Rabbbits Weeekly: That Bird Word
More disclaimer than news on the bird front. Plus, a smattering of headlines around ads, algorithms, Æconomy, attack vectors, and retail.
That One Bird
Unless something truly interesting happens or it becomes “safe” for advertisers again, I’m done covering Twitter for the time being. But there are a few things from this conversation with Kara Swisher that I want to highlight (and they apply to all social networks):
It’s freedom of speech, not freedom of reach
All these platforms are owned by one person who has control over everything and says “I want everyone to have control.” So why do you have total control of the actual business?
What’s bad for The Bird is good for Mastodon.
In brief, Mastodon is a social media oriented platform in the Fediverse. I’m sorry, what now? While Twitter is an imperfect comparison, let’s go with it for illustrative purposes.
There is only one Twitter, you are either on it or not. You can interact with anyone else on The Twitter. But you cannot use your Twitter to interact with people on Instagram or Snapchat, etc.
Mastodon is made up of a bunch of different servers, called instances. To join Mastodon you pick the instance you want to be your home base. You can interact with anyone else on Mastodon, regardless of their instance, but all your info is tied back to your home base. This allows you to root your experience in the instance that most fits your tastes while still experiencing Mastodon as if it were a monolithic social network. Want to move to a new home base? You can do that, and your data is all yours. Although you may lose all your posts, at least for the time being, though you will have a JSON file archive of them.
It’s probably better to think of Mastodon as similar to Reddit but with a Twitter like interface. Or even like the message boards and blog rings of old.
Mastodon is built on the ActivityPub protocol, which is a really cool tool for building decentralized, social network like experiences without the walled gardens.
And if you’re still looking for alternatives, there’s always Micro.blog (I’m there), Cohost, or whatever “Twitter 2” turns out to be.
Leaner issue this week due in part to the above stance plus the general rough time in the industry and a lot of “news” I saw over the last week feeling like retreads of stuff we’ve talked about already.
retail_tea_leaves
People plan to holiday shop in-store this season. They want something approaching normalcy and they want it out of the house.
eBay is doubling down on the secondhand surge and will only promote used items this holiday season.
So long, free returns?
Making people decide how many of your item(s) to buy via multiple buttons (Add 1 to Cart, Add 2 to Cart, etc) might ground them into thinking how many to buy rather than whether to buy or not. A field study of this approach led to a 12%+ increase in conversions. Of course, this doesn’t work for products that people only buy 1 of most of the time (cars, for example). But it does work better for more expensive items. (Check out the paper or listen to a teaser.)
Shopify has released a native email collection form tool, but it looks like it only integrates with the Shopify Email suite?
Retail media may not be living up to its promise. It’s getting money because merchants have the data, but it sounds like these platforms are experiencing the same issues with most nascent digital ad platforms: they just aren’t very good (yet).
Æconomy
Amazon has lost a trillion dollars in market value. Microsoft almost copied it. Nvidia is in the valley. And Meta is worth less than The Home Depot. It’s a good time for tech.
In response, The Everything Store is looking to cut costs, and Alexa is under the microscope. It doesn’t sound like the voice computing platform is poised to get axed, but the limit for new initiatives will be much lower than the sky for a bit. (Also, layoffs.)
Ads
Digital is forecasted to grow its share of the ad dollar pie in 2023. 2026 forecasts include: video as the new banner as thanks to Connected TV (1/3 of digital spending), CTV will eat into mobile spend, and search will start to lose ground to display (presumably thanks to CTV). Social is forecast to drag display down a bit next year. (But beware CTV ad fraud.)
YouTube is adding a new bidding optimization: Target Frequency. This will allow advertisers to target a max frequency of 4 / week, and the system will try to optimize for unique reach within this goal. This is welcome news for anyone used to seeing the same commercial every break. If want to steal a learning to keep in mind across platforms, how about this:
On average, TV advertisers’ return on investment (ROI) decreased by 41% when frequency exceeded 6+ weekly impressions
You can now run performance forecasts for Video Action Campaigns in Google Ads.
Want to advertise on MLS games? There’ll be an Apple for that.
Algorithms
Disney missed earnings estimates thanks to soft advertising numbers on their traditional media properties. But Disney+ added 12m+ new users. Bet they can’t wait to turn on the streaming ad money tap (on Dec. 8 with 100+ advertisers).
Even TikTok is feeling the earnings burn, revising revenue expectations down by $2B.
Pinterest Shuffles is public, will it keep its cool cred without the invite-only status?
YouTube Shorts, now on your TV! The device most perfectly designed to enjoy short-form vertical video.
Etsy gets visual search to help shoppers find the perfect thing. Search used to be a tech problem, the deep learning explosion looks to have turned it into a feature to add wherever makes sense.
Google Search Advocate John Mueller:
I imagine, over time, the weight on the links. At some point, will drop off a little bit as we can't figure out a little bit better how the content fits in within the context of the whole web.
The context of your content is becoming increasingly important to Big G’s vision for the future of its search algorithm.
Attack Vectors
Hypocritical?