Hope you had a good weekend, here’s the news you may have missed:
GENERAL
- TapAd is exiting the media side of the ad industry, with the media business moving over to Brand Networks. TapAd will focus on their device graph, cross-device and identity products.
- Google’s acquisition of part of HTC completed during the week. Now that it has completed, expect more Google-branded mobile hardware.
- The WSJ (Paywall) published a good article on the size and scale of Amazon’s Ad Business. Based on JP Morgan estimates, Amazon’s worldwide ad business sits at $2.8B, bigger than twitter ($2B) and Snap ($.08B); just over half that of Oath: ($5.3B) but still a long way from Facebook ($40B) and Google ($73B). Digiday also reported that Amazon’s ad business grew at 60% last quarter.
- Google’s latest quarterly earnings came out, best summarized in this tweet (seriously) or you can view the PDF of earnings call transcript here. Major calls outs were Google Play, YouTube and cloud services are contributing significantly to growth.
- Facebook’s quarterly earnings results also came out (PDF of the slides are here). Of note, US Daily Active Users (DAUs) fell for the first time. Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) grew in all markets. Facebook also confirmed that people are spending less time on Facebook. Also revealed were details on the impact of the newsfeed changes, AdAge has a good summary.
E-COMMERCE
- eBay dropped PayPal as primary credit card processor, switching to adyen, a Dutch-based payment processor. PayPal will still be supported for transactions on eBay but expect direct credit card process rather than having to use PayPal to become the norm. This change could also be positive for eBay’s advertising solutions (giving more insights into user’s spend on and off the platform).
- Have you always wanted an officially licensed Dancing Hot Dog Plushy? Snapchat has launched a Snapchat Store within the app (find it in the Discover tab). This could be the start of a broader push by Snap into offering eCommerce solutions for advertisers.
SOCIAL
- Instagram will now let businesses schedule posts; while there were all sorts of workarounds, this is a change that has been long demanded. In other news, Instagram are bringing carousel ads to Instagram Stories. For an example of how it works, check the Instagram Blog.
- twitter is updating their API to make every tweet ever available. The updated API (in beta) means any developer could access 12 years of historic twitter data. For context, twitter’s enterprise licensing did offer this depth of data, the new API opens it this twitter data to a much broader developer audience (so we may see some interesting ad product and insight innovation).
- Facebook published a series of end-user oriented privacy principles, including specific details on Facebook advertising.
MOBILE
- Many of you probably have long since forgotten Yo! a mobile app back in 2014 that let you only send the word Yo! (raised $1.5M in 2014 at a $10M valuation). In a sign that we’ve probably on the downward trend from the peak-app craziness, Yo! is now on the verge of closing and soliciting donations from users to keep it alive. Personally, I always liked Yo! and thought Facebook might buy it one day, as it would have been easy to make it into a Snapchat-esque service.
ONLINE AUDIO & VIDEO
- YouTube’s Live TV app (a competitor to Hulu) is now available on Roku and AppleTV.
- Spotify is beta-testing a separate radio style app called “Stations” Currently the beta is limited to Android and Australia only, and is focused on Spotify’s own curated playlists. The entire service is ad-supported.
- At the same time as Spotify started experimenting with radio, Pandora confirmed layoffs of 5% of their staff, primarily in advertising sales and marketing.
AD FRAUD / BRAND SAFETY
- Last weekend, the New York Times wrote an excellent report “The Follower Factory” on fake followers (and a company called Devumi), bots raised questions about the value of online influencers. If you missed the Magna/Reprise POV/response let me know. It’s a handy reminder that buying influencers purely on follower count (or alleged reach) is not wise.
- Buzzfeed news reported alleged ad and traffic fraud by the publisher of IBTimes and Newsweek. The report claims DoubleVerify classified IBT as having “as having fraud or sophisticated invalid traffic” and consequently blocking IBT across all DoubleVerify clients. Newsweek refutes Buzzfeed’s claims.
Joshua