Today in Digital Marketing - TikTok's Ad Revenue Plan Don't Jiggle Jiggle, It Folds

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, January 25th. Today, Meta will help you track down brand copycats. TikTok's ad revenue sharing plan is bombing. Advertisers continue to stay away from Twitter. The two approaches being taken with AI Creative and LinkedIn's good numbers, but bad forecast. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead on Today in Digital Marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:23 Meta is lending a helping hand to e-commerce brands and businesses that want to protect their copyright material on its platforms. The company today launching a new rights managers site to help brands detect and take action against IP violations on Facebook and Instagram. The site includes the usual links and resources. It also has a full overview of the company's rights management systems, including its brand rights manager tool, Thank you. violations in page posts, marketplace listings, and so on. The site also includes some testimonials from businesses that have benefited from the tool. Anyone with a Facebook page can apply for access by visiting this URL, rightsmanager.fb.com. TikTok is facing more challenges over creator

Starting point is 00:01:22 monetization as its ad revenue sharing initiative is apparently tanking. Short form video monetization presents unique challenges since you can't directly monetize via in-stream ads as you might be able to with longer content. This is a major risk for TikTok because it's only a matter of time before its creators realize that YouTube and Instagram are just more lucrative places to post content. As part of its efforts to improve this, TikTok launched its Pulse advertising initiative last year, which lets advertisers place their ads alongside top creators' content. Those with more than 100,000 followers can apply to get a cut of the ad revenue. Sounds like a viable solution, right? Well, apparently not. Creators have reported extremely low earnings from its Pulse program. Fortune.com spoke to several influencers

Starting point is 00:02:11 with followings of at least $100,000, and none of them reported earnings exceeding $5 in total. Quoting socialmediatoday.com, the reports once again highlight TikTok's challenges in this respect, and with YouTube also launching its new short-form video monetization program, which will enable Shorts creators to get a cut of the total revenue generated by Shorts ads, these insights come at a less-than-ideal time for the app. Even if YouTube's Shorts RevShare program doesn't end up being highly lucrative,

Starting point is 00:02:43 YouTube can also offer its partner program, which has made many creators into millionaires. TikTok doesn't have anything anywhere close to this. And while it is working hard to add in brand partnership programs and e-commerce integrations, all of these require additional effort on the part of the creator who, on YouTube, can just concentrate on making great videos. It's a key challenge for TikTok and the element that eventually saw Vine die out. Elon Musk is going to need to sell a lot more blue check marks. Ad spend on Twitter reportedly dropped by more than 70% in December, as top advertisers slashed their spend following the takeover.

Starting point is 00:03:26 According to new data from advertising research firm Standard Media Index, ad spend on Twitter also fell in November by 55% from last year, despite those months typically being a time of higher spending as brands promote their products into the holidays. Ad sales, remember, account for about 90% of Twitter's revenue. Most companies cut off spend in November, according to estimates by another research firm. The same month, Musk restored suspended accounts and released paid account verification that resulted in scammers impersonating companies. Speaking of suspended accounts, the most cancelled man in America is back on Twitter. Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist streamer who pushes Holocaust denial conspiracies and other anti-Semitic hate, was banned from Twitter back in 2021. But now Gizmodo reports that the company has done him a solid by reinstating his account.

Starting point is 00:04:17 And Twitter has once again reversed the decision to make the algorithmic for you tab the default, which is good news for brands, which saw engagement plummet. Twitter now says if users leave their timeline on following, that's the reverse chronological feed, rather than for you, it will remember that. This new stickiness is on the web now and will be rolled out to the mobile app soon. Oh, breaking news. Speaking of reversing decisions, Nick Fuentes has been kicked off Twitter again.

Starting point is 00:04:45 Literally, in the time it's taken me to read this story, he has been given the boot. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that last night, Fuentes hosted a Twitter space where he had just lovely things to say about Hitler. While Getty Images is suing Generative AI for copyright infringement, Shutterstock is jumping on the bandwagon with a new Generative AI image tool. Now, customers of the stock photo company can create images based on text prompts powered by OpenAI and DALL-E2. Moreover, Shutterstock says the images are ready for licensing right after they're made. As TechCrunch points out today, this is significant given that one of its biggest competitors, Getty Images, is currently embroiled in a lawsuit against Stability AI over using its images to train its AI without permission.

Starting point is 00:05:37 Quoting TechCrunch, In other words, Shutterstock's service is not only embracing the ability to use AI rather than the skills of a human photographer to build the image you want to discover, but it's setting the company up in opposition to Getty in terms of how it is embracing the brave new world of artificial intelligence. LinkedIn is still growing. The professional network is now closing in on nearly a billion members, with the platform reporting quarterly growth of 20% in total user sessions. It is important to note, though, that members and users are not the same. How many users does LinkedIn have?

Starting point is 00:06:15 Only the company has the exact data, but some reports have suggested the platform has about 310 million monthly active users. Although we're still in the dark about in-depth usage insights, the company did recently provide some more data on engagement trends, such as LinkedIn members viewed 20% more feed updates in 2022 year over year, members conducted 25% more public conversations on the platform year over year, and newsletter creation was up 10 times year over year. LinkedIn's revenue also increased by 10%, driven by growth in talent solutions. The platform warned, though, this is likely going to decline this year due to a broader slowdown in hiring, particularly in the tech sector.

Starting point is 00:07:02 And finally, no, it's not you. Over the past 24 hours, much of Microsoft's services have been down for thousands of users. The company said users today have been unable to access some of its services, including Microsoft Teams and Outlook. Microsoft says it isolated the problem to a network configuration issue. Earlier today, the company tweeted that its impacted services have recovered and remain stable. That TikTok video I mentioned yesterday is now at 1.2 million views. So if you're new here and came from TikTok, welcome. We do this podcast every day.

Starting point is 00:07:34 We also have a Slack community. It is free. There are a thousand people in it, all sharing advice, getting help. There's even a channel you can promote yourself in. Just tap the link in the show notes or go to todayindigital.com slash slack. We also have a premium podcast, which is just like this show, but with no ads,

Starting point is 00:07:49 you get immediate access to 25 deep dive, full length episodes covering the latest in marketing science, links to stories in the show notes. It comes out earlier. There are audio chapters that let you jump around. Again, the link in the show notes will take you to the premium feed

Starting point is 00:08:02 or go to todayindigital.com slash premium. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - TikTok's Ad Revenue Plan Don't Jiggle Jiggle, It Folds

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