Unfollowing as a Service

[00:00:00] It is Wednesday, May 1st. Today, the court case that could dramatically change the Facebook feed as we know it.

[00:00:08] Why Google is automatically pausing your keywords, Pinterest's user numbers jump, but at what cost?

[00:00:15] And the game heard around the world and at LinkedIn.

[00:00:20] I'm Tod Maffin. That's ahead today in Digital Marketing.

[00:00:25] The lawsuit filed just this morning against Meta says American law forces companies to let users customize their social feeds with unofficial add-ons.

[00:00:36] These add-ons have existed in the past.

[00:00:38] The few that remain are constantly being deliberately knee capped 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.

[00:00:50] 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 the platforms.

[00:01:03] The suit was filed by a software developer who's working on an extension to let people more easily unfollow friends groups and pages.

[00:01:11] That's something you can do now, but you have to do it one at a time.

[00:01:16] The lawsuit is being bankrolled by a First Amendment advocacy group at Columbia University.

[00:01:21] Three years ago, Meta permanently banned a British developer who made a tool similar to this fellows.

[00:01:27] At that time, the developer told Slate, quote,

[00:01:29] I still remember the feeling of unfollowing everything for the first time.

[00:01:34] It was near miraculous.

[00:01:36] I had lost nothing since I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going to them directly.

[00:01:40] But I had gained a staggering amount of control.

[00:01:44] I was no longer tempted to scroll down an infinite feed of content.

[00:01:48] The time I spent on Facebook decreased dramatically, unquote.

[00:01:52] 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 feeder, blah, blah, blah.

[00:02:01] Besides the time spent on platform, a critically important metric that investors watch closely,

[00:02:07] Facebook doesn't want people to easily unfollow the very entities that provide the ad network signals on what people are interested in.

[00:02:16] Though, even that feels like a little bit of an out-of-date throwback to the era of interests targeting.

[00:02:22] Quoting Wired, quote,

[00:02:23] John Morris, a principal at the Internet Society, a nonprofit that promotes the open development of the internet says that to his knowledge,

[00:02:30] this strategy hasn't been used before in terms of using Section 230 to grant affirmative rights to users.

[00:02:35] Noting that a judge would likely take that claim seriously, unquote.

[00:02:43] Heads up if you run Google ad campaigns, your low activity keywords may soon stop running.

[00:02:50] 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.

[00:03:00] The rule, of course, intended to help declutter ad accounts full of underperforming keywords.

[00:03:05] Personally, I'm of two minds about this.

[00:03:07] On the one hand, it's true that many ad accounts are probably full of basically dead keywords and this will make things simpler.

[00:03:15] But still, I've never liked the idea of ad platforms just going in and changing the parameters of a campaign,

[00:03:22] even if those parameters are underperforming.

[00:03:24] A notification recommending you remove them is one thing.

[00:03:27] Straight up deletion is another.

[00:03:30] You can't really opt out of this, but if you do spot Google pausing a keyword and you still want it,

[00:03:35] you will be able to unpause it.

[00:03:37] But they say they'll repause that keyword again if you still don't get any impressions over the following three months.

[00:03:47] We have some new numbers on how Amazon's ad business is doing.

[00:03:51] That division grew to almost $12 billion last quarter.

[00:03:54] That's about 24% higher than the same quarter last year, putting it ahead of Google's growth rate.

[00:04:01] Ads make up about 8% of the company's total revenue, quoting Adweek,

[00:04:05] quote, this year marks Amazon's first appearance in TV upfront week,

[00:04:10] joining the flow of major streamers who are all making a big play to grab the growing pool of dollars once earmarked for linear TV.

[00:04:19] YouTube was added to the upfront roster in 2022 and Netflix joined in 2023,

[00:04:25] paving the way for Amazon's entrance this year, unquote.

[00:04:29] Amazon ads still lags way behind Meta's revenue.

[00:04:32] That was about 35 and a half billion and Google's, which was over 60 billion.

[00:04:36] But Amazon still dominates retail media ads with 74% of the US market.

[00:04:43] Walmart, which made 3.4 billion in ad revenue plans to acquire Visio for 2.3 billion to boost its ad business and compete with Amazon.

[00:04:57] Pinterest too had a great quarter with a big increase in active users,

[00:05:01] alongside a solid rise in revenue year over year.

[00:05:04] Pinterest now has 518 million monthly active users, up from 498 million last quarter.

[00:05:12] Most of this growth though comes from markets that generate less revenue.

[00:05:16] In the past quarter, Pinterest added 13 million users in the rest of world category,

[00:05:21] 5 million in the European Union and only a small number in the US.

[00:05:26] But the company's costs are rising as well.

[00:05:29] It spent 12% more on sales and marketing, comparing Q1s, quoting social media today, quote.

[00:05:35] That could also bode well for future potential if those dollars are well spent.

[00:05:40] But I don't think Pinterest's most recent advertising push,

[00:05:43] which clearly cost it some big dollars to produce was worth the investment.

[00:05:48] Still, Pinterest CEO Bill Reddy says the platform saw its fastest user and revenue growth since 2021 in the quarter,

[00:05:55] which he credits to ongoing development efforts.

[00:05:58] But I mean, that's his job to be the cheerleader in the earnings announcements.

[00:06:02] And I don't know that I see as much to be excited about in these figures, unquote.

[00:06:12] TikTok this week released some new numbers around its TikTok shop initiative.

[00:06:16] It says there are now 15 million merchants in their system, but that came at a cost.

[00:06:21] It says it blocked about 37 million products from being listed that went against its terms

[00:06:27] and removed another 133,000 after they'd been listed.

[00:06:32] If you're thinking of dipping your products toes there, here's what they need from sellers,

[00:06:36] quote. We require all sellers to provide documentation to verify their identity,

[00:06:40] business type and their eligibility to operate that business.

[00:06:44] Once the sellers approved, they're placed on probation for a period of time,

[00:06:48] meaning there is a period of time where merchants can learn the rules and be eased into their experience on the platform, unquote.

[00:06:55] Indeed, TikTok says they turned down more than two million seller account registrations for not following their requirements.

[00:07:07] You have one unheard message.

[00:07:10] Hi, I was calling current the influencer marketing platform,

[00:07:15] but I think I just got redirected to a bunch of people listening to a podcast.

[00:07:20] Well, anyways, I was calling current because I was told they could help get my brand set up on TikTok shop

[00:07:26] and even build out an affiliate program of content creators promoting my brand

[00:07:32] and even have those content creators go on live streams and promote my product there.

[00:07:37] Wow, I could really use current.

[00:07:41] I also heard that the brands they work with are making millions in sales.

[00:07:46] I guess I'll just go to their website at current.tech.

[00:07:52] Without the ones like you who work tirelessly to keep things running, everything would suddenly stop.

[00:07:57] Hospitals, factories, schools and power plants, they all depend on you.

[00:08:02] No matter the weather, emergency or time of day, you're the ones who get it done.

[00:08:06] At Granger, we're here for you with professional great industrial supplies.

[00:08:11] Count on real time product availability and fast delivery.

[00:08:14] Call clickgranger.com or just out by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[00:08:22] And finally, my wife and I don't have a lot of family routines,

[00:08:25] but one we've been doing lately is racing each other to finish the New York Times connection puzzle first.

[00:08:31] Honestly, it's a great puzzle if you haven't seen it.

[00:08:33] Connections alongside the classic crossword and the viral hit wordle

[00:08:38] are driving a growing amount of the New York Times subscriber base.

[00:08:42] Other platforms have noticed and now LinkedIn says it wants in on the Games action too.

[00:08:47] And today it launched three new games, Queens Cross Climb and Pinpoint.

[00:08:53] Queens is basically a Sudoku clone.

[00:08:54] You have to arrange crown icons in a way that doesn't overlap with the other icons.

[00:08:59] Cross Climb is sort of a trivia game crossed with, I don't know, Jenga.

[00:09:04] You have to fit clues onto a grid and the words change one letter by one letter with each clue.

[00:09:11] Pinpoint is my favorite so far because it's kind of closest to connections.

[00:09:15] You're given a word and you have to guess a taxonomy that that word would fit into.

[00:09:19] I don't even know if I'm using that word correctly.

[00:09:21] But anyway, it gives you another word than another.

[00:09:23] And hopefully by the fifth and final clue, you will have guessed the category that they all fit into.

[00:09:28] These new apps are available now globally in the LinkedIn app or on the web at LinkedIn.com slash games.

[00:09:36] And like the New York Times games, you can only play these once a day.

[00:09:40] You can also invite your first degree connections to play.

[00:09:42] You can share your progress with your connections as well if you choose to.

[00:09:46] It should be noted that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, which owns the huge Xbox gaming brand.

[00:09:54] A quick plug for our email newsletter.

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[00:10:11] I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening.

[00:10:13] See you tomorrow.

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