 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
 |
| Twitter Flies Away from Apple’s Revenue Hits |
 |
| Many companies felt the brunt of Apple’s privacy changes earlier this year, but Twitter was not one of them. Its quarterly revenue went up 37%, causing stock shares to increase by 3%. Ad revenue for the latest quarter was $1.14 billion, on par with insider estimates. The company is “working to expand its targeted advertising business, and is introducing more features like topics that users can follow on Twitter. The features provide data on people's interests that can eventually be used to help deliver relevant ads, said Twitter Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, during a conference call with analysts.” |
 |
| Twitter avoided a substantial revenue hit, one that many of its competitors could not avoid. But it doesn’t mean it didn’t lose some revenue shares. Both Alphabet and Twitter described their losses stemming from Apple’s changes as “modest.” “Apple’s decision to change the privacy settings of iPhones caused an estimated $9.85 billion of revenues to evaporate in the second half of this year at Snap, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as their advertising businesses were shaken by the new rules.” This prompted advertisers to cut back spending at these companies and put it towards Android users and Apple’s ad business. “Mike Woosley, Lotame’s chief operating officer, said advertisers are now getting less bang for their buck on iPhones.” Facebook will be overlooked for a platform that’s less expensive and trackable, like TikTok. “If your ability to advertise on Facebook is no longer economic, you’re going to move away immediately,” said Aidan Corbett, chief executive of Wayflyer. “So TikTok is becoming extremely popular because it’s a lot cheaper (from a cost per 1,000 impressions basis).” If walled gardens are losing at the Apple popup game, what does that mean for our publisher friends? It hasn't been smooth sailing. At PubForum San Diego next week, we're speaking with a publisher that's syncing with the data team and optimizing bid floors for performance for anonymous users to balance out the revenue that they lost. And though they're not hitting pre-pandemic levels, they've been able to salvage some of it. There's more to come on that story soon. |
|
|
| Spotify Wooing Advertisers and Publishers |
| Spotify launched its first global brand campaign targeting marketers. It coincides with the company renaming its advertising business to Spotify Advertising from Spotify for Brands as a way to attract small and mid-sized businesses. Per eMarketer, Spotify is slated to eclipse Apple in the podcast game with an estimated 28.2 million monthly podcast listeners by the end of the year, which inches the audio powerhouse ahead of Apple’s 28 million listeners. “And we were really nowhere, compared to the largest players in the industry. Today, we have 3.2 million podcasts on the platform, a growth rate of over 1,500%, noted Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. In the prior quarter, Spotify had 2.9 million podcasts.” |
|
| Spotify’s ad business revamp places it in competition with the likes of Twitter and Snap, and possibly even YouTube. “Our goal is to start to really compete with Snap and Twitter and deliver on the expectations advertisers have, including small businesses,” said Dawn Ostroff, Spotify’s chief content and advertising business officer. “Last year, Spotify began inserting ads via streaming, which it said let it more precisely track ad impressions, audience demographics and other data. It bought the podcast ad platform Megaphone. And earlier this year it introduced the Spotify Audience Network, which lets advertisers aim ads toward certain audiences across Spotify’s own content and elsewhere, instead of only buying by the show.” Even more interesting, is where Spotify is taking its video podcasting business. There are plans to offer creators the tools to upload video content, much the way that YouTube does. And as the streaming giant builds up its audio and video podcast offerings into the millions, it will further step onto YouTube’s playing field, selling ads to help pubs and creators earn revenue. Maybe this time next year, after Alphabet, Meta, Amazon (and Apple) all get fully wrung out by the mounting antitrust cases and legislation against them, we could be talking about Spotify as one of the top ad revenue earners. |
|
 |
||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||
|
|
|
