire news space? I'm talking about news as a product. The Times certainly seems to be positioning itself for that sort of future, and certainly they're the best positioned to be that future if it does come to pass.

reminds me of the first column by Ben Smith, who was another one lured away from his position to the Times from BuzzFeed. In his debut column, Smith said that the New York Times has become, like Facebook or Google, a digital behemoth crowding out the competition. Link to that piece in the show notes. With remote learning continuing to be the reality of the moment for a lot of students, teachers are increasingly unearthing and reporting the pain points that they are encountering in the remote learning setup. A lot of them seem to be pain points created by technology solutions that were designed to eliminate pain points in the first place. For example, teachers say they are forced to spend hours reviewing tests that were scored incorrectly by auto-grading test bots, which try to match a student's response to an answer key. Quoting again from the Wall Street Journal.

Auto-grading promised to save teachers' time, but now has many of them spending hours pouring over answers to their students every assessment and exam if they are aware of the grading problems at all. The root of the failure is in the simplistic design of many grading bots. They try to match a student's response to a teacher's answer key. If the two aren't identical, the response is often marked wrong, even if a human could easily see it's correct. It is yet another headache for teachers, parents, and students brought on by the sudden shift to remote learning. The makers of such educational software acknowledge the problems with auto-grading and say many teachers didn't have enough time to properly train on how to use the online platforms. Christina Perez, a single mother, and Aurora, Colorado said her three, three children have become dispirited by the whole remote school experience, including receiving numerous incorrectly graded tests in the Canvas Learning Management platform, the same virtual classroom my children use in California. All of my children were B students and now they're failing in most classes. That's how bad it is, said Ms. Perez, whose children are in seventh, eighth, and tenth grades. What does that do to a kid's mental health and their willingness to even try, end quote. Apparently, answers can be marked incorrectly for something as simple as using capital letters as

opposed to lower case. And here I thought that machine grading was a problem that we had solved 30 years ago with a technology called Scantron. Finally today, let's end by talking about digital media again, while staying on the COVID situation, in a nice little combo package. If you've been following COVID as a story at all, then you've probably heard of the COVID tracking. Project, which is basically the source for all of the data relating to COVID numbers, new cases, hospitalizations, deaths, etc. I was not aware of this, but it turns out that the COVID tracking project was an entirely volunteer project set up to make up for the fact that early on, we couldn't get reliable numbers on the spread of the virus from anywhere, including from governments.

And the fact that the COVID tracking project is still going is maybe down to the fact that they remain the best, if not the only source of data and facts around COVID-19. So for all the times we bemoan people not coming up with big solutions these days, solutions to fit a moment in history, or journalism being broken. Maybe we should take our hats off to these actual heroes who did the thing, who didn't ask permission, didn't ask questions, they just built. Quoting Bloomberg, This critical repository of health information started improbably with three journalists, a data scientist slash biotech investor and a couple of spreadsheets. Back in late February, the coronavirus was still a sleeper threat in the U.S., with new cases popping

up in ones and twos around the country and signs of hidden spread on the West Coast. Officials in the Trump administration held briefings touting the government's rapid rollout of testing, but they couldn't answer one important question. How many tests were being done? Alexis Madrigal, a technology writer at the Atlantic, and Robinson Meyer, an environmental writer at the magazine, decided to call every state and find out how many tests had been performed, plugging the numbers into a spreadsheet. While federal officials were talking about having distributed millions of tests, the two journalists reported on March 6 that fewer than 2,000 people in the U.S. had been checked for COVID. Soon after the story published, Madrigal heard from an old friend, Jeff Hammerbacher. He and Madrigal had attended Harvard together. Madrigal got an English degree and became a journalist.

Hammerbocker studied mathematics and went out to start the data team at Facebook. Unbeknownst to Madrigal, Hammerbocker, who now helps found biotechnology companies but previously worked in medicine, applying data science techniques to research, had his own spreadsheet. He posted it online, kept updating it, and got feedback from readers. I thought, I guess I'll keep doing this, Hammerbocker recalls. When Madrigal's first analysis was published at the Atlantic, Hammerbocker emailed him. Hey, did you guys use my spreadsheet for this? Madrigal and Myers sheet was full of quotes from health department officials, while Hammerbocker's

set was set up to become a proper database. They decided to team up until the data from the government got better. Co-founder Aaron Kassain, an editor and community manager who works in journalism and technology joined around this time. They thought the project would last a week or two. We just sort of figured, of course, the CDC would put out this information, Madrigal said, but it just never happened, end quote. Search for the COVID tracking project on Google Scholar, which compiles academic literature, and you'll get more than 500 results, a sign of its standing in the scientific community. The project has helped force states to improve their disclosure of COVID data. In April,

it started giving states letter grades on the quality of the data they reported. At first, only 10 states got an A or A plus. Now 40 states and territories have reached that grade. The project is a demonstration of citizen know-how and civic dedication at a time when the country feels like it's being pulled apart. Yet it's confounding that almost a year into the pandemic, the COVID tracking project is doing what might be expected of the U.S. government. It's kind of mind-boggling that it's fallen to a group of volunteers to do this, says Kara Shetman, one of the project's early volunteers, who's since become the paid co-lead for data quality, end quote.

Did you notice that I had to dig a bit for news today? Went with a couple of things that I would have normally reserved for the long reads. That's because, of course, this is Thanksgiving week here in the U.S., So expect hard news to be sort of slow this week, but that's the flexibility we've built into this podcast from day one. Some days it's all headlines and breaking news, but a lot of times it's deep dives and analysis into larger trends, which frankly I kind of prefer. So don't worry, we won't want for things to talk about this week. By the way, thank you to those of you who watched the weekend bonus episode on YouTube. That little experiment did exactly what I thought it might.

Basically quintupled, our usual viewing hours. on YouTube, boosting our entire catalog of videos to boot. Again, I'm not suggesting anyone, you know, went into our YouTube channel and just set it to autoplay for a few hours and then walked away to let us rack up viewing hours. But I don't know, if a few hundred of you did something like that, it would certainly boost our subscriber count even more, which has been an amazing way for us to actually hack discovery, something that is sorely lacking in podcast. It would also help us pass that magical 4,000 view hours threshold that I told you about with YouTube last week. Maybe we could pass that by the end of the year. So, you know, I'm not saying anyone do that, but if you

press play on our YouTube channel and walked away, you know, food for thought, talk to you tomorrow.