New Year, New Fees: Enshittification Comes for Marketers

[00:00:00] It is Wednesday, January 3rd. Today, big fees ahead as TikTok kicks off the New Year with bad news for marketers. LinkedIn's CPMs are up dramatically and you can blame Elon Musk. Podcast ad rates are falling and Instagram's new content trend could be a huge security risk.

[00:00:20] I'm Tod Maffin. That's a head today in Digital Marketing. Do you want to experience the most beautiful adventure of your life? The shopping platform Shopify revolutionizes millions of companies worldwide. With Shopify, you only focus on your online shop, without programming or design knowledge.

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[00:01:27] Tiktok just hours ago announced that it will be raising its fees and cutting back on deals for its e-commerce arm called Tiktok Shop. The most significant change is a hike in the commission that Tiktok takes on most sales.

[00:01:41] The company will raise its commission from 2% to 8% over the next few months, but they'll take a lower cut of 3% on portions of sales over $10,000 in some categories. In addition to raising fees, Tiktok is also cutting back on some of the subsidies it's been offering to sellers.

[00:02:00] The company has been offering deep discounts on many products listed on Tiktok Shop, but it's now limiting these discounts to just a handful of best-selling items. Tiktok also previously covered the cost of some returned Tiktok Shop items, but is no longer doing so.

[00:02:19] Tiktok Shop has been growing rapidly in recent months, but it's still not profitable. The company hopes the new fees and reduced subsidies will help it reach profitability, but the changes could also alienate sellers and shoppers. What to watch for now?

[00:02:34] A potential ripple effect across the e-commerce landscape as other platforms tighten the screws as well. Has the trend of in-shedification finally come to digital marketing? If you've been thinking about trying an ad campaign out on LinkedIn for the new year, you may want to think again.

[00:02:55] Prices on the business platform have spiked in the last couple of months and the Financial Times says you can blame Elon Musk. Apparently last year's ad boycott of X, the platform formerly known as Brandsafe, is what's behind the rise.

[00:03:09] One agency executive told The Times that LinkedIn's CPMs for their clients have been running at an eye-watering $300. That's $0.30 per impression. Not click, not conversion. Impression. By contrast, the cost for a single impression on Meta's platform runs usually around a penny or two. So why so high?

[00:03:33] To be fair, LinkedIn's prices have always been stratospheric. So have Twitter's for that matter. In fact, they've usually been considered the two most expensive social platforms to advertise on. Prices for ads are set by auction,

[00:03:45] so when advertisers focus more on one platform, it makes sense to see the prices spike there. Insider Intelligence says LinkedIn's ad revenue was up 10% last year compared to the previous year, clocking in at almost $4 billion. So if you don't want to spend the crazy CPMs at LinkedIn,

[00:04:08] where do you turn for B2B marketing? How about TikTok? Yes, eMarketer says TikTok is emerging as a contender for organic and creator-based B2B marketing. Why? Three reasons. First, TikTok has a massive audience that's highly engaged.

[00:04:25] In the US, almost one out of every three adults are active on the platform. Those adults average about 55 minutes per day on the platform. That's five minutes more than YouTube and 25 minutes more than Facebook. These numbers are from eMarketer's forecast back in June,

[00:04:42] but that group has a pretty good track record with accuracy. Second, B2B influencers are already on TikTok. They're teaching viewers how to use Microsoft Excel, offering career advice, and reporting on the daily marketing news of the account today in digital.

[00:04:59] And big companies like Adobe, Grammarly, and Monday.com all have at least some kind of B2B content up. But perhaps most importantly, GenZ and Millennials are becoming B2B buyers. Quoting eMarketer, These generations are getting older and taking on more decision-making in the B2B buying process.

[00:05:18] People aged 25 to 34 will make up nearly a quarter of US TikTok users in 2024, a higher share than any other age range. This age group includes those making B2B buying decisions or those working with decision makers who could be influenced by this age group's media habits.

[00:05:35] All that said, of course LinkedIn and Meta do still hold the lion's share of B2B focus. Combined eMarketer forecasts, those two will eat up more than 42% of the US digital B2B ad spend in 2024. Posting on social media gives immediate feedback and a dopamine hit.

[00:05:59] But Pamela Wilson, author of the Master Content books, wants to remind you your website content will last for years. Your social media content? Not so much. That's because social media posts disappear from follower feeds after a few hours or a few days.

[00:06:15] Your website content is just the opposite. Website content is read by highly motivated people searching for solutions and it's readily available for years to come. Remember, search engines and your business have aligned goals to provide people with a dependable archive of in-depth answers to their burning questions.

[00:06:37] If you're ready to increase your website content ROI in 2024, buy and read Pamela's newly updated Master Content books at mastercontentbooks.com. That's mastercontentbooks.com. Even with last year's ad market jitters, podcast ads held their own in December. 60-second mid-rolls cost advertisers an average of just under $23 CPM

[00:07:03] that's down from 2022 but only by about 90 cents. Of course, different podcast genres rock different rates. Art shows are closer to $26 per thousand downloads. Tech podcasts at 25. Health and fitness 24. Surprisingly, the true crime category, despite being among the format's most popular, came in under $20.

[00:07:26] Around the same as gaming and history podcasts. A popular trend on Instagram is raising eyebrows among cybersecurity experts who warn the seemingly harmless get to know me challenge could be a treasure trove for hackers. The trend involves answering 11 questions displayed on a template,

[00:07:48] ranging from favorite food and biggest fear to date of birth and height. While participants see it as a fun way to connect with followers, some experts see a more sinister side. Like Eliana Shiloh, a cyber and security risk analyst at Deloitte, who posted this on TikTok.

[00:08:06] Wait, if you guys did that Instagram trend with all the questions, literally delete that shit right now. You guys know what I'm talking about? Like the one where you're like, favorite color, fears, height, shoe size. And I won't lie, I almost fell victim to this.

[00:08:16] I literally started filling it out and then I was like, wait a damn minute. My first initial thought was, wow, I have a lot of fears. Do I say literally everything or list out like guns, getting shocked, getting kidnapped, places with no bathroom, etc.

[00:08:27] And then I was like, wait, these are the answers to a lot of my security questions. This is hacker Nash right here. This, the creepy creeps of the cyber web. They're going to have a field day with this trend. While some dismissed Shiloh's claims,

[00:08:39] arguing security questions rarely involve favorite foods or phobias, experts like Lisa Plaguemeyer, the National Cyber Security Alliance's executive director disagrees. She told Business Insider, quote, you're really giving a bad guy everything they need to social engineer you. What you're doing here is making their research

[00:08:56] a lot easier, unquote. This isn't the first time a social media trend has sparked security concerns. In 2020, hashtag class of 2020 graduation photo challenges raised similar red flags for exposing vulnerable details like college and graduation year. It's no surprise that Meta never liked Apple's changes in iOS 14.5.

[00:09:21] They didn't like the privacy legislation in Europe and they're not going to like the removal of third-party Chrome cookies later this year. Until now, Meta's tried a number of things to combat this loss of signal data, everything from doubling down on machine learning

[00:09:34] to running full-page ads in the New York Times asking Apple to please let them have their cookies back. But now, Meta's come up with a new approach, sort of. Link history. They're selling this to their users as a convenient way to never lose a link again,

[00:09:51] but of course we know, and to be fair, Meta even admits in users' notifications that this is about data collection and targeted advertising. Link history is enabled by default and while users can opt out, the data collected remains stored for 90 days even after disabling.

[00:10:10] But while media focused on the privacy aspect of this over the weekend, most missed the point that this is actually an improvement to privacy. Quoting gizmodo.com, quote, Meta has always kept track of the links you click on.

[00:10:24] This is the first time users have had any visibility or control over this corner of the company's internet spying apparatus. In other words, Meta's just asking users for permission for a category of tracking it's been using for over a decade.

[00:10:42] And finally, as you might recall late last year, Elon Musk removed headlines on link previews on the ex-website and the Apple app. Why? All part of his business plan called... Go f*** yourself. Nobody liked it. It made links look just like images and click-through rates plummeted.

[00:10:59] I shouldn't say nobody liked it. Elon said he thought it looked cleaner, which I guess it did. But never mind because just a couple of weeks later, Elon posted that he'll bring the headlines back sort of by overlaying the page titles at the top of the image.

[00:11:14] Weeks came and went and nothing happened, but then over this past weekend, people discovered that ex indeed was putting titles back on link previews. It was in tiny print at the bottom and didn't really make for a compelling call to action,

[00:11:29] but hey, it was better than literal nothing. This morning, those titles were gone again. So an interesting thing happened over the holidays. I set up Twitch affiliate status or I qualified for it. That basically means on that live streaming platform

[00:11:55] I've sometimes been telling you about that I stream games on, I reached like enough followers or views or something to get monetized. So I have like actual people who come who are watching me produce the podcast right now, which is bizarre to me but still kind of fun.

[00:12:11] So if you're curious about how the sauce is just made, my Twitch channel is twitch.tv. Oh, new username, low effort dad. That's it for today. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.