This Week in Social and Digital (Week of February 10)
This Week in Social is a weekly digest of some of the biggest stories in social media marketing news. These stories are the show notes for the Brave Ad World Podcast. Each story is discussed at a deeper level on the podcast.
IGTV Partner Program Being Tested
IGTV is two years old, but the platform has yet to gain any real traction. Instagram hopes to change that by giving content creators and influencers more of a reason to use the platform—money. Instagram is testing a Partner Program that would let content creators make money from the ads shown alongside their content.
While that may sound promising, some influencers are expressing skepticism. Publishers and influencers heeded Facebook’s call to go all in on video years ago with very limited returns on that investment. This Partner Program faces the uphill battle of convincing creators that investing in content creation will have an actual payoff.
Doing that successfully means clarifying two things. First, it needs to define the requirements of a monetizable video for the program. Second, it needs to convince creators that it will be able to drive traffic to IGTV, and that’s where this gets a bit more complicated. Instagram is recruiting creators to get the visitors, but creators are going to want to know there’s an audience before investing heavily. In the age of TikTok, YouTube and video everywhere, IGTV may be a solution in need of a problem.
That being said, Instagram is one of the strongest platforms out there, so if there is a service that can make a destination like IGTV work, it’s Instagram.
News Quick Hits
Spotify Kids is launching as a beta in Australia and the UK. The ad-free, algorithm-free service will allow kinds to access lullabies, pop music and stories human-curated into age-appropriate collections and playlists. The app is free but only available to families with Premium Family subscriptions. Spotify appears to have done its homework on this, learning from the mistakes of YouTube’s YouTube Kids service.
Facebook has acquired the UK firm Scape Technologies, which specializes in AR and has the goal of creating a 1:1 digital representation of the real world. The technology gets user locations down to the centimeter, which allows for AR overlays of the real world. That ability to pinpoint users for targeting or offline attribution, in addition to Scape’s AR capabilities, point to what we could see from the acquisition in the future on Facebook.
The IAB is pushing the advertising community to devise a reliable alternative to cookies, but until someone comes up with a better plan, it suggests Project ReArc. Project ReArc would leverage a person’s phone number or email address to allow them to sign into various domains, creating a unified identity for users across the web. The benefit for users, beyond a single login, is they would be given privacy controls. Of course, this approach represents multiple challenges including getting both publishers and users on-board.
WhatsApp is now up to 2 billion users, that’s four times bigger than just two years ago and much bigger than what it was when Facebook acquired the platform for $19 billion six years ago. Despite its massive growth, the platform is not monetized, and that will remain the case for the foreseeable future as plans to monetize the app further have been tabled.
The FTC has opened up public comments to further codify disclosure guidelines. Currently, there is a non-binding endorsement in place that any connection between an endorser and seller of a product needs to be disclosed. Should the new stipulations go through, violators “could be held liable for civil penalties… and damages."