Cornering the Creator Market
2020 was the year platforms woke up to the fact that creators are currency.
Read More2020 was the year platforms woke up to the fact that creators are currency.
Read MoreUser growth isn’t what it used to be. As social media saturation takes over, the number of users coming onto each platform is going to look less and less impressive, at least for established platforms, moving forward. 2020 kicked off with eMarketer stating that for the first time ever Instagram US user growth has dropped down into the single digits. That trend isn’t an outlier. That decline’s going to continue moving forward.
Instagram has had meteoric growth, especially after it started copying Snapchat on a feature-for-feature basis, but the joyride is slowing down. Now, it will likely be joining the ranks of Snapchat and Twitter in posting more deliberate, modest user growth gains. This is to be expected. When you get so big, getting bigger gets harder and harder.
Read MoreOne of the most hyped moments of 2019 from a media, tech and consumer behavior standpoint has to be the launch of Disney+. Its launch ushered in “the streaming wars” as the incredibly rich Disney catalogue was made available to all. This would be Netflix’s true test. It became yet another symbol of the decline of TV, and if you were anything like me, it felt as if everyone in the world had just signed up.
As marketers, we’re obsessed with hype, and for good reason. We want to be in on the latest, the greatest and the most noteworthy opportunities in media and culture. Disney+ had the hype and in many ways it backed it up. A lot of people signed up for it at launch, but I was struck by some numbers from CivicScience that sought to separate substance from hype. They proved what intuitively we know to be true. Hype is not reality.
Read MoreSocial media’s gotten pretty heavy as of late. Mark Zuckerberg’s been defending his platform’s policy of allowing blatant falsehoods to be promoted on Facebook. Twitter’s had to update its policies by allowing political figures’ tweets to remain on the platform even if they go against the its rules and policies. These social platforms are having to take stances and defend those stances because, whether they like it or not, they have become political tools. They are where views are shared, campaigns are mobilized and news is consumed by users.
Things have gotten heavy on social; so heavy in fact that they may very well collapse under all that weight.
Read MoreSharing on social channels is in decline, but it’s not because people are sharing less; it’s that they’re sharing differently. 63% of consumers share information or content through private messaging apps. That’s followed by social media accounts with 54%. Clearly, users are moving from more public, more polished social presences to more private, more real spaces.
How Will the Platforms Pivot?
Read MoreFacebook’s “clear history” tool is here. It allows users to uncouple data held by third parties through Facebook trackers from their profiles. Not to be outdone, Google proposed a new initiative with the goal of making it more difficult for advertisers to track users across the web by not only altering how cookies work in Chrome but also giving users more tools to block such cookies. The initiative is part of a larger “Privacy Sandbox” effort by Google to allow advertisers to run personalized ads but still protect user privacy.
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