Today in Digital Marketing - Why Did Pinterest Lose Millions of Users?

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 point is 00:00:18 starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Today, why did Pinterest lose millions of users last quarter? at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. and the peculiar connection between bad tech predictions and the podcast ad business. It's Friday, July 30th, 2021. Happy International Friendship Day. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital, and here's what you missed today in digital marketing. And we start with a part of Amazon's revenue that many people forget exists. Sure, they make most of their money on e-commerce sales, but a growing chunk of pie comes from its ads business. In their latest earnings statement, they reported that chunk was up 87% in Q2 this year compared to Q2 last year.

Starting point is 00:01:15 To put that in perspective, eMarketer says last year Amazon's share of the overall U.S. digital ad market surpassed 10% for the first time. Amazon said in the last quarter they added at least 40 new features and self-service capabilities to their ad portal. Among those features, a new service that lets sellers contact shoppers directly via email. The tool is called Manage Your Customer Engagement, and its introduction marked the first time Amazon really loosened its grip on customer data. This makes it easier for brands to encourage repeat purchases, possibly completed on a non-Amazon site. Don't forget, Amazon the company is much more than Amazon the site.

Starting point is 00:01:56 They have a lot of web properties that are more tuned to the ad business. The game streaming platform Twitch, IMDb TV, Fire TV. Cumulatively, those now reach 120 million monthly active users. Over to the health of the podcast ad business, and it's certainly healthy. New numbers from Magellan say podcast ad spending grew 71% year over year. When you look at quarter over quarter, those numbers were up a healthy 22%. For the first time this past quarter, Magellan tracked more than 2,000 brands advertising on podcasts, the highest spending of which was the online counseling software BetterHelp. They spent $18 million on podcast ads.

Starting point is 00:02:43 Apparently, when you average out the playtime of all monetized podcasts, about 5.3% of podcast airtime is dedicated to ads. It's worth calling out Spotify in particular, which saw its podcast ad revenue go up 627% year over year. Even so, Spotify's CEO said recently he doesn't believe that podcast audiences will overtake music audiences. As a reminder, then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in 2007, quote, There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. Unquote. market share, no chance, unquote. After 11 quarters of consecutive user growth, Pinterest shared some surprising news with analysts this week in its Q2 reports, a decline in overall users.

Starting point is 00:03:39 Pinterest lost 24 million users over the last three months. The company says the reopening of physical stores is largely the cause here, given that online browsing has dipped. I'm not so sure about that. Pinterest is trying to spin itself here as primarily an e-commerce platform. And, you know, sure, it's made big strides to embrace that. But I think most people still consider the platform to be a social media site that people use more for visual discovery, design inspiration, and so on.

Starting point is 00:04:07 Maybe this is just about people having less free time at home now? Pinterest itself acknowledged this in its report, saying, quote, Given that many of Pinterest's core use cases, for example, decor, garden, cooking, do-it-yourself, are especially relevant at home, we believe we disproportionately benefited from increased time spent at home during pandemic lockdowns, unquote. They also reported that people who use Pinterest on the web are less engaged and generating less income than people who use the mobile app. As for that all-important ARPU metric, that's average revenue per user. That's doing just fine. This past Q2 was more than double the revenue per user than Q2 last year.

Starting point is 00:04:50 In terms of top-line revenue, that was up 125% year-over-year. So maybe this user loss is more of a market correction than anything else. That might also explain the awfully cautious language it used in its report, quote, The evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions remain unknown, and we are not providing guidance on Q3 2021 monthly active users, given our lack of visibility into certain key drivers of engagement. Do you have business insurance? of engagement. and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com.

Starting point is 00:05:47 Be protected. Be Zen. Doesn't matter what decade you grew up in. Everyone's got a favorite retro TV ad. Maybe yours was this. I like to buy the world of coke

Starting point is 00:05:58 and keep it company. That's the real thing. TikTok has launched its campaign called Remake, which asks its users to recreate those retro ads. According to the company, Remake is a celebration of the iconic advertising campaigns that have shaped the industry and influence culture, while also showcasing how TikTok has provided an entirely new way to captivate and persuade audiences. Remake by TikTok aims to inspire and educate brands and creative agencies on how to unleash their creativity on the platform, unquote. It is a little strange that they put this news out

Starting point is 00:06:32 yesterday since content for this promotion has been on TikTok since as far back as February. Some of those brands in early, Snickers, Old Spice, Skittles, some of them hired influencers to do videos. There's no requirement for you to have any kind of formal arrangement to jump in. If this is something that you think your brand could jump on, just use the hashtag TikTok remake. You could do your own remake of an old ad from your brand or better yet, ask your followers and the TikTok community to do one themselves and tag you in it. Even if you didn't run TV ads back in the day, you might ask people to recreate a current promotion you're running in the style of, I don't know, neon 80s or something. And finally, there is something new in Snapchat's ads manager, Campaign Lab, a more comprehensive version of the split tests tool they launched last year.

Starting point is 00:07:29 Quoting the company, Campaign Lab is a new section within Ads Manager where advertisers can easily set up and act on scientific campaign experimentation in a completely self-serve way. It includes actions, insights, and learning agendas to help you understand where to start your tests, form hypotheses, identify what's working, and take action accordingly to inform your campaign strategy, unquote. You'll find it under that top nav bar thingy. Incidentally, if Snapchat is in your marketing quiver and you were having trouble getting the app working yesterday, it wasn't just you. The platform reported an outage that was fixed a few hours later.

Starting point is 00:08:12 Don't forget, you can get this podcast as a daily email newsletter, too, complete with images, related videos, links to dive deeper, and newsletter-exclusive content. And there's a free tier as well. You would get an issue every Friday on the free tier. The newsletter comes out about an hour before the podcast drops. Just go to todayindigital.com slash newsletter to sign up or tap the link in this episode's notes. Today in Digital Marketing is produced on beautiful Vancouver Island by EngageQ Digital,

Starting point is 00:08:39 production support and fact checking by Sarah Guild. Our theme is by Mark Blevis, music licensing by Source Audio. It looks like it's going to be a hot one out there, at least in my part of the world. So stay cool, stay safe, and I'll talk to you on Monday. You're always in my life, you're always my way. You're always in my life, you're always my way i can see when it all begins

Today in Digital Marketing - Why Did Pinterest Lose Millions of Users?

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.