Today in Digital Marketing - Unfollowing as a Service

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, May 1st. Today, the court case that could dramatically change the Facebook feed as we know it. Why Google is automatically pausing your keywords. Pinterest's user numbers jump, but at what cost? And the game heard around the world and at LinkedIn. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, Today in Digital Marketing. electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.C-A.

Starting point is 00:01:01 Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. The lawsuit filed just this morning against Meta says American law forces companies to let users customize their social feeds

Starting point is 00:01:33 with unofficial add-ons. These add-ons have existed in the past. The few that remain are constantly being deliberately kneecapped by Facebook engineers who try to keep people from seeing their feed in a way that Meta doesn't like, or seeing who unfollowed you, and so on. Interestingly, the lawsuit argues that the law that shields social networks from liability that arises from the content of their users, known as Section 230, also requires more flexibility from

Starting point is 00:02:01 the platforms. The suit was filed by a software developer who's working on an extension to let people more easily unfollow friends, groups, and pages. That's something you can do now, but you have to do it one at a time. The lawsuit is being bankrolled by a First Amendment advocacy group at Columbia University. Three years ago, Meta permanently banned a British developer

Starting point is 00:02:24 who made a tool similar to this fellow's. At that time, the developer told Slate, quote, I still remember the feeling of unfollowing everything for the first time. It was near miraculous. I'd lost nothing since I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going to them directly. But I had gained a staggering amount of control. I was no longer tempted to scroll down an infinite feed of content. The time I spent on Facebook decreased dramatically, unquote. And that's the real reason Meta hates these, of course, despite what Meta's PR people say about the security of the platform or integrity of the feed or blah, blah, blah. Besides the time spent on platform, a critically important metric that investors watch closely, Facebook doesn't want people to easily unfollow the very entities that provide the ad network signals on what people are interested in. Though, even that feels like a

Starting point is 00:03:18 little bit of an out-of-date throwback to the era of interests targeting. Quoting Wired, quote, John Morris, a principal at the Internet Society, a nonprofit that promotes the open development of the internet, says that to his knowledge, this strategy hasn't been used before in terms of using Section 230 to grant affirmative rights to users, noting that a judge would likely take that claim seriously, unquote. Heads up if you run Google ad campaigns, your low activity keywords may soon stop running. The company's been emailing advertisers this week saying positive keywords in search ad campaigns will automatically pause if they haven't generated impressions in over a year. The rule, of course, intended to help declutter ad accounts full of underperforming keywords.

Starting point is 00:04:05 Personally, I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it's true that many ad accounts are probably full of basically dead keywords, and this will make things simpler. But still, I've never liked the idea of ad platforms just going in and changing the parameters of a campaign, even if those parameters are underperforming. A notification recommending you remove them is one thing. Straight up deletion is another. You can't really opt out of this, but if you do spot Google pausing a keyword and you still want it, you will be able to unpause it. But they say they'll repause that keyword again if you

Starting point is 00:04:40 still don't get any impressions over the following three months. We have some new numbers on how Amazon's ad business is doing. That division grew to almost $12 billion last quarter. That's about 24% higher than the same quarter last year, putting it ahead of Google's growth rate. Ads make up about 8% of the company's total revenue, quoting Adweek, quote, this year marks Amazon's first appearance in TV upfront week, joining the flow of major streamers who are all making a big play to grab the growing pool of dollars once earmarked for

Starting point is 00:05:17 linear TV. YouTube was added to the upfront roster in 2022, and Netflix joined in 2023, paving the way for Amazon's entrance this year, unquote. Amazon ads still lags way behind Meta's revenue, that was about $35.5 billion, and Google's, which was over $60 billion. But Amazon still dominates retail media ads with 74% of the US market. Walmart, which made $3.4 billion in ad revenue, plans to acquire Vizio for $2.3 billion to boost its ad business and compete with Amazon. Pinterest, too, had a great quarter with a big increase in active users, alongside a solid rise in revenue year-over-year. Pinterest now has 518 million monthly active users alongside a solid rise in revenue year over year. Pinterest now has 518 million

Starting point is 00:06:07 monthly active users, up from 498 million last quarter. Most of this growth, though, comes from markets that generate less revenue. In the past quarter, Pinterest added 13 million users in the rest of world category, 5 million in the European Union, and only a small number in the US. But the company's costs are rising as well. It spent 12% more on sales and marketing, comparing Q1s. Quoting social media today, quote, that could also bode well for future potential if those dollars are well spent. But I don't think Pinterest's most recent advertising push, which clearly cost it some big dollars to produce, was worth the investment. Still, Pinterest CEO Bill Reddy says the platform saw its fastest user and revenue growth since 2021 in the quarter, which he credits to ongoing development efforts.

Starting point is 00:06:57 But I mean, that's his job, to be the cheerleader in the earnings announcements. And I don't know that I see as much to be excited about in these figures, unquote. TikTok this week released some new numbers around its TikTok shop initiative. It says there are now 15 million merchants in their system, but that came at a cost. It says it blocked about 37 million products from being listed that went against its terms and removed another 133,000 after they'd been listed. If you're thinking of dipping your product's toes there, here's what they need from sellers. Quote, we require all sellers to provide documentation to verify their identity, business type, and their eligibility to

Starting point is 00:07:42 operate that business. Once a seller is approved, they're placed on probation for a period of time, meaning there is a period of time where merchants can learn the rules and be eased into their experience on the platform, unquote. Indeed, TikTok says they turned down more than 2 million seller account registrations for not following their requirements. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit?

Starting point is 00:08:14 No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. And finally, my wife and I don't have a lot of family routines, but one we've been doing lately is racing each other to finish the New York Times connection puzzle first. Honestly, it's a great puzzle if you haven't seen it. Connections, alongside the classic crossword and the viral hit Wordle, are driving a growing amount of the New York Times subscriber base.

Starting point is 00:08:51 Other platforms have noticed, and now LinkedIn says it wants in on the Games Action 2. And today it launched three new games, Queens, Cross Climb, and Pinpoint. Queens is basically a Sudoku clone. You have to arrange crown icons in a way that doesn't overlap with the other icons. Cross Climb is sort of a trivia game crossed with, I don't know, Jenga. You have to fit clues onto a grid and the words change one letter by one letter with each clue. Pinpoint is my favorite so far because it's kind of closest to connections. You're given a word and you have to guess a taxonomy that that word would fit into.

Starting point is 00:09:28 I don't even know if I'm using that word correctly. But anyway, it gives you another word than another. And hopefully by the fifth and final clue, you will have guessed the category that they all fit into. These new apps are available now globally in the LinkedIn app or on the web at linkedin.com slash games. And like the New York Times' games, you can only play these once a day. You can also invite your first-degree connections to play. You can share your progress with your connections as well if you choose to. It should be noted that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft,

Starting point is 00:09:58 which owns the huge Xbox gaming brand. A quick plug for our email newsletter. It is free. It comes out every day. It contains everything you hear in the podcast and more. Links to learn more about the stories we cover, videos, charts, illustrations. You can sign up for free by tapping the link in the show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter.

Starting point is 00:10:21 I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Unfollowing as a Service

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