Contents
YouTube & Super Bowl Commercials
Logan Paul Hasn’t Been Paid By Mayweather
Pokimane’s Exclusivity Deal With Twitch
Twitter’s Q4 Performance Report
Instagram’s Valentine’s Day Live-Stream Shopping Event
Snapchat Tests Mid-Roll Ads In Stories
Snapchat’s Partnership With Ticketmaster
YouTube’s 2022 Product Roadmap
YouTube Continues To Push Short-Form Video
Meta’s New Mission Statement
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta has announced in an all-staff meeting that Meta is updating its values. From 2009 to 2014 the mission statement for the company was “move fast and break things”, which was then updated to “move fast with stable infrastructure”. Then in 2017, we had the era of “make the world more open and connected”, then a year later this was updated to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”.
However, now Meta is announcing a new mission, which combines past objectives. The key elements for Meta’s new mission include moving faster together, building awesome things, focusing on long term impact, living in the future and being open. This aligns with Meta’s ongoing mission to create the metaverse, building on early experiments with the metaverse found in the gaming industry.
Meta has currently only presented a VR perspective of the metaverse, with more work to come to create a fully immersive world that is fully interactive – no doubt the new mission will align with future acquisitions and technological advancements to bring communities together online in a new virtual world.
YouTube & Super Bowl Commercials
YouTube has put together a list of the most-viewed Super Bowl commercials on gameday. This has helped Super Bowl commercials benefit from additional exposure beyond the event.
The top spot was awarded to an Amazon Alexa ad starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost – achieving over 65.4 million views on the platform. Other top commercials included ads from T-Mobile, Hyundai USA and trailers from Universal Pictures including Jurassic World: Dominion.
YouTube also shared that ad viewership on living room screens grew 35% over the past year, and the most searched commercials during the game across Google were from brands such as Budweiser, Coinbase, Michelob Ultra and Doritos.
Collab Acquires Trendpop
The creator platform named Collab has recently announced the acquisition of Trendpop. Trenpop is an influencer marketing upstart, founded by former engineers from both Google and Pinterest.
The platform aims to help brands discover creators and trends across TikTok, with the addition of insights to aid campaign building. The agreement will see Trendpop operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Collab.
Interestingly, Collab is an official marketing partner with TikTok with API access. Collab also currently operates multiple divisions including Collab Brands (creative agency), Collab Creators (talent division), CollabDRM (rights management provider) and Collab Clips (library of licensed viral videos).
According to the founder and co-CEO of Collab this acquisition will help clients make more informed decisions about how best to spend marketing budgets, activate creators and deliver engaging content to target audiences.
Logan Paul Hasn’t Been Paid By Mayweather
Following the boxing match between Mayweather and Logan Paul, back in June, it has been revealed by Paul that Mayweather is yet to provide payment from the exhibition match.
After the fight, it was implied that Mayweather earned around $100 million for the fight, but the terms of the deal were that both fighters would take home $10 million and $250,000 upfront. Both fighters were also meant to take a cut of the PPV revenue – with the fight reportedly drawing in 1 million PPV purchases on Showtime, priced at $50.
However, due to an absence of payment, it is looking like Paul will be suing the boxing legend.
Pokimane’s Exclusivity Deal With Twitch
Pokimane is the top-followed female streamer on Twitch with an audience of over 8.9 million. In recent updates, the streamer has confirmed that she will remain on Twitch exclusively.
This news comes off the back of a whole host of creators moving to YouTube Gaming, including Valkyrae and Ludwig – who are some of the largest streamers of the moment.
Pokimane has also found success creating other businesses from her success as a streamer. Pokimane is the creative director for Cloak – a brand co-founded by creators and the founder of her own talent management company named RTS.
Twitter’s Q4 Performance Report
Twitter in Q4 has reported having added 6 million users, and a 22% year-on-year increase in revenue. Twitter now exceeds 217 million daily active users, with significant growth being evident in international markets.
Interestingly, user growth has not hit significant momentum in the U.S. However, markets such as India and Asia have had the opposite result.
Twitter is aiming to add 100 million more users by 2023. Therefore, we can expect Twitter in the next year to push new products and streamline the user experience to align with platforms like TikTok.
Twitter’s Crypto Expansion
Twitter is expanding its tipping options to allow users to tip with Ethereum. Previously it was reported that the platform was adding an option to tip through Bitcoin.
The update also will see the addition of payment services that include Barter, Paga and Paytm. Users can send tips by navigating to the Tips icon on a creator’s profile – with those over the age of 18 having the ability to enable tips on the platform.
The new payment services are perhaps the most useful expansion as it makes tipping easier in markets where mobile payments thrive using the above services.
Instagram Story Likes
Instagram is adding Story likes as another means to engage through the format. Users will be able to ‘like’ any story and alert the creator without starting a DM conversation.
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, announced the feature update, explaining that at the bottom of your Stories view you will see a new heart icon, when tapped it will notify the creator.
Story likes will not be public, only the creator will be seeing the likes in their Story Insights, with a heart icon being added next to viewers’ names in the Story view listing.
At this stage, Instagram has not implied that Story likes will have an impact on ranking content, but due to the platform’s transparency promises, it should be highlighted if it becomes a determining factor.
Instagram’s Valentine’s Day Live-Stream Shopping Event
Instagram continues to push live shopping on the app and a key part of Instagram’s strategy is influencer marketing. The reality TV star, fashion influencer and host of her own weekly fashion stream on Amazon Live, Paige DeSorbo hosted the main shopping stream on Instagram.
Throughout the stream, the creator was joined by a number of influencers and celebrities like Brad Goreski (celebrity stylist and reality star), Kelli Anne (Makeup artist) and Uche Nwosu (Reality star). In 2022, expect to see more influencers taking over platform shopping streams, following the success this strategy has had in the Chinese market.
Snapchat Tests Mid-Roll Ads In Stories
Snapchat is introducing a new way for creators of the app to earn money. The platform is testing mid-roll ads that appear in the Stories of a group of top US creators. According to reports, a wider rollout of the monetisation opportunity will also be happening in the next few months.
When an ad is placed within a Snap Star’s Story, Snapchat will share the revenue with the creators. The company says the revenue share is based on a formula that takes into account metrics like posting frequency and engagement. The feature is currently only available to Snap Stars, who are creators or public figures with large followings that have been verified on Snapchat.
Snapchat’s Partnership With Ticketmaster
Snapchat is partnering with Ticketmaster to allow users to discover live entertainment events within Snap Map. This new integration will be available through a new in-app Mini – which are third party programs that sit within Snap’s Chat section.
The new Ticketmaster Mini will match users with events based on their preferences – which will be gauged through an initial survey. Once completed users are then served suggested shows that they can swipe through. Once an event has been discovered, users will be able to see if friends have matched the same event, whilst also providing an option to invite friends to the event and start a guest list live chat. Users will also be able to share the event to their stories.
In addition, users can use Snap Map to see events being hosted in nearby venues through a new map layer in-app. Users who are looking to attend the event can then be directed to Ticketmaster’s website to purchase tickets. This new Ticketmaster Mini is being rolled out to 21 countries including the U.K, U.S and Canada.
YouTube’s 2022 Product Roadmap
The chief product officer at YouTube has announced the platforms product plans for 2022. First up Shorts will be a product exploring monetisation features – going beyond a Shorts Fund. Plans include integrating Super Chats into Shorts, making content shoppable and facilitating branded content production.
In terms of live video, YouTube will be testing gifted memberships following the ability to launch collaborative streams.
YouTube is also looking into opportunities with NFTs, aiming to find a solution to allow fans to own unique videos, photos, art and experiences from their favorite creators – but YouTube is approaching NFTs with caution to responsibly bring a product to the platform.
Finally, YouTube’s primary aim will be shopping, looking at shoppable videos, live shopping and how shopping appears across the app. This will be an area other platforms such as Instagram and TikTok will be focusing on, as social platforms look to develop their respective e-commerce capabilities.
YouTube Continues To Push Short-Form Video
YouTube has added a new Shorts shelf in channel listings on the desktop version of YouTube. Now when a channel uploads Shorts, it will be displayed in a separate section, giving a specific focus on short-form video – incentivising creators to focus on this new format on the platform.
YouTube has previously reported that Shorts clips have amassed over 5 trillion views, with significant momentum being evident in India. This new shelf will help creators boost channel performance, and the platform is also looking to build out more monetisation options beyond a fund – something that has been a pain point for TikTok.
If YouTube can effectively build out an attractive monetisation model that is superior to TikTok, it could help bring more TikTok creators to the platform to not only invest in longer-form video but in the creation of short-form content.
The Reddit Talks Expansion
Reddit is looking to capitalize on audio social, last April the platform released ‘Reddit Talks’ and now is looking to expand the feature to more communities across Reddit.
Currently, more than 1,000 subreddits have access to the feature, which has resulted in more than 250% growth in daily active listeners of Reddit Talk sessions in the last three months.
Following this performance, Reddit is looking to capitalize on its competitor product to Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. Firstly, Reddit will make Reddit Talk chats more prominent on the platform by placing chats in the top-of-feed display.
In addition to this, Reddit is also launching Talk recordings, allowing users to revisit conversations after the fact. The feature will include playback with options to fast-forward or rewind.
Alongside this, Reddit is adding text and emojis to help participation and engagement within a Talk, whilst bringing the feature to web users.
