Blog: digital advertising

YouTube’s changing of the guard has brought forward a stark reality: the social video platform responsible for a seismic shift in how video is created, monetised, and distributed is now looking and feeling like an incumbent.

When Twitch influencer Freckled Science wanted to puncture the falsehoods surrounding the beauty industry, she patched in Dr. Michelle Wong for a live interview . The co-stream, incorporating the feeds of both streamers, was among the early try-outs of Guest Star – the livestreaming platform’s latest tool for bolstering viewer engagement.

Social media companies have been happy to ride the tumultuous waves of digital advertising regardless of the market dominance of Google and Facebook. Arguments for tweaking the business model have always struggled to win-out against the benefits of scale, even during the economic turmoil caused by the pandemic.

Facebook is now old enough that there are teenagers on it that are younger than it is. In the time that it has been around, it has reinvented social media . It has also had to do some reinventing of itself, adding to its portfolio image-sharing app Instagram and end-to-end encrypted messaging service WhatsApp to form a powerful trifecta dominating mainstream digital socialisation.

Esports video viewers are becoming more interesting to brands and media companies. Increasingly more focus is now put on accurately valuing esports audiences. Gamers (and even more so, esports viewers) are valuable segments in terms of money and time spent across the attention economy.

Spotify is reported to have purchased the podcast companies Gimlet Media and Anchor. Having only just reported an operating profit for the first time, the deals demonstrate not only how Spotify is still firmly locked in growth mode and its market share in music streaming platforms but also how much Spotify value the podcast space.

Ads on YouTube are about to get a lot more interactive. With competition from Amazon heating up, Google is doubling down on the competitive advantage of its video assets, namely YouTube’s unrivalled position as a how-to video domain, compared to Netflix and Amazon Prime Video’s more premium offerings.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said there are no second acts in American lives. Sir Martin Sorrell however is not an American, despite having conducted extensive business in the US and being rumoured to hold the record for most the transatlantic concord flights between London and New York.

It is the fastest growing segment of the business and yet until recently no one seems to have addressed the extent to which Amazon’s advertising is becoming an increasing force in ad land. Now that’s its online gaming streaming platform Twitch is targeting over $1 billion in annually in advertising, will the next two years see the e-commerce and cloud giant meaningfully break the digital ad duopoly held by Alphabet and Facebook? Firstly, some figures: Amazon’s advertising business could deliver as much as $8/9 billion USD for 2018.

To paraphrase a proverb on the inevitability of change, ‘It is astonishing how long things can continue and how quickly they can fall’. The NME’s swift announcement of a final issue certainly aligns with this prophecy.

Brace yourselves for a stats-centric blog. Having gone through this week’s annual reports from big tech, there have been some important developments in the digital advertising space. These of course hold significant implications for content monetisation, as whilst subscriptions remain the core driver of growth, ad-supported content is a vital component of overall revenue.

Having promised a ‘whole new Snapchat’, it appears the app’s mooted re-design is not the revolution Evan Spiegel proposed during his company’s Q3 earnings call. The company’s founder stated that: “While blurring the lines between professional content creators and your friends has been an interesting Internet experiment, it has also produced some strange side-effects (like fake news) and made us feel like we have to perform for our friends rather than just express ourselves.

With US listed public companies’ quarterly earnings currently being drip-fed to Wall Street, here are two of the implications for Media and Advertising entities from Tech’s Big Four Q3 earnings: Amazon’s Media Presence is Continuing to Grow: While Amazon did not break out its specific numbers around the nascent advertising and media group aspects of its business, its revenue defined as other, is alongside its emerging subscription revenue (Prime, Amazon Video etc), is the fastest growing element of the Amazon ecosystem.

Last week a major strategic puzzle piece fell into place on an adblocker’s journey to become a commercial part of the digital advertising industry’s value chain. Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus announced that it is launching an ad exchange.